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 Have you watched Tim's Vermeer? It opened my eyes to what cheaters artists have always been.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer
@joshmillard @ardgedee It's great, I wanna get Hockney's Secret Knowledge book at some point. Tim's Vermeer helped me resolve some latent "using computers for music is cheating" issues.
@bradsucks @joshmillard
Yeah I don't think Hockney's the final word in art history at all, but I like that somebody with intimate and expert knowledge of his craft chiming in on (a) the Great Masters having help and (b) that this does not lessen their greatness because somebody''s eye-hand coordination is not the sole criterion of the worthiness of an artwork.
@bradsucks @joshmillard Would make a great double feature with F For Fake.
@bradsucks I havne't, and I've been meaning to! And @ardgedee just linked me to a related BBC doc by David Hockney that I have also been enjoying this morning now.