Some #art thoughts I've been struggling with:
1. I'm learning to do oil painting. I have a lot of cultural baggage about painting, from outside. Oils as high culture, mastery of art, pure fancy creation.
2. I'm deep in a math art place, variations on Menger sponges and related ideas. Stark geometric objects, fine hard lines and proportions.
The two fit together weird; I feel like my subject is fighting my medium, and yet feel like using tools (stencils etc) to mitigate that is "cheating".
And that "cheating" sense is something I'm trying to power on past, to say, fuck it, there's a whole history of modern art unmoored from fusty Old Masters mystique. My hand is unsteady? I need a sharp straight line? Do whatever makes it happen!
But it's still there in the back of my head, in the wrestling match between different things I could do when I sit down to paint. Better to use a tool, force a straight line? Better to freehand and train my unsteady arm? Better to find a compromise? Etc.
@joshmillard These are constraints that only exist for you. For observers of the art, they aren't going to see the process, so what they get is just the piece itself. There is so much evidence that painting as a craft for hundreds of years was filled with do-whatever-works technique for controlling perspective, not just the push towards the abstraction of constructivists or the dynamic geometry of cubism or vorticism or orphism.
I don't think there is a better, just what works.
@joshmillard @Mainebot or rather, if the viewer is supposed to know those things, you're going more into conceptual or performance art or something, and so you need to think of what you're saying with that, rather than how masterly it is
@Mainebot Yeah. Reminding myself that art is a thing I'm doing and that it doesn't have rules in any sense is I think something I need to keep foregrounding for myself when I get to beanplating this shit.