--When you are working in the studio, who is your imagined audience? --I agree with all the responses from my last post, but it still leaves a lot of conundrums. One of these is how can we communicate in our language that we are so familiar with (painting) with a group of people who might not have any experience with that language?
--Some of the stuff I've been trying out for my proposal involves things I think work conceptually or visually but I have no idea if anyone else will "get it", but I must proceed on to make it interesting for me.
--For example (above) I have some disjunction in these panels that I want to push together to create a panorama, and there are some rhyming forms and scale shifts that I want to use to create some connection. The vignette of figures (not shown) will play somehow with the still life arrangement and the goats in the background to create a dialogue about active and passive uses of the land...
--Anyway, I'm also bringing in the Robert Frost stuff in various ways that make sense to me because I know the whole story and love visual metaphor (a scrim of trees) but will anyone understand any of that unless I'm standing next to my work explaining it, or there is a wall text (not a fan) explaining what I was trying to say?
--My work (all of us finalists' work) is accessible to a wide audience due to realism, certain level of logic, ideas of aesthetic balance and harmony... but a lot of it is available only to other painters, and other people who have experience with reading visual images.
--Giotto is a good example, and in fact I was thinking of him the other day when I was trying to think of artists who told a story in a way that I found interesting. (other Sienese painters).
--All that work was commissioned to tell stories to people who couldn't read.
5 comments:
....well, Tooker, too. And would Hopper bend his style to make the finals list? Hmmmmm..... love your perspective. Frost rocks (and heaves).
- CWH
Implicit in your question is that in order for an artist's work to be appreciated it must be understood in the precise terms that the artist intends and that the viewer must share the artist's specific conceptual framework in order to "get" a piece of work. If this were true, art from different centuries and cultures would have no power to move us. To take your example of Giotto, though some parts of the visual narrative are clear (and your point about his painting being for people who couldn't read is lovely) other parts are obscure to modern audiences who, though they can read perfectly well (we hope) do not understand the nuances of Christian symbolism; a wall card explaination may help but it can supply the emotional impact that the symbolism would have for a viewer in Giotto's time. Yet despite our modern inability to completely "read" Giotto he still has great emotional impact for us; perhaps our very inability to grasp all the subtlety of his symbolic language makes us more sensitive to the nonverbal aspects of his work as we draw from it meaning that we frame in modern coneptual language. The greatness of an artist like this is that he manages to speak to audiences with vastly different conceptual frameworks; each audience understands him in their own way.
I would argue that the same principle applies to your work. It is your job to do it so compellingly that people are drawn to it and moved by it - whether or not they "get it" in exactly your terms is unimportant -and frankly, any artwork with only one interpretive avenue is not good poetry.
Mariella said something to me in a phone conversation which was extremely simple and profound when we were discussing the project: "Hey, I do what I do."
And this surely is IT. We are, after all, in this at this stage, because of what we do. We shouldn't forget that. And, to heap it on, there's always Shakespeare: To thine own self be true, and thou canst not then be false to any man.
you need to articulate what you do naturally. your work is already strong- it is understandable and good on many levels; visually, conceptually etc. the difficulty is, that now we have to take what we do naturally, and propose a FUTURE for Vermont... In that proposal for the future, you still want to be able to work comfortably, right? I think its like adapting to a new place to live in for a while...
-ficertg
Back to your original post-I agree with Elizabeth about accessibility. A lot of the meaning in allegorical painting from art history is lost to me, but I am drawn into the imagery partly because of its mystery-also how well its painted...and "The Future" is such a mystery...
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