about ‘art’

My late painter/sculptor father was of a generation that thought cubism and everything that came with and after it—e.g. Orphism, abstract art, Purism, Futurism, Suprematism, Dada, Constructivism, Vorticism, De Stijl—wasn’t just cool, but the greatest thing in visual art since…well, just about anything that came before. I suspect that he would have been unsurprised to hear that I've never bought into any of that.

There’s a famous pithy poster-meme about modern art, whose contents are meant to disparage its detractors":

Modern art = I could have done that + Yeah, but you didn’t.

An even pithier rejoinder might be:

True. But why bother?

Modern art never made sense to me, despite me having been surrounded by it during my youth. Everyone to his own, I guess.

As for me, these two statements make much more sense to me…

From Franco Clun:

“At the end of each drawing, I feel I know so much more about the person I have drawn. I learn something new every time I take a pencil in my hand.”

And another pencil portrait wizard, Kelvin Okafor:

I love to draw faces. Each face to me tells an intriguing story regardless of age, gender, race or background. In the process of putting pencil to paper, I begin by drawing in sections/stages. Since I was a child I have always created drawings this way. I visually dissect facial features - I study them and then I put them back together like pieces in a puzzle. This method of creating helps me understand expressions and also helps me appreciate the lengthy process each portrait drawing takes.”