Open Letter To Artists (From An Art Critic) - Part 36
Urban streets are tough to paint.
by
Joan Altabe
If you don't know them, you can get them wrong. If you haven't lived them, you're liable to render only their moods of impermanence and grimy blackness, their pasty light, their anemic color and broad chunks of shade and their detached population in nameless places – diners and hotel rooms with featureless windows. If all you paint is the barrenness of a city, you won't get what the city is: wild, eccentric, erotic, tender-hearted, mythical and unknowable. If you don't have feeling for the city, you'll only see its planes and angles and its dark side.
New York artist Lisbeth Firmin knows the city. In her street scenes, which look like Manhattan's Greenwich Village, you feel the romance, even when they're empty. That's because she blurs its edges, veils it in a kind of fogginess, which leaves you telling yourself stories: Not of what you see, but what you can't see - life off the streets, behind closed doors, in streaks of light under the slats of someone's blinds.
You might compare her to Edward Hopper. His Nighthawks, a portrayal of bored, lonely coffee drinkers in a diner that underlines their alienation from themselves and the world around them, is the story of many in our rootless century. Ditto the blank windows in Hopper's Early Sunday Morning. But the comparison is arguable. In contrast to the clear planes and angles in Hopper's city scenes, Firmin paints them with just enough delineation that you can recognize them as the city, but with barely a detail. That way, they keep their secrets. And in this tell-all world, her cloaked renderings offer relief.
Now here's an example of a bad street scene. It's called Downtown. (Never mind who painted it. I'm not out to embarrass anyone). The sun splashes across a town toward the harbor while carefully detailed waterfront buildings slope down to the water like sea cliffs.
So far, so good. Not so good: despite the detail, all you get is style and technique. What’s missing? Mystery.
I'm reminded of a show juried by an editor of a how-to art magazine some years ago. Technique was the main idea (the same one that drives the magazine, by the way). The show offered impeccable technique, but that's all: 125 pretty pictures with little to say.
Which raised the question: What did the 1,048 rejected works look like? You get an idea of the works that gained entry by their titles: Melon Patch, Orchid Fantasy, Empty Pot, Sunlight on Roses, Lilies and Lemons, Pencil Shavings, Sunflower...
Even those images that were not still lifes came across as still lifes. That's because everything looked like Kodachrome slides made into paintings. Everything looked once removed from visceral experience – slick, smooth and skin-deep – a technique typical of the magazine's teachings.
What you got are depictions of physical appearance. There's nothing of the artists' inwardness, their emotional lives, to see. Sad to say, no one attending the show seemed to mind. "This is wonderful," said an onlooker, who was praising a picture of a chair with a shirt draped over it. Perhaps the most telling reaction came from a man praising a work this way: "It looks just like (Andrew Wyeth's) Christina's World," he said, sounding happy for the imitation.
I came away wondering why an art lover would find happiness in a copy. And why anyone would be satisfied with renderings of appearances. You're not one of these folks, are you?
— by Joan Altabe
|
August 13, 2007
|
Print Version - 
PDF (385 Kb
Comments:
The views and opinions of individual authors/contributors expressed on the FAR® web site do not necessarily state or reflect those views and/or opinions of Fine Art Registry® or its agents or subsidiaries.
Fine Art News Feed
