Darren Daz Cox, now in Pekin Illinois!
Neauveau Mannerism vs. Realism in figurative art
What I enjoy about the figures I draw is that I do not strive for realism but surrealism and that my lack of ‘perfection’ in drawing the nude as realistically as possible, a goal for many artists, allows for a more spontanious creative process.
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (March 6, 1475 – February 18, 1564), was a major force in the mannerist phase of the Renaissance which simply put was a belief that the artist’s individuality was a vital ingredient in the work. These days we take it for granted that an artist has his own style but before rock stars like Michelangelo came along, art was a job and like those cheesy art classes where you get graded on how well you drew the still life set up in the center of the room, realism was the goal. You do have to learn certain techniques to make a 2D image look 3D but perfecting those skills doesn’t mean the work you end up doing is ‘better’.
I appreciate realism to a certain point but once your art starts looking like a photograph you lose my interest, besides do you think you can paint more realistically than Chuck Close, Richard Estes and the soft drink machine commercial artists? With the advent of Photoshop and high resolution printers the photorealists of the sixties and seventies have become less important in that these days people are less likely to appreciate the point of the photorealism or the process.
There comes a time when you gotta say an art form has been maxed out, no one is going to be more punk rock than GG Allin, and hopefully no one will try to! The art of the 21st century lies between realism and non-objective abstract work as both of those have been explored extensively allowing for only the subtlest variations. Do you think you can splatter paint in a way that isn’t simply a gimick anymore? Jackson Pollock opened huge doors for all of us to be free from the shackles of realism but he also set a boundary as all work that looks similar will be compared to his.
Randomness allows for the subconscious and higher self to communicate to the conscious mind. You’ve probably seen a ouija board and whether you believe in the idea of paranormal or not the net effect is more exciting and interesting than simply making words out of a pile of letters with your logical mind. Allow that randomness to work for you!!!!
I finally found the .psd file for this one called "Two Sides of Your Mind" after years of intending to post a larger sized file. (I have done probably a thousand pieces of art (not all as complex as this obviously) using the liquify filter within Photoshop to randomly draw things ever since the liquify filter was introduced to Photoshop, and before the liquify filter existed I used the smudge finger tool in a similar fashion). I was surprised at how ‘primitive’ my liquifying technique (what I call randomly pushing the pixels around with the smudge finger tool) appeared to me on this one but how totally similar (and pleasing to me) my pencil sketch of the girl is to the pencil sketches I continue to do. Oh, you want to know what it means? It’s simply a pretty way to draw a brain. You can infer all the duality and dichotomy references you wish!
This piece of art (above) came out pretty well for pure randomness, and the composition is something I’m quite proud of. This one would make a nice wall sized installation in a gallery or museum (yes, my art will be in a museum one day, I’m skipping over the middleman of schmoozing art galleries to be exploited so that people can buy my art as an investment and I’m heading straight to legendary cultural status with a museum space dedicated to my work in every major metropolitan area. Reality is what you create it to be and I’m an artist that will inspire others long after I am gone like my artistic heros did for me! Vincent VanGogh may not have sold anything much but he always knew his place in the art world and that he was good.
In other more bloggy news, I signed up for my Myid.is account
and am almost 100% verified, I’m just waiting for the snail mail code they send to complete the verification process.
The verification process starts with you picking a name, your name or perhaps your prefered internet name and then you allow the process to charge your credit card a small amount, at random (my amount was $6.28) and then you tell them (via the website www.myid.is (no dot com it’s dot is)} the amount and you have verified yourself!
Then you can verify your blog (by putting a code in the head tags of your code) there’s a badge for the sidebar too but mine doesn’t show up yet (I have a new (to me) Mac I’m using so perhaps I haven’t updated something yet). The net result is that I am verified by what will become the internet standard for proof of identity.
Since I don’t have anything for sale nor any advertising I don’t need to prove my honesty in that way, but I want to have my artist biography to be complete.
When a gallery or event wants to use my art or a magazine wants to interview me they will be able to tell that this is really me and not some name squatter or flat out cheater. As much as I enjoy twitter, I have no way to verify that the people with the famous names are really them so I take what they say with a grain of salt or perhaps as theatre of the random!
Originally posted 2009-03-27 22:08:55. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
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