Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Influences schminfluences
I am taking a crash course in identifying my influences. Being an aspiring artist means having artistic influences, much as being alive means having life influences. Everyone who makes marks, sculpts, writes, etc has at least one influence. For most of my life, I haven't given any of mine much thought. For the most part, art has been something I have not taken very seriously in a long, long time. Drawing and writing were always just things I did to vent or pass time. The thought of being an artist disappeared from my priority list around the time I turned 18, and so went any focused interest in artists and their work. When I look back, I think I will have many reasons to regret my 20s, my near abandonment of art being one of the most glaring.
So I haven't given much thought to who I would consider influences for over a decade. I know that I would like to make images like this and pull it off successfully, but a part of me is drawn to stuff like this and this and this and this. I'm all over the place, and the feeling is simultaneously freeing, in that I like who I like from every end of the spectrum, but troubling, in that my interests are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. More troubling is that I am not getting any younger, and the idea that my best creative years, if I ever have/had any creative years, may very well be lost somewhere in that decade-plus spent away from art. People say I have talent, but nothing I do impresses me and that seems to be the core of really enjoying art, impressing one's self. You never really know if people are just patronizing you, or just being polite. After all, praise is just words and words are fleeting things. I think the key to really creating something, to really feeling good about something I've created, will be that moment when I look at a piece and get the undeniable feeling of satisfaction that comes from being certain you have achieved something.
So far, in art and in most of my life, I find that such a sense of satisfaction is usually lacking. Nothing I do impresses me, because anything I can do just doesn't seem impressive. The situation is a paradox of sorts, or maybe it is a sign that what I do is nothing worth talking about. I am always more impressed with other peoples' work than my own, but I am not sure that this isn't the natural state of affairs. After all, what we do is rarely, if ever, going to seem impressive, because anything we can do is going to seem less impressive for the simple fact that we have done it. Unless you are at the absolute peak of your field or profession, there will be someone whose work impresses you. The ironic twist is that once a person reaches the proverbial top, the only place to go is down. But where was I going with all this…
Oh yeah, influences…most of my heaviest influences as a youth were from the comic book world. Names like Todd McFarlane and Marc Silvestri were much more familiar and dear to me as a child than Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, or any of the other American giants of the 20th century. I enjoyed Dali's work, but most "serious" art people do not take Dali very seriously, so it would seem that I gravitated toward "low", or even "low brow" work. Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Donatello were just Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles(as drawn by Eastman and Laird, not the hokey, cartoonish crap that would later take the proletariat by storm) to me until my teens. Francis Bacon, whose work I am becoming more obsessed with, was not a name I even knew, outside of Sir Francis Bacon, who was quite a different man than his distant, contemporary namesake. I enjoyed looking at the work of Van Gogh, but always thought of him as the 'crazy artist that cut off his ear for some girl', and missed the power in his work as a result.
But we change as we age. I still love those old comic book artists, but I must admit that I do not see myself as someone who will one day be in the comic book or illustration field. I still have no affections for the work of Warhol, Pollock, or most 20th century, American artists, but that's not to say that I do not have a better appreciation of artists like Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and Van Gogh. Some of my tastes still venture into so-called "low brow" art, but I see little differentiation between low and high art. We live in a world where folk art is breaking into major museums and galleries. The difference between high and low art is being blurred, which is a good thing. People always seek to establish hierarchy in an effort to stroke their own egos, but in the end, hierarchy and superiority are little more than figments of our collective imaginations.
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Labels: art
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High, low, who cares???? Isn't all about how the person looking at the art feels about it. What you may think is 'high' art - I may think looks like a piece of shit that a one year old scribbled and something you might consider ‘low' art I may love.
Whether it be art, cars, clothes, anything... look at, buy it, be influenced by it because you like not because someone tells you you should. I'm not saying you're that way, but the general population is and it drives me crazy!!!
I don't know about the people you know and/or deal with, but I've known people who are into art and they are so snobby about it. It drives me crazy. They think they know everything - when in my opinion there is no right or wrong way in art... it's all about how each individual feels about each piece.
Art connoisseurs and academic artists, like most people with very focused and specific interests, take pride in their knowledge. Subsequently, many of them are going to come across as snobs, and the fact is, many of them probably are. It is the same with fashonistas, hardcore sports fans, audiophiles, etc, etc. I can't be snobbish. I'm a poorly trained prole and my memory is dissolving all around me, so I can't claim to be a product of "the academy" and I can't name drop worth a damn. Fortunately, the artists and professors I have dealt with direction were most definitely NOT of the snobbish variety.
I think there can be a wrong way in art. When what you're making does not communicate on any level with a larger audience, I think you've missed the plot. This is why so much of the abstract movement is lost on me. The 'why' and 'what' behind most abstract art is only going to be fully understood by people who are educated in art, and even then, only if they are focused on the influences or movements that brought abstraction, and its off shoots, to be. I like artists like Picasso for the 'why' behind what he did, but much prefer someone like Van Gogh or Bacon because of the 'what' they were doing. You don't have to understand what they were trying to say to experience some sort of response to their work. In my mind, that's art done right. :)