Monday, July 5, 2010

A Couple Quotes I Want to Remember from Artists I Admire

Camille Rose Garcia, on using glitter in her paintings:

"Being in art school for six years I learned that there were, in fact, rules for what is art and what isn't art. No one will print the rules and the rules are always changing, so you just have to assume that whatever you're doing in your work is bad or wrong or isn't art according to the giant unprinted rulebook.

So pretty much everything I liked or did violated one or more of the rules. Narrative was bad. Figurative was bad. Humor was bad. Cartoony things definitely wrong, unless you were Keith Haring or a Japanese artist, then okay. Text in paintings was bad. Illustration was defiantly bad, trite, common, not art. Glitter and fancy frames definitely bad. The frames always had to be simple and stark. Anything kitsch or cheesy, even if you were doing it ironically, was bad. Unless you were Jeff Koons, then it was art. So the glitter started as a kind of quiet revolution, because I knew it was cheating. But it just looked so good.

And those are my art rules: it has to at least look good."
~Camille Rose Garcia, Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine, May 2009.

Todd Schorr
on the areas "still ripe for the exploring within the arts":

"Painting isn't dead,
and I do feel figurative painting especially has plenty of unexplored territory to cover and much ground to make up for all the years squandered on abstract expressionism and conceptual art.

It's always been my opinion that if the royal art academies had not grown so constipated by the late 1800s and had allowed more freedom of expression using academic technique we would have had more acceptance of figurative painting in the subsequent early part of the twentieth century.

Instead, mediocre talents like Manet and Cezanne who felt alienated by academy dogma planted the seeds for the fall of figurative realism, which we're finally starting to recover from.

Aside from painting, I do love many of the things being done with computer-generated imagery in film and I'm sure the next step will be total immersion environments in 3D. But regardless of any new technology that may come along, I feel strongly that humans will always have a fascination with artwork that was created by hand by another human as with painting. It's the human touch that connects us with all those who came before"
~Todd Schorr, Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine, September 2009

No comments: