Added Feb 29, 2016
My apologies to Pablo Picasso...
I was pondering how I should describe my art for this website - I vacillate between Impressionism and Expressionism. Yet, what is Expressionism, or for that matter, what is any style of art?
Usually 'styles' of art were names given to schools or movements. but even within those movements there were artists who had varied techniques and styles.
Impressionism is generally defined as literary or artistic style that seeks to 'capture a feeling or experience rather than to achieve accurate depiction'. I contend that these days, any artist understands he isn't going to make a completely accurate depiction - otherwise he would have used a camera instead!.....
Most people who love art don't want an accurate depiction either - otherwise they would just be lik everyone else and buy a postcard or a large photo-poster. Thus, to be a true 'artist', a photographer has a doubly difficult job because he has to capture a mood with a device which is specifically designed to capture only a sterile image. So few photographers are capable artists. With a camera I am like most people just an archivist of beauty, of humanity, or of situations. The camera today has lost a lot of its charm.
I digressed - so Impressionism is a movement towards realism that doesn't lose track of the artist’s sentiments. So what then is Expressionism?
We tend to hear that Expressionism's typical trait is to 'present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas'. I don't know how any artist can't help to feel purely subjective about what they paint. If the artist wasn't purely subjective, they wouldn't paint. If they didn't feel for their work or put their own interpretation and emotions about a subject into the painting then they wouldn't be an artist they would be an archivist or a documentarian, produce an engineering drawing or just look for a job. Or, maybe they would be among those new artists who employ a 'staff' to create their ideas who have turned art into a product from an assembly line. And.. every artist hopes that his work evokes moods and ideas!
As for radically distorting the subject,sometimes some laymen (God forbid!) accuse some Expressionists of being just bad or failed artists. Some of the most extremely abstract works of art do beg you to ask the questions: Is this really art or is this just a mess on the canvas? Was the artist just cleaning his brushes or did he have an accident or an actual idea? Are some highly overpaid critics just trying to convince us that this is good to justify their existence? ….or ...Could my three year old do better?.....
When you so often hear from, non-artists, "my three year old, “could do better" and the painting has a price tag in the thousands you begin to wonder about some of the snobbery, pretention and self-aggrandizement of the art world. Why is it that as the art has become more intentionally abstract, as it is bigger and has more paint piled on the canvas, that we seem to have to pay more for what look s less and less like art?! And why are we so obsessed to label everything and every style? Should we?
I remember many years ago watching a documentary by Fife Robertson a UK broadcaster (long since dead, and buried by the art world!) about modern art - some of which he dubbed Phoney Art (PH-Art for short). I am sure that many abstract artists among us took umbrage and failed to see the humour - but what he was responding to was the 'bricks in the Tate' sort of art where people overcharge for an idea. He wasn't taking issue with the concept that everyday objects can be art but rather complaining at the price tag and the idea that the art establishment should dictate what constitutes 'good' art and what we should pay for it and the idea that nobody should mention the 'Emperor’s new clothes' – that some abstract art isn’t necessarily good because it is just novel or different or isn't even artistic.....
It's possible to say everything is and can be Art and everyone knows what they like... perhaps we should leave it at that? Who knows someone may even like the Tate bricks, other than an art critic. I'm sure if the price tag wasn't so high many more people would appreciate the artistic statement. Some bricklayer somewhere might be chuffed that his daily bread and butter was seen as a modern artwork.....( I've just been inspired to create an work of Art called ‘Bread and butter’ and offer it to the Tate...but I expect someone has already done that one...??!!). I think Art is in danger of pricing itself out of popularity and becoming only an item for ultra rich investors who don't care about it and don't care about art at all.
Our love of the sublimely ridiculous and the abstract seems to have spiraled out of control. I often wonder what the Old Masters, or the great Impressionists, would have to say (and I fear they would mention 3 year olds more often than not) about how the art world has gone crazy about abstract art and installations....
Which gets me back to my original thought - would the great Impressionists and other artists seek to classify themselves and compartmentalize their art, or would they just be content to say, “I know what I like and I paint what I feel about the things I like."
Personally, I'm a painter, not an expressionist, or impressionist, or abstract painter or any other ism or ist - I just paint because I enjoy it...but to keep the Art world satisfied I guess I have to try to fit in a box...and if any ultra rich investor wants to turn my way I can "speak the language"!!
