Evolutionary Vs. Revolutionary and Traditional Art

I came up with this distinction while thinking about how to promote my own art, which I am not very good at doing, possibly because singing your own praises isn’t a song anyone really wants to sing, or listen to. But if I don’t promote myself, I won’t be able to make art indefinitely, as funds will run out. After all, the most cherished art is not the best art, but the most promoted. So, I rather spontaneously characterized my art, in my Instagram description, as “Evolutionary Digital Fine Art”. But this is more than a play on words and makes a significant distinction between artistic approaches.

Generally, contemporary art strives to be “revolutionary”. The object is to break with the past, and spawn a new dawn. Whatever was successful in the past must be rejected in favor of a sweeping new vision.  Y’know, Duchamp, Pollock, Koons…

Another popular trend is to embrace tradition as it was, and work in the way of the older masters. Think of artists like Daniel Maidman, whose illustrations of models could have been done a century or two ago.

But a third broad approach is what I started to call “evolutionary art”. This is the kind of art that builds on tradition, but embraces novelty and innovation. I don’t even know if anyone else uses this term, but I assume many, many do. I decided to write my own thoughts before looking up what’s already been said and done. I like to formulate my own ideas, sometimes, before testing them against others.

A great example of “evolutionary art” is Francis Bacon. While the Americans were largely embracing abstract art, the British Bacon fiercely made figurative art. His images directly referenced great paintings by Rembrandt, Velasquez, and Van Gogh. He infused not only new pictorial understanding – such as the flattening of the picture plane, the power of large color fields, Expressionistic brush work, and elements of abstraction – but new content. Myopic critics deride his work as a painterly slaughter house, but this reflects their own lack of understanding, and not his. Some of the key elements of his new content were intimate portrayals of contemporary, indoor, urban life (with props such as sinks, ashtrays, mirrors, beds, and even toilets); the slaughter of the second world war; psychological states and introspection; and alternative lifestyles.

And here are four of his tributes to Van Gogh, which also incorporates elements of the Post Impressionist painter’s style into his own.

Here’s a larger version of one of them.

Check out this portrait of Van Gogh he painted. I don’t think I ever saw this before a Google image search of about five minutes ago.

You won’t be surprised when I say that two of my most favorite and influential artists are Van Gogh and Francis Bacon. And although I use new technology – I work digitally [though I have a drawing/painting background] – you can see clear elements of both of their styles in a lot of my art.

My “Infinite Objectivity” is a triptych, which is indebted to Bacon’s infamous use of triptychs, especially for his portraits.

If it wasn’t obvious – and since nobody’s ever mentioned it I guess maybe it wasn’t – you can see the homage to Bacon when you reflect for an instant on any of his triple portraits.

Three heads, three panels, three states. I updated it by using conscious robots, and making metallic impasto, digitally.

You can see the influence of Van Gogh in my brushstrokes.

and

Incidentally, I’m certain, because of continued utterances from others, that people can’t distinguish between a JPEG they see online, and a full-sized digital file. People will often say that there’s no reason to ever buy a digital artwork when they can just steal it online.  Anyone who works in digital media can instantly see the problem with this stance. We all know how important it is to work very large, so you can get a non-pixelated, crisp, detailed, printable image large enough to be shown in galleries. The JPEGs of my work you can steal from the internet are good for making a print to stick on your fridge, but NOT for a high quality large scale print. The original files are usually at least 20 times as big, which reflects my practice of working about as large as my computer can handle it. You can’t just enlarge an image after the fact, either, as this just blows something up, but can’t produce more detail – a blown up postage stamp is not the same thing as something that starts out 4 feet wide.

Here are a couple more pieces that show an obvious influence of both Van Gogh and Bacon, but in terms of media and content are contemporary.

and

So there you have it, “evolutionary art” builds on the art of the past (in my case specifically visual art), incorporates and reflects the contemporary world, and strives to innovate and search for new visions. Evolutionary art has elements of revolutionary and traditional art, but seeks to integrate and hybridize, rather than distinguish itself at the extremes. For me it’s the best of both worlds, but most of the world may beg to differ. The self-styled revolutionary artists, and their following, see any vestige of traditional art as a redundant appendage that one would be better off lopping off; and the traditionalists reject it out of hand as outside the allowed boundaries of what they believe is defacto classic art practice.

lastly, I really don’t know if anyone has made this particular distinction between artistic avenues before. I’m sure they have using other terms, but I don’t recall encountering it, even though I think it’s quite obvious and useful once you catch onto it.

~ Ends

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