The Art Instruction Blues

From time to time I check around the internet to see if there's an art course I might want to take, oil painting usually. I've made these forays into the world of art and art instruction off and on all my life. Sometimes I do start a course or at least buy an art instruction book. Then I give up. There may be nobody else on earth with as much apparent interest in art and desire to learn to produce art who yet can never learn it. I do draw fairly well, but making actual pictures just doesn't happen, and if I have to do it in color, forget it. I see in my mind ideas of what I'd like to be able to do, but for some reason I can never do it.

But over the years if nothing else I've developed a very definite idea of what is good art and not good art. And in fact I do have to say that most of what is actually taught as art does not appeal to me. There's a whole series of art instruction books called North Light, or there used to be, and I have to say I just about always dislike everything offered as examples in those books. The same applies for the most part to art instruction I've found online. I don't like the stuff. There are exceptions, I've found some art I do like, but it's usually by people who aren't teaching it.

(If I maintain some interest in writing about this topic beyond this one post I may link to some of these sites to illustrate my opinions. I may even try to understand my own opinions better than I do.)

Recently I found another instruction site and at first encounter I liked the program. As usual I didn't much like the art but I thought I could get something out of the program anyway, and perhaps I could. It's expensive, though, for me anyway, and I'd have to save up even to take the bite-size modular version of it. So I'd have to be very sure I want this course and could benefit from it. I like that he provides all the materials, even the camera to take the pictures to submit for evaluation, relieving the student of a lot of responsibility. Quality control there, and predictability. And it cuts way down on the decision-dithering I'm prone to. I need that. Also, having to submit work does prod one to actually do the assignment and actually try to learn something. I need that as well.

But as I got to mulling it I got more and more doubtful about it based mainly on my reaction to the teacher's artistic judgments. I tried to tell myself I could still learn basics, techniques etc., but eventually I was back to my usual doubting mania and I guess I won't be taking the course.

But one part of his site stuck in my mind and I think I'd like to talk about it. This is where he gives a sample critique of a student's work and I liked the student's work so much better than his "correction" of it I thought it might be worthwhile to try to analyze and explain my reaction.

Here's the student submission:



Here's the page where the instructor discusses it.

Here's his "corrected" version of it:



First I want to say that what I like about the student's work is primarily the color and the tone and the atmosphere. I love the softness of the colors. I think they all work together beautifully. They don't fight with one another, they enhance one another, they form an overall unity that makes the work art. I think this student has the very talent I wish I had. I'm more likely to produce something that grossly imitates nature and loses the beauty. This student captures the beauty in the color. I love the way he's painted the water, I love how it works with the tone of the sky. I love the muted red of the building and the sensitive shadings in the red. I love the way the gray tone of the roofs is shaded from dark to light. I love the way the white of the seagull is echoed in the white of the buildings at either side of the picture and in the clouds. The pilings even manage to echo the red of the building somewhat. The colors and tones in this picture are really admirable it seems to me.

Clearly there's a problem anyone can see right away with how the buildings are on a tilt or a slant. The student doesn't have a good grasp of perspective. It's enough of a problem in the painting that it would have to be corrected somehow, but I'd want to go very carefully in a critique about this because there's so much good in the picture otherwise -- good that the instructor seems to ignore completely. I think this is merely a problem with perspective, but the instructor instead finds problems with composition. I don't see it.

I don't really see a visual problem with the seagull's tail leading the eye off the picture, which the instructor noted, although maybe the bird should be moved a bit more into the picture, but I'm loath to correct too much in this charming painting. Actually, I just LIKE this seagull. I like his fat white body. I think he can stay where he is without a big problem really. The tail is darkened so it doesn't really make a sharp line pointing off the canvas. Still, sure, ideally it should probably be moved in a bit.

The instructor makes much of lines of sight leading out of the picture and wants to encourage creating lines of sight that lead into it. I've encountered this kind of critique many times before in art instruction discussions. Sometimes I see the point, sometimes I don't. In this case I don't. At least if it results in the sort of painting the instructor produced there's nothing I can find to praise in it. The quiet water in the student's painting is part of the overall design. It's a quiet design. If there is a problem with lines leading outside there must be a far more subtle solution than the garish busyness the instructor produces. He's created a busy sky instead of the student's tranquil sky, and very busy water, and lost the beauty of color and tone and atmosphere. I even have the feeling he's created more of the kind of problem with sight lines that he wanted to correct, with the strong lines of the water pointing down to the lower right. The red of the building is garish and harsh and fights with all the other colors in the picture. He's lost the softness in the gray of the roofs. He's lost the lovely relationship between the whites and substituted a harsh dark silhouette in the bird, and made hard dark shadows elsewhere. It's UGLY. Whatever the faults of the student's painting, it has a beauty in it, a sensitivity, a real artistic feeling the instructor seems to overlook completely. After analyzing all this I'm now convinced it would be useless to take classes from someone whose aesthetic judgment seems to me to be so wrong.

Without mentioning it the instructor includes a corrected perspective in his painting and it's true that the student's perspective needs some correction, to bring it more down to the horizon and correct the upward tilt to the left. But I'd rather leave it as is than force the artificial hard-lined perspective of the instructor's version. I also like the student's rendering of the upright posts around the stone wall. The instructor's are too extreme and formulaic, the student's are nicely positioned in the total scheme.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that the instructor's analysis of the directional lines in the painting is just wrong. Perhaps I'm insensitive on this point but I just don't see it. Here's his sketch of the problem:

I just don't see that the tilt of the central group of buildings has that supposedly strong effect of driving the sight off the picture frame. I agree there's something wrong with the tilt itself, but as far as directional lines of sight goes there are many other elements in the picture that stop the movement. In studying it again I see a strong balancing element to that movement in the line of the bird's back -- even the whole body of the bird -- which points right to the red building in the center of the picture. In fact that is the movement I tend to see first, and not this supposed movement out of the frame. The line of the peaked roof on the right also points to the red building. I also see the offending directional line coming to a halt at the vertical where the stone wall has turned away toward the right distance. I don't see it moving beyond that point but stopping there. Also, the many vertical lines in the painting, the pilings, the uprights around the stone wall, the edges of the buildings themselves, stabilize it and prevent any wild movement off the edge. The horizontal lines in the water and the sky add to the overall impression of stability. So I just don't see this supposed sight-direction problem. There is still the perspective problem, but if that were corrected to bring the tilted lines on the left into the vertical/horizontal overall movement of the painting, the directionality the instructor is objecting to would be completely eliminated.

Here's how I see the directional lines in the existing painting:



That is, I see more lines focusing inward than outward, and many lines balancing or outright stopping movement out of the frame.

A FEW DAYS LATER:
So I got to fooling around in Paint again, and came up with a way the perspective problem could be corrected by skewing the middle part of the picture:


You can see by the color wedges I inserted how much I skewed it to get it to the horizontal. Skewing it unfortunately puts a new tilt into it, to the tall red building, and removes some of the bird's plumpness, but I think the alteration at least makes the point that the problem is with perspective and not with composition or directional lines.

Snow in the West

Outside my door yesterday morning after it snowed all day Monday. A foot and a half on the cars.

Lou Dobbs leaves Ship of Fools

Yay, Lou Dobbs quits CNN. I've been appreciating his sensible comments for some time now and figured he didn't belong there. Terrific to see he's moving on, I hope someplace where his common sense will be more appreciated. I also hope there are more like him out there who are going to be abandoning the ship of fools for the firm ground of rationality.

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Nov. 20 update. He says he may become a political candidate. Interesting. I don't know enough about him at this point to know whether I'd support him or not, but I have been liking what I've been hearing from him for some time now.

Fort Hood Shootings

My very first thought at seeing the headline about the shooting at the army base was to wonder if the shooter was a Muslim. Well, turns out he has an Arab name and was getting interested in suicide bombings and that sort of thing.

Of course CAIR is asking us not to jump to conclusions since the man has an Arab name. How about the fact that he was attracted to the idea of suicide bombings? Can we jump to some reasonable conclusions from that PLUS his Arab name?

How did THEN and THAN get mixed up?

How on earth did this particular error get started anyway? It is so jarring to read that such and such is more or less THEN something else. The word is THAN, people.

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THEN refers to TIME -- something happened and THEN something else happened.

Maybe this will help:

RHYME IT:

THEN is about WHEN.

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THAN, on the other hand, is the word for making comparisons -- something is more THAN something else, or less than or better than or worse than, etc.

The internet spreads this kind of mistake like a virus.

Yuck.

Roman Polanski must be prosecuted

Because of the controversy over the Polanski situation I've been through some different shades of understanding of it, which I may get around to explaining eventually.

But it's always been clear from the transcript of the victim's testimony that what he did was a clearcut crime, the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl -- no, not violent rape, not rape by physical force in a dark alley, but the kind of rape that occurs when the rapist simply ignores the feelings and welfare of the victim and overpowers her psychologically. In this case he was an influential celebrity, gave the girl alcohol and a drug, and she was in a helpless position with no ride home. Her many attempts to say "no" and keep him at a distance were ignored and she finally gave up resisting out of fear. This kind of rape happens frequently with victims of various ages, but by a 43-year old man with a little girl it is of course all the more criminal. Her age alone makes it rape, statutory rape, even if she were consenting, which was far from the case.

Such a crime MUST be prosecuted and arguments that he should go free based on his filmmaking artistry and his hard life as a child are irrelevant. The arguments based on supposed misbehavior by the judge are also irrelevant. This will have to be resolved but it remains a fact that Polanski left the country to avoid the sentencing he expected, and the sentence he expected was well within the legal requirements for his crime.

Pray for a speedy extradition and a just outcome of the case.

It is demoralizing to a society to let such a crime go unpunished.

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Oct 17 update: Boston Globe columnist covers it well:

In 1977, Polanski violated not just a 13-year-old, but also a society that believes children shouldn’t be drugged and treated as things.

The Duchess of Apostrophe on pronouncing Idumea and Muir

Recent encounters on the internet have prompted me to add a Feature to my Hodgepodge blog, about grammar and pronunciation. Just kind of a running random commentary for the benefit of anyone who happens to have need of it.

For this purpose I have a guest blogger, the Duchess of Apostrophe. Over to you, Duchess.

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Thank you, my dear. I think we will simply plunge right in without ceremony today.

I must apologize for not appearing in full regalia in the accompanying portrait. As has been the case with others of my station in life I've fallen on rather hard times, but I will refrain from burdening you with my problems for now. Clearly, as you can see, teaching children takes a toll on a person.

My teaching selections may seem whimsical and I will not be justifying them to you, but as a Duchess I have certain prerogatives you understand. I am not yet commenting on the egregiously offensive offense against my very title, that of the epidemic misuse of the poor apostrophe, but you can be sure that, God willing, I'm going to have quite a bit to say on it eventually.

But for today I had a couple of mispronunciations on my mind. And they are also words I mispronouce myself it turns out. Hard as it is to believe, duchesses do have a thing or two to learn as well as everybody else, and a GREAT need of learning humility in particular. So I've heard at least.

So we begin with how we are to pronounce:

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IDUMEA

A nice Biblical word. It's that part of the Middle East that was Edom in the Old Testament but got renamed Idumea under the Romans.

Here's the pronunciation entry at Merriam Webster dot com:
Variant(s): or Id·u·maea or Id·u·mea \ˌi-dyu̇-ˈmē-ə\

Go to the site to hear it pronounced. I found out that I pronounce it wrong myself. I say ID-YU-MAY'-UH but they say ID-YU-MEE'-YA. I think my pronounciation is more accurate of course :>) as the word is clearly Latin-based. But I'll do mee-ya from now on. Can't argue with Merriam-Webster.

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MUIR

I also looked up "Muir" as in John Muir ("Scottish-born American naturalist who promoted the creation of national parks and reservations") after whom the famous Muir Woods of California were named.

In this case you get three different pronounciations: Merriam-Webster has MYUR (You'll have to listen at the site, I can't make it look reliably the way it sounds). Free Online Dictionary has MYOOR, which is similar but not exactly identical to the pronunciation at Dictionary.com. As for my own mispronounciation of this word, I'm sorry to say I've ALWAYS said MWEER. Oh dear.

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"Bozrah" is BAWZ-rah. "Hecate" is HEH-ka-tee or HAY-ka-tee. "Tarot" is roughly TEH-roh or TAY-roh. "Irenaeus" is either Ear-ren-AY-us (American) or Eye-ren-EE-us (British)

"Conflageration" doesn't exist, and "perquisite" is NOT "prerequisite." You need to look at the word carefully from left to right and sound it out.