Art.....

[Everybody Wang Chung]

Pardon me please as I step in with an odd aside. I do not see Kincade as a sell out as I see no indication that he had anything to present but what he does, take or leave it. It is sweet and the lights glow.

I have a puzzle about Kinkade. I have a distinct memory of seeing paintings of sweet cottages with glowey lights in a little gallery Cannon Beach Oregon in 1970. I was struck with the thought, gee the lights glow. What I remember was so like Kinkade that I have long assumed I saw early Kinkades before he became famous. I looked Kinkade up in Wikipedia and found he was too young to have made the paintings I saw. I am inclined to think what Kinkade created or helped create(or was used by?) was the marketing system that allowed him to spread his not very original work to wide audiences.

The more I look at his early stuff, I see a different artist. I think that this is worth a dive.



Photo above: Thom and his Mentor, Glenn Wessels

In Placerville, he was a boy with crayons, a kid who could draw. He was also the local newspaper delivery boy, an avid swimmer and loyal friend. As a child he constantly read biographies of artists, including those of painters and illustrators like Norman Rockwell, Maxwell Parrish and Howard Pyle. At age 11, he had his first "apprenticeship." Charles Bell, a local painter, instructed him in basic techniques. It was that year that he sold his first painting for $7.50. The woman who bought it remembered thinking at the time, I'd better hold onto this picture. In high school, Kinkade came face to face with twentieth-century modernism in the person of Glenn Wessels, a former professor in the art department at the University of California. Wessels encouraged Kinkade both to tie his art more directly to emotion (rather than observation alone) and to experiment with highly personal forms of expression. He also influenced Kinkade's decision to attend the University of California at Berkley, where he enrolled in studio art and art history classes with a vision of himself as a counterculture nonconformist who would use his art to change and challenge convention. But Berkley in the 1970's gave Thom a culture shock of his own. He discovered he was indeed a nonconformist in his dislike of their system of art education. "My professors would say art should be all about you," Kinkade recalls. "That's a very self centered approach." After two years of frustration, Thom decided it was time to move on and he transferred to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The fierce competition with other students pushed him to an intensive development of techniques for creating effects of light and mood. His work at the Art Center helped him to get hired to paint backgrounds-700 of them-for Disney's Hollywood animation studios on the animated film Fire and Ice. After one year he decided to move on

Thanks Markk! Very interesting. Maybe I'm being too hard on Thomas Kinkade.

I would love to know Andy Warhol's thoughts on Thomas Kinkade. Warhol would probably have loved the idea of someone out there like Kinkade who was making art accessible. Warhol is rumored to have loved McDonalds, not the food, but the idea of McDonalds because the most powerful and wealthy person in the world would get the same treatment and the exact same hamburger/meal as poor person would get.

[Dr. Shades]

Imagine how it would look if it was a photograph, then paint it.

This is how I understand students in China approach art. They practice by copying photographs of the masters' works. The weird effect is the student who produces the most accurate copy of the Van Gogh has produced something potentially worth a lot of money, while the student who produces the next closest to the photograph makes a little less, while the original Van Gogh is worthless, because it isn't photo-like.

I heard of one strange case where a student submitted a self-portrait and originally got an F. But when the professor learned how it was created, the grade was changed to an A. Care to guess how he did it? This student really wanted to be an impressionist, but we know impressionism isn't art because it isn't photo-realistic. Unless that is, it's a copy of a picture of an impressionistic piece of pseudo-art! So he painted his self-portrait the best he could in the style of Van Gogh with lots of detail -- tiny brush strokes etc., and then took a picture of it. Then, he copied the photograph using a sophisticated paint-by-numbers scheme that resulted in a near duplicate of his original work. When the teacher saw how close the copy was to the photo of the original, he was really impressed.

Thanks, but that has very little to do with my advice to Markk for how to de-mystify the technique of integrating accurate perspective into one’s painting.

[Gadianton]

I disagree. If you take a photo of a painting and then do a precise painting of the photograph you'll get the perspective of the first painting as photo much better than if you only imagine what a photo of that painting would look like.

[Markk]

Thanks, but that has very little to do with my advice to Markk for how to de-mystify the technique of integrating accurate perspective into one’s painting.

I think I get what you are saying. You are simplifying, or dumbing down how to approach the image in mind, and not so much concerned about the outcome. I appreciate that. I am more often than not intimidated on how to begin.

In woodworking and metal working I can see, in my mind, in three D, ahead of time what I am going to create. I think maybe if I approach it as a photo that I am taking, I can see in my mind on how to express the "image" in a collective three D perspective.

Is that closer to your thought?

Thanks

[canpakes]

I disagree. If you take a photo of a painting and then do a precise painting of the photograph you'll get the perspective of the first painting as photo much better than if you only imagine what a photo of that painting would look like.

It’s difficult for an individual to imagine what a photo of their real life view would look like, because perspective is interpreted differently by each eye as 2D, but then combined by the brain, which is what creates 3D depth. One would need to ‘unsee’ that, or cover one eye while painting.

Then there are other factors such as eye level alignment, and real-time infinite width vanishing points versus artificially-fixed (drawn) 2-dimensional vanishing point placement.

Related, many people maintain that they can’t draw well, but this is more a function of the habit of drawing what they think they see, versus what they actually see. This cognitive bias makes it doubly difficult to ‘see as a photograph’ because the observation process is short-circuited right at the get-go. Using a grid while drawing allows one to overcome this.

A good demonstration of cognitive bias versus purposeful observation is achieved by drawing a simple object as it normally appears, and then turning that same object upside down and drawing it a second time as it now appears flipped over. When the ‘upside down’ drawing is complete, turn it and your object right-side up and you’ll discover that this second drawing likely looks much more accurate than the first. This works because your cognitive bias is eliminated during the second drawing attempt as your object no longer looks as familiar, with the result being that you’ll tend to rely on your observation of the object, rather than what you ‘know’ it looks like.

This technique is described in the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards, although you can also google this exercise for plenty of examples.

[Everybody Wang Chung]

And then there is Frank Frazetta. Since his death, his paintings are selling for millions.

[canpakes]

And then there is Frank Frazetta. Since his death, his painting are selling for millions.

I always liked this one below by Frazetta. It has a Mucha-esque flavor (another artist whose illustration work I enjoy immensely).

[Markk]

I think an interesting question is how much the personality of an artist contributes to the "success" of the artist. Wang Chung got me thinking about it with Kinkade.

I know Van Gogh was not popular until close to or after his death. I'm sure if we do a study there are countless stories like his. In regard to personality I find Jackson Pollock fascinating. Like Van Gogh, like even Kinkade....they were a mess inside.

I live fairly close to both Laguna beach and Palm Springs, both artist communities. When I go to events like the Laguna Beach Art Festival or one out in Palm Springs, there are so many artists that just blow me away, true talents, selling their art for peanuts. Yet Warhol can paint a can of soup and it is recognized as one of the most famous painters in the world.

Speaking of Van Gogh, he has a lot of self portraits, this is penetrating, I can almost feel his inner suffering. He has the thousand yard stare of a veteran.

[Markk]

I've been on vacation for the week, just staying home while my wife is working, not doing much. Just a rest. I have been spending a few hours each day looking at painters and reading about the artists.

In the many rabbit trails, and link clicking, this painting keeps grabbing my attention. I am not sure why, but it does. I also seem to maybe remembering my mother having a copy in our home....it is so familiar but never really caught my interest, I guess.



"Girl with the Pearl earring" by Johannes Vermeer. I know nothing about him, other than hearing his name.... yet.

I looked through his wiki page briefly as I wrote this and this painting grabbed my attention. Over the years I have stabilized and restored maybe a few dozen "Unreinforced Masonry" (URM) buildings, and when I saw this my eyes tricked me for seconds into seeing a photo of a typical URM building that we might restore.... with painted figures into a photo. Really cool.

[dantana]

Well, I haven't said anything stupid on here in a while so, let me try. We've all heard the adage - those who can, do; those who can't, teach. And, of course everyone knows that the only reason country bands are country is because they flunked out as rockers. Similarly, I've always held the opinion that the only reason that anything besides realism in painting types exists is because some artists lack the skills to do realism.