![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
RANDOM DAILY BLATHER
Only here... can you attend a meeting conducted in one language, with reading material published in another, and be expected to write a lengthy paper based on it, in a third. ROFLMAO. It's just hilarious, sometimes.
ROGUE LEADER
I think I'm done with the Wedge Antilles picture. No doubt I'll be finding small areas to fix over the next few days (because I can get psychotic over tiny matters like stray pixels), but I've already watermarked it, and prepared it for uploading. Go Wedge.
PHOTOREALISM & HYPERREALISM: IS THERE A POINT?
Throughout history, art has been steadily evolving alongside the rise of civilisation and developments in technology. Even if we were to limit it to the realm of painting, art has come a long way from the Aurignacian cave paintings, gaining proportion, losing proportion, gaining shape, losing detail; paintings have grown more real or more dreamlike, gained proper form or become grotesque in shape, or lost them alltogether in a incoherent maelstrom of colour and brushstrokes.
Towards the end of the 1960s there emerged a new movement in art centred around the usage of photographs to make paintings, or Photorealism. Photorealism was a reaction against the minimalisation of realism in Abstract Expressionism, advancing Pop Art and embracing Modernism, and so it was natural that there would evolve a branch of art that pushed the boundaries of the real even further: Hyperrealism, or the creation of art that appeared to be high quality photographs. There is, however, some distinction between the two movements: Photorealism tends to imitate photographs, simplifying detail in maintaining the overall illusion of a freeze-frame of mundane reality, Hyperrealism pushes the boundaries of detail into the realm of realer than real. Pores on the skin become painfully obvious, each strand of hair becomes visible, and every last nick and dent on a metallic surface challenge the viewer's perception of illusion and reality.
Accepted as artistic movements, Photorealism and Hyperrealism have nevertheless been attracting harsh criticism even as they were gaining prominence, denounced as nothing more than bland imitations of life - never mind that great artists from centuries back have been using visual aids to help them create art, and never mind that even a great proportion of art in history has been about the attempt to reproduce what the artist sees or has seen - and viewed as a threat of devaluing "classical" art. Digital Photorealists and Hypperrealists (that is to say, artists who paint with computer programmes, such as Adobe Photoshop) tend to catch even more flak in their usage of digital media, which has been described disparagingly by some traditionalists as nothing more than "digital trickery and cheap Photoshop skills."
My Opinions on the Matter
Being a self-trained occasional digital Photorealism/Hypperrealism painter (and one, I hope - without pride - that can hold their own against other digital portraiture artists), I rage everytime I hear people tearing into these forms of realism and claiming they're "pretty but meaningless", and "nothing but cheap reproductions", and even more so when the world "digital" is involved ("digital trickery" is a phrase that never fails to cause me to froth at the mouth; just don't even get me started). To be sure, I refuse to confine myself simply to realism (I enjoy exploring various genres and media from comicbook to still life, and from inks to colour pencils to Photoshop) and don't think too much of people who do nothing more than find a stock photograph (rather than taking their own, or combining several stock photographs to create a new image), grid it to death and reproduce it (gridding or tracing are tools you can make use of, if you're already familiar with form and proportion, but I find it pointless that so many fledgling artists start out by using grids, without even learning the basics first), but I also believe that there's far more to these two branches of realism than just mindless copying.
Leaving out "meaning" and "value" to the stuffy art critics to argue over, I personally see Photo- and Hypperealism as serving two distinct purposes:
Photo/Hyperrealism as Illusion
Face it, the majority of people like illusions. Why else would there exist magic shows, sleights of hand, Rudy Coby's Hypnotron 2000 and everything under the heading of Optical Art from Giuseppe Arcimboldo's bizarre portrait heads (made of mundane objects like fruit, books and flowers) and Hans Holbein's anamorphic "Ambassadors" painting to Shigeo Fukuda's sculptures (that look like junk but project startlingly recognisable silhouettes, or fall into perfect place at one particular viewing angle) and Vik Muniz's deceptively real (from a distance) pictures, composed of anything and everything from toy soldiers to diamonds to chocolate sauce to - dust? Just as trompe l'oeil serves to deceive you into thinking a painting is a real, three-dimensional object, a Photorealistic painting serves to make you mistake a painting for an actual photograph. The highest compliment you can pay a Photorealism/Hyperrealism painter is, "Holy shit, that's not a photo???"
Photo/Hyperrealism as a Journey
I think that a reason a lot of people don't "get" Photo- and Hyperrealism is because they tend to perceive it in terms of the end product, and not the process. But, speaking from personal experience, Photo- and Hyperrealism is like a trip whose worth isn't so much the destination, as the journey itself. For many realists, I think, painting is a challenge you undertake to see how close you can approach reality - or even go beyond it - to achieve the deception of real life in photo quality. In imitating life in painstaking accuracy, you force yourself to see (and even come to appreciate) details that people seldom notice: every scratch, every wrinkle, every rough texture, every sparkle of light on a reflective surface. (Never thought of skin pores as beautiful? wait until you've painted them yourself, and marvelled at the darkness of the pit, and the light that bounces off the edge). Moreover, it is also a relaxing journey, one whose destination you already know, and one that you are comfortably coasting towards. These paintings may not be worth much to the disdainful eye, but they can mean a great deal to the one producing it.
And I think, at the end of the day, that's all that really counts.
Only here... can you attend a meeting conducted in one language, with reading material published in another, and be expected to write a lengthy paper based on it, in a third. ROFLMAO. It's just hilarious, sometimes.
ROGUE LEADER
I think I'm done with the Wedge Antilles picture. No doubt I'll be finding small areas to fix over the next few days (because I can get psychotic over tiny matters like stray pixels), but I've already watermarked it, and prepared it for uploading. Go Wedge.
PHOTOREALISM & HYPERREALISM: IS THERE A POINT?
Throughout history, art has been steadily evolving alongside the rise of civilisation and developments in technology. Even if we were to limit it to the realm of painting, art has come a long way from the Aurignacian cave paintings, gaining proportion, losing proportion, gaining shape, losing detail; paintings have grown more real or more dreamlike, gained proper form or become grotesque in shape, or lost them alltogether in a incoherent maelstrom of colour and brushstrokes.
Towards the end of the 1960s there emerged a new movement in art centred around the usage of photographs to make paintings, or Photorealism. Photorealism was a reaction against the minimalisation of realism in Abstract Expressionism, advancing Pop Art and embracing Modernism, and so it was natural that there would evolve a branch of art that pushed the boundaries of the real even further: Hyperrealism, or the creation of art that appeared to be high quality photographs. There is, however, some distinction between the two movements: Photorealism tends to imitate photographs, simplifying detail in maintaining the overall illusion of a freeze-frame of mundane reality, Hyperrealism pushes the boundaries of detail into the realm of realer than real. Pores on the skin become painfully obvious, each strand of hair becomes visible, and every last nick and dent on a metallic surface challenge the viewer's perception of illusion and reality.
Accepted as artistic movements, Photorealism and Hyperrealism have nevertheless been attracting harsh criticism even as they were gaining prominence, denounced as nothing more than bland imitations of life - never mind that great artists from centuries back have been using visual aids to help them create art, and never mind that even a great proportion of art in history has been about the attempt to reproduce what the artist sees or has seen - and viewed as a threat of devaluing "classical" art. Digital Photorealists and Hypperrealists (that is to say, artists who paint with computer programmes, such as Adobe Photoshop) tend to catch even more flak in their usage of digital media, which has been described disparagingly by some traditionalists as nothing more than "digital trickery and cheap Photoshop skills."
My Opinions on the Matter
Being a self-trained occasional digital Photorealism/Hypperrealism painter (and one, I hope - without pride - that can hold their own against other digital portraiture artists), I rage everytime I hear people tearing into these forms of realism and claiming they're "pretty but meaningless", and "nothing but cheap reproductions", and even more so when the world "digital" is involved ("digital trickery" is a phrase that never fails to cause me to froth at the mouth; just don't even get me started). To be sure, I refuse to confine myself simply to realism (I enjoy exploring various genres and media from comicbook to still life, and from inks to colour pencils to Photoshop) and don't think too much of people who do nothing more than find a stock photograph (rather than taking their own, or combining several stock photographs to create a new image), grid it to death and reproduce it (gridding or tracing are tools you can make use of, if you're already familiar with form and proportion, but I find it pointless that so many fledgling artists start out by using grids, without even learning the basics first), but I also believe that there's far more to these two branches of realism than just mindless copying.
Leaving out "meaning" and "value" to the stuffy art critics to argue over, I personally see Photo- and Hypperealism as serving two distinct purposes:
Photo/Hyperrealism as Illusion
Face it, the majority of people like illusions. Why else would there exist magic shows, sleights of hand, Rudy Coby's Hypnotron 2000 and everything under the heading of Optical Art from Giuseppe Arcimboldo's bizarre portrait heads (made of mundane objects like fruit, books and flowers) and Hans Holbein's anamorphic "Ambassadors" painting to Shigeo Fukuda's sculptures (that look like junk but project startlingly recognisable silhouettes, or fall into perfect place at one particular viewing angle) and Vik Muniz's deceptively real (from a distance) pictures, composed of anything and everything from toy soldiers to diamonds to chocolate sauce to - dust? Just as trompe l'oeil serves to deceive you into thinking a painting is a real, three-dimensional object, a Photorealistic painting serves to make you mistake a painting for an actual photograph. The highest compliment you can pay a Photorealism/Hyperrealism painter is, "Holy shit, that's not a photo???"
Photo/Hyperrealism as a Journey
I think that a reason a lot of people don't "get" Photo- and Hyperrealism is because they tend to perceive it in terms of the end product, and not the process. But, speaking from personal experience, Photo- and Hyperrealism is like a trip whose worth isn't so much the destination, as the journey itself. For many realists, I think, painting is a challenge you undertake to see how close you can approach reality - or even go beyond it - to achieve the deception of real life in photo quality. In imitating life in painstaking accuracy, you force yourself to see (and even come to appreciate) details that people seldom notice: every scratch, every wrinkle, every rough texture, every sparkle of light on a reflective surface. (Never thought of skin pores as beautiful? wait until you've painted them yourself, and marvelled at the darkness of the pit, and the light that bounces off the edge). Moreover, it is also a relaxing journey, one whose destination you already know, and one that you are comfortably coasting towards. These paintings may not be worth much to the disdainful eye, but they can mean a great deal to the one producing it.
And I think, at the end of the day, that's all that really counts.
