REDEFINING ART

I've had some very eye opening views on art during the past two weeks (maybe that's why I'm a week behind on posting). You see, being a self taught artist doesn't really give you a lot of room to say much about art. I can't comment on the "greats". I have no idea what makes a piece outstanding. I don't have the art vocabulary. Nor do I have the art snobbery. Really, I get defensive about the whole thing. How can you define what can't be defined?

Honestly, I'm not bitching. This all started brewing in my head when a very, very dear friend and I were discussing the award for Dinner for Two. My friend told me it was a nice shot, she really liked it, she didn't get it, but she liked it. While I heard the "liked it" phrases, the one that really stuck was "I didn't get it". Right there, the problem with art. There isn't necessarily anything to get. Dinner for Two is a shot of an empty outside dinner table with a white tablecloth, silver wrapped in white napkins resting on top of two white plates, all set against a pale pink stucco background and the top edge of red chair. I saw the image, I saw the colors and I shot. It caught me. It didn't really represent anything until I downloaded it onto the computer and started keywording. How do I keyword this? Love? Hope? Romance? Happiness? Yeah, that was all there. But that's not what I saw when I took the shot. I saw color and texture. The pink and all that white. The stucco wall. Really, the red chair was the kicker.

I got to thinking about what my friend said. "I didn't get it, but I liked it." You know, that's the whole purpose. You liked it. You may not know why you liked it, but you liked it. It set something off, maybe an emotion, a memory. Maybe nothing and you just liked it. Point is, there's nothing to get. Art is too subjective to either get it or not.

The second awakening was making presentations for a client showcase. I'm very honored to have received a request to present my work to them, but it was nerve wracking to say the least. I'm sending over photos of images of Fredericksburg, and while they liked them, they wanted buildings and landmarks (where I have a tendency to capture quirky, up close detail of buildings and shadows and things nobody really wants). Nothing wrong with what they were looking for, I understood the reason, but to me, that's not necessarily art, and the purpose was to showcase local art. And so again, we have a difference (or am I being an art snob). Fortunately, I have this thing about the church steeples piercing the skies of old town, so I did have what they were looking for. That and a few other location type shots. Not what I normally shoot. To me, landmarks and buildings are tourist shots, travel memories for the scrapbook (remember when you'd watch slides of your family vacations?). But then again, I've seen some gorgeous artistic travel shots. I mean, Nat Geo lives on that stuff. All in all, we're talking style here. It's like that old saying - One man's junk is another man's treasure.

But let me wrap this up because I'm getting a little too wordy. Art has this perceived definition (and I apparently fell into it). It's a world that seems to belong to a certain social class and the best the rest of us can  do is purchase prints of long dead artists from the local arts and crafts store. No, that's not snobbery. In fact, my favorite print on the wall in my home is by Paul DeLaroche - La Jeune Martyre. And guess what? I got it at the local Michael's.

La Jeune Martyre

Art needs to be redefined. It doesn't need to belong to one particular class of people, but to the world; and while there are amazing artists out there redefining (in a good way) what art really is, it seems a struggle at times. Not just for me, but for all of us; because art has been pre-defined by the academics of this world. I say we just leave it subjective, because really, there's nothing to get. It's simply a matter of something to enjoy.