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| Edward Burne-Jones : The Sleeping Beauty |
Well, let me start by explaining the purpose of this one. I am a practising painter, I paint in a traditional realist manner, that is to say I take the natural world as the source of all my images and put them together in such a way as to create a whole which does not fragrantly defy any natural laws of appearance. That I think is a fairly decent defintion of realist painting and would apply to pretty much every painter you've ever heard of who worked in the western world between about 1400 and 1900. Perhaps one could argue about whether Hieronymus Bosch fits in there, but even in his most fantastical paintings the imagery is drawn for the most part from the natural world and the parts are represented realistically albeit in bizarre combinations. Before 1400 I think it fair to say that since the time of Giotto artists had been striving towards a greater understanding of how to represent the natural world so one could I think justifiably claim that realists painters today are working in a tradition stretching back seven centuries or more
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That the tradition broke down around 1900 I think is unarguable, how and why will be topics for later posts but the fact remains that we currently live in an age where representative art is considered by the art establishments of the world as by defintion of no real value, hence the 'cold climate' of my title. There is currently a swing back towards the proper training of artists especially in the United States, where the thread of realism was never quite cut completely, which has been led simply by the ever increasing demand amongst art students for an education which attempts at least to give them the skills necessary to make worthwhile paintings and sculptures. Rather bizarrely the philosophy of the last century has been to raise the status of art objects to near mystical levels and yet at the same time suppose that they can, indeed should, be made by people without any formal training in the technical basis of their chosen fields.
In brief then I would like with this blog to explore the theoretical and philosophical issues behind creating art, especially realist art (using that word in the broad sense that I indicated above). No doubt I shall refer from time to time to my own practice, I don't want this blog to be dry and academic and the theoretical issues can only be made relevant by putting them into the context of actually making art, but this blog wont be a 'here's what I did today' type of record, there are plenty of those and many by painters of great skill and understanding. I shall look at the realist art world today, perhaps throwing it into focus by comparisons with what we may call the 'official' art world and I shall talk too about the wider cultural and artisitc world, artists like everybody else can't live in a vacuum and we are influenced by the times we live in, as much as we try to influence them. Although I think it true that we are living in a time of deep cultural malaise, in many ways a uniquely bad time, yet I am by nature optimistic and can't quite give myself over to complete despair, if I did I would have to stop painting, and that I could never do! The very fact that I can write this blog too, and that I can make contact with other like minded people, some of whom also have their own excellent blogs is itself a hopeful development; cultural fragmentation can create possibilities for good as well as harm.
Readers may well have noticed the reference in my title to the great work of art crticism (and so much more) in 5 volumes by that great Victorian John Ruskin. My love and admiration for Ruskin and so many of his contemporaries will no doubt become very apparent with the development of this blog but I will finish this introductory post with a little hopeful quote from possibly the greatest Victorian of them all, William Morris : ' Meanwhile, if these hours be dark, as indeed in many ways they are, at least do not let us sit deedless, like fools and fine gentlemen, thinking the common toil not good enough for us and beaten by the muddle, but rather let us work like good fellows trying by some dim candle-light to set our workshop ready against tomorrows' daylight - that tomorrow when the civilised world... shall have a new art, a glorious art... as a happiness to the maker and the user.'
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