The most recent post, Number 1451 ( — ), from Monday, February 8, 2010, 8:34 am. Link. 25 comments.
About Pictures
Whilst in New York most recently, my always gracious hosts gave me a copy of About Pictures by Terry Fenton. Get yourself one, and keep it handy for the next time some bewildered soul asks you an ingenuous question about art. Fenton, is his long career as an artist, museum director, and author, has clearly had to entertain countless such questions, as his answers to them have the sound of many hundreds of patient, kind revisions.
How can you tell the best works of art from lesser ones?
By looking. By comparing. By letting your own taste decide.
Remember, the good ones are seldom perfectly good, nor the bad ones utterly bad. But the better ones are more sustaining than the lesser ones.
Good art stays looking good. Mediocre art becomes something like wallpaper. Sooner or later it stops rewarding your attention. It gets taken for granted.
Good art nourishes your attention. It calls you back. It refreshes your eyes. It just looks good. All of its aesthetic "meaning" is contained in that. The real enjoyment of art comes from savoring the experience of it. Each work of art presents a different experience.
One could quote any number of gems.
Really good pictures come across as presentations, as gifts. Lesser ones are more like demonstrations.
Is there a right way or a wrong way to look at a picture? There's no secret method, apart from keeping your eyes open and keeping and open mind. The first is easy. The second isn't. ... Sometimes, people mistake recognition for appreciation. They think they like certain pictures because they've seen reproductions of them or pictures like them, or they recognize the subject matter.
Trust your eyes. Trust your instincts. Don't analyze. Let the picture come to you.
Fenton invited us into his studio when we rolled through Saskatoon in 2008. (Honestly, we more or less invited ourselves, but he received us warmly.) He's making excellent paintings, one after another, of the incomparable prairie landscape of Saskatchewan. Afterwards we talked, over Chinese food, about his long career, Greenberg's visits to the region, and the thankless work of museum direction. He also knows the kind of political, philosophically ruthless creatures who have moved into power in his absence. Given the indoctrination that these people would like to foist upon the art-viewing public, About Pictures could act as a tonic, as a plain-spoken, eminently sensible invitation to look at art that, with any luck, will cause later assaults of convoluted wall text to bounce off.
This book also offers delightful revelations for those of us who have been pondering art for a long time. He explains why pictures are usually rectangles. Why indeed? I never bothered to ask, and didn't have a good answer until I read Fenton's. (In short, because walls are usually rectangles.) He also does a better job explaining the aesthetic differences, generally, between paintings and photographs, and between real works and reproductions, than anything I've read to date.
You may have a bit of trouble obtaining a copy, as Hagios Press describes itself as "a regional publisher with a national reach" with a "focus on fine works by Saskatchewan writers." Persevere. Your effort will reward you with eighty handsomely produced, beautifully illustrated, well-bound pages of refreshing good sense about art.
"Let the picture come to you." Says it all. And it could be said for artists as well as viewers. Watching what a painting is trying to be and helping it be that.
Judging by the table of contents, Terry covers a lot of ground.
Hey, Franklin, the least you could do is give the guy a positive review on Amazon!
I liked the book so much I make it required reading in my Art Appreciation classes. It is my antidote for the unreadable, unorganized, and downright awful text that the college requires those of us who teach the course to use.
Following the link in #3 and opening the sample book page, we have a little problem. In the text, what should be "de rigueur" is given as "de rigeur." The people in Quebec would not be happy with this.
I ordered one from Amazon.
If I really like a painting i'll hang it up for a while and some, not all, do keep drawing my eye and inviting contemplation. At the time of completion they were finished but i imagine theres more inspiration in the one that continues to emit interest and a bit more mindlessness in the one whose surface becomes so familiar i forget its there.
I remember how quickly a new Penthouse would lose its effectiveness. That would be an example of what James Joyce termed kinetic art. Static art would be his term for good art which is only concerned with itself and not its effect on the viewer. Art drawn from true inspiration without thoughts of an audience. Art discovered in process rather than worked toward?
As far as the rectangle goes, it seems its easiest to stretch rather than an oval. I create abstract paintings but some are more landscapes while some are more inspired by the human element. Thats when i turn the rectangle upright to suggest a figure.
This modest volume is the archetypal antithesis of the art business, pitting simplicity, clarity, common sense and intelligence against the obfuscatory, corrupted stinking mess that is the art world today.
I would like to see it become the revolutionary handbook for artists and art students everywhere, but without major promotion behind it that is probably a hapless dream.
The book has a fair number of typos unfortunately. Anyone interested in that book should consider this one, also by Fenton. It is the best book published to date on this very fine landscape painter. She was esteemed highly by Greenberg, and remains a gem on the Canadian scene. Scrolling down there's some really great links I think you'd enjoy, Jack. Incidentally, if I was a legit collector of real stuff, Fenton and Knowles are both gorgeous painters and can be had relatively cheap. Myself, we pinched pennies and bought a small canvas off this guy a few years back and we'll never regret it.
Terry will sell his book direct to his southern neighbors. I just got mine and have finished it and loaned it to a friend.
I have read somewhere that it is "too fundamental" for advanced artists. I would say, it is too fundamental for advanced artists to ignore.
Amazon.ca will not allow you to review it unless you have purchased either "it" or "something" from them (could not tell exactly which), as opposed to Amazon.us. So I tried but having bought it from Terry and nothing else from Amazon.ca, could not say anything about it.
It's a shame Fenton didn't have a sufficiently picky copy editor, like me (or Chris Rywalt, if one can deal with his other issues). Unfortunately, in my opinion, typos and such can subliminally blemish and even discredit, to a degree, even the best writing. In a professional publication, it's not acceptable.
Well Jack, like Terry says about masterpieces, nothing, no matter how great, is perfect.
True, John, but some degree of anal retentiveness can be a good thing. If I ever had something published, any sort of typographical, spelling or grammatical error would be hunted down and annihilated ruthlessly before the thing went out the door.
Jack's got a point, though. I wouldn't have caught his de rigueur error but anything more would annoy me greatly. (I don't feel bad about missing that so much since I proofread in English only.) It can be grounds for dismissal by some. I tend to think I dismiss first on ideas, and then if there are typos it adds insult to injury; but I have to admit, typos alone will drag writing closer to dismissal for me.
I am extremely sensitive to such errors, quite probably hypersensitive, but they do bother me (most of all if it happens in something I've written myself). To me they read as being careless, sloppy, even incompetent somehow. It may be making packaging the same as content, which they are not, but I guess I was traumatized by the kind of grade-school English teacher which is probably quite extinct by now. Or maybe I'm simply abnormal, which is hardly out of the question.
I certainly didn't get my predilection for proper spelling and grammar from my English teachers, many of whom knew less than I did about the language. Bless their hearts but they meant well.
But, yes: There's no correlation between spelling and intelligence, especially in English where I've come to believe spelling is simply perverse. While copying over their spelling words my kids would ask me, "Why is it spelled that way?" "Because English spelling is insane," I'd reply. Either you're good at it or you're not, and I happen to be good at it.
Nevertheless I feel it's sloppy for professional writers not to get it right. Maybe many good writers are lousy spellers -- I'd hate to look over a Stephen King manuscript, I bet it's a total wreck -- and grammar has a lot of little dicey bits. Still, as a professional, there are standards to be maintained.
Fenton's editor is a poet, so perhaps it's just poetic license...
I'm looking forward to "About Sculptures", should he choose to write it (and especially, should he choose someone else to edit it).
Unfocused artsy types should not be trusted to do editing work, MC. You need hardcore, error-phobic, take-no-prisoners types who cannot rest until every error has been obliterated.
When I taught "writing about art" (what a subject), I told students that errors in English eroded the authority of whatever they wrote. In the case of Terry's book, though, this just does not happen. His may be the exception that proves the "rule".
"I told students that errors in English eroded the authority of whatever they wrote."
Yes, precisely. There is always an exception, but the rule remains the rule.
If the statement has gravity, typos are mitigated. Correctness for its own sake is the province of old maid school marms.
Nevertheless, I'd be embarrassed and angry with typos in a published piece I wrote.
You have to give Jack credit, he totally owns this blog. By comment 4, he's switched the topic from Fenton's book to spelling errors. By comment 25 he'll have everyone looking at his pots. woo hoo potblog.net!
To be fair, I'm a sucker for a conversation on proofreading.
And Jack's a proofreading conversation sucker, apparently.
Way to add nothing, George.
1. Jack
Monday 8 February 2010 8:54 am
Sounds good. It's available on Amazon for under $20, including shipping.