Deb Clarke Asks the Question:
What Do You Consider Art?
Audience Participation Required!
Don’t be Schlub! Share your view.
definition of “Schlub”: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=schlub
Check out Deb Clarke’s art by clicking the link below
http://debbieclarke.blogspot.com/
Good Morning Gloucester 
art? not art? i don’t know. i hope the answer contains humor.
LikeLike
Debby, I will start…. Art is everything…its viewpoint – culture – expression – creativity….all of it…everything…..People think of painting as art…and in this vein I will start the discussion……… Most people love Impressionism and I was just having a discussion about the Impressionism vs Cubism with someone else so I will segway that conversation into your question….just because of the synchonicity of it all
….Lots of people don’t understand that Cubism came out of Impressionism…
Well, When I was in art school(Monserrat in early 70’s) I studied with this guy named Paul Scott. He isn’t famous now or anything (but he is a hero to me) but he was an amazing character. He had studied after WW2 in NYC with this guy named Henri Leger who had lived in Montparnasse in Paris around the turn of the century and was heavily influenced by Cezanne and then later by Marc Chagall, Man Ray, and other artists of that period including Italian futurism. He basically took the Impressionism of Cezanne and turned the two dimensional planes he obviously struggled with on the flat surface of his canvas and turned it upside down into a futuristic cubism. He is one of the fathers of cubism which was a radical offshoot of Impressionism (believe it or not). His father had been an architect so in a sense you can “get” the engineering of his radical outlook. Anyway, studying with Paul Scott was a trip because he was so heavily influenced by this cutting edge original cubist, Leger. His drawing and painting classes were amazing. He did everything quickly and intuitively just as he learned form the early cubists. He turned dimensions as we know it upside down and inside out. At first, I couldn’t understand a thing he was talking about but I liked his spontaneous creativity and practically psychedelic outlook on the world and society. Later when I studied Eastern religions and things like the Yoga Vathistha, the talks he gave started making complete sense to me. I had heard this stuff before from Paul Scott when discussing the lifting of three dimensional perspective of art, taking it back down to two dimensions but indicating all the other dimensions. So I got an early education from this amazing person so I am into it because it (cubism) explains everything really… How all dimensions are all happening spontaneously and all at once but that we see it as chronological (remember Dali with his melting watches…that was surrealism and it came out of cubism…) but really things are very multidimensional and more expodential than our pea brains can stand so we try to simplify it all…Art is expressing our view of the multidimensionality of it all.
LikeLike
I cannot define it but I know it when I see/hear it….(heard this somewhere before)lol
LikeLike
I know a whole lot about art — but I don’t know what I like.
One thing I DO KNOW that I don’t like is too much art “analysis”. Too much art analysis undermines art, which should rely on “emotion” for its springboard.
Plus, it’s boring.
LikeLike
Art is huge and hard to quantify. It is painting, a child’s squiggles, photography (some of the best I’ve seen came from throw aways and cellphones), poetry and prose, music, theatre, dance, the way the leaves fall, or the bark grows just so, a garden, blown glass, didgeridoo, tattoo, opera, pottery, sculpture, abstract, surrealism, impressionism, realism, luminism, 2d, 3d, video, hair, makeup, clothing, and on and on. It is as unique and unrepeatable as the individuals who create whatever they create.
LikeLike
some great ideas here. one of my dictionaries has a definition that begins: a replication of beauty. this idea suited me for a long time, particularly when i was attached to a more literary and naturalistic approach to painting.
today, my artistic expressions are more meditative, repetitive, evidence of a process. there is no ‘feverish’ activity. just a steady ‘breathing’ through the act of ‘making’ . i find beauty in the ‘products’ and the process.
the definition of art that I relate to the most are the words of American painter/sculptor/installation artist Audrey Flack: “Art is an energy exchange.” it is the artist’s energy exchange of seeing, breathing, interacting with materials, creation, thought process. once the work goes out into the world, the energy exchange happens between the art and the audience. and if the work is viewed closely, the molecules must get stimulated, changed at some minute level.
I wonder if Rembrandt’s painting look exactly as they did when he painted them. perhaps the beauty that is found in his work is the accumulated adoration, love and response of generations of humans responding to the work.
why do we respond to some art and not others? for me, it is a vibrational response. i’m either on that wavelength or not. and if i’m not on the same wave length the work, the work does not interest me. i do go outside of my comfort zone with this, move my bias aside and try to understand.
btw: Audrey Flack has a great little book “Art & Soul”. it’s a slender, inexpensive paperback with lots of thought provoking observations about art. you can order it through the bookstore. always recommended to my students, as well as, constant studio companion.
best,
deb.
LikeLike
ps: the iterations about rembrandt, and energy are from Audrey’s book “Art and Soul”. my paraphrase, with some personal expansion.
LikeLike