stephbg | Compose yourself (Reply)

I'd promised The Catmobile a run today to help chase the cobwebs out of her engine. Due to lack of spoons and thus imagination I ended up in the Sorrento Surf Life-Saving Club carpark, which is where we usually go to look at ocean sunsets and such. By pure co-incidence the club was hosting an art show, so after a period of time sitting on a wall in the sun I thought I'd give it a look. I then discovered I'm some kind of monster. So, a post in which I ramble incoherently about art...

It was a community art show, vastly dominated by landscapes, seascapes, still lives (lifes?), sad pets, and mutant children. Only a couple of honest abstracts in the lot, not counting the landscapes etc that were insufficiently realistic to be labelled real, but were insufficiently abstract to be "properly" abstract.

Most of them hurt to look at.

I've been in shows like this. I've submitted work like this, and to be perfectly honest if I'd managed to produce any out of a good half of the entries I would have been thrilled to bits. But thrilled to bits by just the bits – what was overwhelmingly lacking in most of these paintings was a complete lack of composition and a lot of perspective worth of escher girls (so many horses with broken legs :-( ). So yes, that tree looked great, and those eagle feathers were very clever, but that building next to that tree is apparently made of diamond-shaped walls, and that beak looks like it's been caught in a car door. That creepy child with the beautifully rendered hat is *floating* above the sandy beach(?) on which it romps *shudder*.

Good bits do not an artwork make.

One artist stood out with his acrylic outback landscapes. They were so perfectly composed and competently painted I nearly fell asleep in front of them. All were sold.

I guess these days ahead of all other considerations I need art to have strong bones, and that takes real talent. Deliberate wrongness can be the best part of a work, but accidental wrongness just plunges me into the valley of the uncanny and hurts all the more for it. Those few precious good abstracts were like oases to me, but the relatively low prices being asked for them probably says more about the artists' environment than the absolute quality of the work.

Are you painting this sort of thing (trees, pets, houses, roses)? Trying to improve your craft? Bravely exhibiting in community shows? Having fun? KEEP DOING IT. Don't be put off by people like me. Yes, people like me are out there (or out here, since I'm there too, here) but if you think you're making art, damnit you're making art. If you're not sure you're making art but want to, keep trying. I may not buy it and hang it in my bedroom, but that's irrelevant (unless you're a professional and then you should probably care at least a little about the market, and have some actual skill.)