Painting Today

(Warning: It's a bit of a history lesson)

The term “Realism” often refers to the artistic movement which began in France at the turn of the nineteenth century. The popularity of realism grew with the introduction of photography - a new medium that captured the immediacy of everyday life and created greater public demand for images that evoked life-like precision. Accurate reproduction of objects, and scenes taken directly from experience was the goal of many Realist artists(Courbet, Sargeant). Realism believed in the ideology of an objective reality and revolted against exaggerated emotionalism in contrast to Romantic artists of the same era. To this end, Realist artists tended to discard theatrical drama, lofty subjects and classical forms of art in favor of commonplace themes.

While technically elegant and precise, the disdain of emotional or dramatic content and the rendering of images with stark frankness often negated plot structure within the paintings and made the content inaccessible to many viewers. The next generation of artists, the Impressionists, steered a course back towards a reflection on subjective experience of the immediacy of the moment, and brought with it a new level of abstraction in art making that allowed viewers to make greater determinations about content and plot within the painted images.

The factious group of Post Impressionist painters (Van Gogh, Cezanne) continued to explore these experiments in abstraction and subjective emotional content further challenging conventional uses of color and form. What followed from this was nearly a hundred years of continuous exploration into the marriage of abstract design and emotional response culminating in the complete negation of form where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features. Post Impressionism spawned Cubism and Fauvism which in turn inspired countless movements including Futurism, Constructivism, NeoPlasticism, and Surrealsim, fianally culmination in Abstract Expressionism, a movement in art that reflected the perfect marriage between abstract design and emotive content.

But not all artists were convinced and certainly not all exploration ceased. While Abstract Expressionism remained highly influential and spawned a a dozen subsequent movements many artists, especially Minimalist artists distrusted the suggestion that a purely abstract form could have emotive content.

In many ways minimalism was a reaction Abstract Expressionism and, in general, the evolution of abstract design aimed at producing emotion responses from its viewers. Because of a tendency in Minimalism to exclude the pictorial, illusionistic and fictive in favor of the literal, there was a movement away from painterly and toward sculptural concerns. Of primary importance was distilled painting's forms into blunt, tough, philosophically charged geometries. Artistic concerns aimed at creating objects that inhabited a space which could not comfortably be classifiable as either painting or sculpture. Thus, the categorical identity of such objects was itself in question, and avoided easy association with well-worn and over-familiar conventions. In this way Minimalist works of art seemed to create a new category of artistic perception, but it was a perception that necessitated a meditative and deeply person response from its viewers and was therefore still “theatrical” or “emotive” at its core.

If Minimalism was a reaction to Abstract Expressionism, so Pop art could be thought of as a reaction to Minimalism. Pop art represented a return to figurative art as well as a return to the representation of objects culled from the immediacy of everyday life by relying on mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture for its subject matter. However, like Minimalism, Pop removes the material from its context and isolates the object, or combines it with other objects, for contemplation. The “narrative” or subjective content of the work is negated and the emotive content of the work is driven by the viewers own personal evaluations of consumer culture. The upside to this approach in art making is that the content is ever renewing as each new generation looking at the work of art will bring their own ideas of popular culture to the piece. The drawback is in the artist expectation that the viewer’s reaction to consumerist culture will always be negative, but that any positive attitude towards consumerism would result in a banal or clichéd interpretation.

In many ways Postmodernism artists have been struggling to find uniformity between representation and content. Postmodernism is defined as a reaction to modernity or in the case of modern art as a rejection of artistic practices in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation. In many cases these experiments have been fruitful as well as self defeating, giving rise to greater degrees of experimentation that culminated in the myriad of artistic movements throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth century.

In pursuing a course that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity, history, or language I have chose to use, as a launching point, a reevaluation of the Realist’s rejection of emotive or theatrical content as well as the static depiction of objects that rely solely on optical perception. I have chosen Realism as my “jumping off point” as Realism offers a transcendence of the mundane by offering the possibility of the viewer finding and being made aware of universal themes found in ordinary, everyday objects. In choosing their subject matter Realist artists were identifying archetypes, or the embodiment and the existence of universal forms without content that nonetheless channel experiences and emotions, resulting in recognizable and typical patterns of behavior or responces.It is this notion of the universal in the everyday that continues to facinate and inspire me in my own work.