Each entry in my Top 25 will have: a descriptive paragraph. a sentence or two about why I chose it. one or more close-up details. a link to my original post about the work. thumbnail gallery with all artworks included so far. prints for sale. Links for all previous entries. a poll for picking your…
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Above is the final demo in the class, and all credits go to Andrew Hou for the digital painting, which I recreated as part of learning his process. As my regular readers know, I’m a trained “fine artist” working in digital media, and currently learning the industry standard digital painting techniques from illustrators in order…
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Hi kids. Another word bites the dust. We’ve seen a lot of that in recent years, and you probably think it’s some dumbing down of America or the world. Probably true in regards to facility with language. If you follow my blog you know some of the ones that really get to me. Just a…
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Hope you don’t mind if we just cut through all of the avalanche of bullshit, right to the proverbial bone. This is something I figured out when I was 18, but somehow there seems to be a cloud of confusion around the topic. To best address this, I’m going to go with an analogy. Let’s…
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Everyone is an artist, and anything and everything is art (except painters and paintings)! Words have come to mean, if not their precise opposite, something quite different from what is or was in the dictionary. Literally now means figuratively (ex., “It was literally raining cats and dogs!”). Random means all sorts of things, like cool,…
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The popular notion that artists need to suffer is a threadbare excuse to underpay and exploit them. [Note: Van Gogh would have suffered a lot less if he’d sold more than one painting in his life.] The notion that artist need to suffer in order to gain inspiration or have something to say is really…
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More fun things you can do with digital painting that would be quite difficult in traditional mediums. This was just a quickie exercise to see if I could create some sort of fire entity using a couple custom fire brushes I made. I didn’t even bother making it bigger than you see it here. Just…
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In my last post I boasted that an advantage of digital painting over traditional painting is I could knock out a swarm of bees in 15 minutes, but it could take days and days to do it with physical mediums. I did say it would take hours if I made more custom brushes, and I…
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Just some experimental clouds I knocked out in a few minutes after creating a couple cloud brushes, which also took just a few minutes. This was my first breezy attempt. I know they aren’t magnificent. I only used black and white, and they need to be blended better, etc… The point is how much one…
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If you have a good eye, whether or not you ever look at this kind of art, you can tell which one is mine, because it’s the flawed copy. Of course I can’t imitate someone else’s style the first time I try. Don’t fear my familiar followers, I would likely never work in this style…
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[This is another of my “runaway rants”, but I couldn’t squeeze that in the headline and keep it punchy. When I call something a “rant” I just mean it’s more or less stream of consciousness, as opposed to me sitting down and making a structured outline. I’m just getting some thoughts out there that I’ve…
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Rather than go back and edit my prior post, I decided to write a follow-up to expand on the ideas a bit. I want to give another example of why skill is necessary, but also elaborate on why it’s considered just busy-work and not important in contemporary art. First, I want to give a more…
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I haven’t been writing or sharing anything lately because I’m in one of my training periods. This involves a lot of knuckling down and plowing through tutorials and exercises to fine tune my skills, and that requires a bit of a humble and honest mindset. It’s not fun compared to creating, but it’s essential to…
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The apple above illustrates a typical digital approach to painting (which I do not typically use myself). This is just an exercise I did as part of a digital painting course I’m going through [I’ll explain why], but take note that it was done from scratch and achieves a high level of realism with a…
Read More[Update: I can no longer endorse this series because the judges selected the winner based on race and gender rather than art, to put it very directly.] Several seasons of Portrait Painter of the Year and Landscape Painter of the Year have become available on YouTube in the last month or so. They both go…
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After a century of anti-art bullying visual art, visual art bites back! There are 25 images in this mini-series so far. Above is the first, which I made four years ago, though I didn’t intend at the time to make even one more. Originally I attributed the faux painting to an imaginary artist, Günter Groos,…
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A hostile comment to me, on this blog, the other day, crystallized something. Rather, it was this specific idea in the diatribe against me, and defending a certain anti-artist (according to his interpretation) that stood out in particular: He is deflating the significance of the artist Deflating the significance of the artist is a good…
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Philosopher, and art-critic, Arthur Danto’s “The End of Art” is considered one of the most important and influential essays on art in the 20th century. The influence is undeniable, the importance determined by how important people take it to be, and the underlying arguments in relation to reality bonkers. Art ended before I was born,…
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Killing in the name of… I’m going to write this in under an hour, because, I believe, if you can’t make an argument in that time, you don’t already know what the hell you are talking about. And if you can’t express it clearly, as I argued in my last post, you are not talking…
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I’ve come to the conclusion over time that if an author can’t make their ideas accessible to an intelligent general audience, they are most likely full of shit. I’m in the middle of writing an article about a certain legendary essay in art criticism. When I tackle these essays, the most difficult part is never…
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[Quick rant over my morning cup(s) of coffee.] By changing art from an image to be seen, into a thing in a gallery or museum to be contemplated in that environment, art stopped being a universal medium and became a practice for the elite only. I live in the so-called “developing world” in Asia [and…
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I’m still digesting this. [You can read this brief intro, or skip the preamble and scroll down to the re-blogged article.] If you don’t know what an NPC is, it’s a “non-player character” in a computer game, and the term is used by the far right to ridicule people on the far left who they…
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The art world is filled with bad ideas that are repeated like scripture, and accepted as truisms. Most of them presume to make sweeping statements about all art, and establish a hierarchy with their chosen art at the pinnacle. I’ve dismantled a bunch of the worst of these ideas in lengthy articles, but here I’ll…
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The key word here, that might give someone reason to pause, is permanent. But, let me outline the argument, first. The underlying premise is that non-white men, and women of color in particular, are systematically being excluded from the permanent collections of art museums in America due to racism and sexism. In such a case,…
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[Usually I call these impromptu writings “runaway rants”, but that implies a certain combativeness or railing against something, which is sometimes true. “Reflections” is probably more fair, at least when I’m not objecting to something offensively stupid.] Sometimes something is so goddamned obvious we don’t see it, and I would not think this about myself…
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It’s been more than a year since I’ve updated my New Art page, and it didn’t even include my Selfies From Alternate Universes series. It’s now revised to include all the recent work, with added thumbnail galleries and slideshows. I’ve reproduced it below. And just a quick note. I find it odd and a little…
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I’ve been blogging since about 2013 [which makes this one of the longest-lived, and, by the way, most comprehensive independent art and criticism blogs out there], but haven’t really analyzed my audience data until now. I’ve looked at my stats, but other than taking the results at face value — how many views, of what…
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The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald [Here I present an argument that art must be beautiful. Note that beauty signifies being visually captivating, compelling, or interesting, and doesn’t mean it’s…
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