I watched a mini-documentary “Beauty: Explained” on Netflix, and a few pieces fell into place regarding how art is considered today. Before I connect the dots and introduce what the new science suggests, I will need to review what the dots are, and what they signify. If you already know your contemporary art history, you…
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What do Flat-Earthers have to do with contemporary art? I was watching the 2018 documentary Behind the Curve, which is about the Flat Earth movement and some of the people involved in it. Two things hit me in quick succession. One was that the paintings and models of the Flat Earth were conceptual art, and…
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The New MoMA aspires to reconstruct art history through the lens of a revolutionary political agenda, but in the process sacrifices both art and justice. MoMA, along with the art world in general, has by hyjacked by a revolutionary political movement. The new MoMA happily subordinates art to postmodernist philosophy and social justice, which, while…
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I reached into the archives to retrieve these horrible classics (not for the little kiddies, though). Feel free to share, print, decorate, worship, & whatever: The Human Fly: Alien Autopsy: Awakening Upon Death of the Bride of the Creature: The Agony and the Extraterrestrial: Golgolon: Monster Maiden #1 Monster Maiden #2 The Giant’s Den: Now…
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Some of you know I’ve been doing a lot of study over the last several months, and now it’s paying off. I’m working on portrait #32 in my SFAU series, and I decided to put in an earring from a photo. [Decided to do another portrait to practice some of the techniques I’ve learned.] There…
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THEY’RE HERE! Prints of my original fine art digital paintings are now available. I’m using INPRNT as my printing service for several solid reasons. Prices are fixed, fair, and a bargain. They use archival papers and inks. Creators keep half the profits. Artists have to be approved. The interface is streamlined. It looks like this:…
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The Salvator Mundi, a portrait of Christ attributed to da Vince and sold to the highest bidder as such, is in the news again, now because it hasn’t arrived for a blockbuster da Vinci show scheduled to open in about a week. I’m more perturbed that people take this painting seriously. “for me the most…
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Renoir is an object of hatred and scorn, but the criticism is myopic. When I said to reconsider Renoir, it’s from the last critical update, at which point, if you don’t already know, his status was solidified as a horrible painter and sexist pig-man. And while there are some cringeworthy bather paintings, if we were…
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Artists can make whatever kind of art they want, and it’s totally legit. I’m all for it. It mostly just comes to good or bad examples of the kind of art in question. People might think that because I am pro-visual art, and because I criticize certain conceptual works, that I am against conceptual art…
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When I was a little kiddie and went to Sunday school we glued pasta to empty tomato-sauce cans and spray-painted them gold (or was it silver?). Maybe they were supposed to be chalices or something. I forget the religious import. True, the world’s richest artist is using better materials — dead butterflies no less —…
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Hope you all like the new design and layout. Above is the snappy new logo I designed. Because my theme keeps the header at the top at all times, I needed a logo that would be easily visible against any background, but unobtrusive. I got the idea of using that old tape that you could…
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Comedy as Unintentional Conceptual Art Anyone who watches YouTube prank videos and is familiar with conceptual art and its pseudo-philosophical underpinnings should experience some cognitive dissonance when YouTube comedians do performance and installation art without giving it a second thought. This short clip from the Impractical Jokers includes a viable contemporary art installation: Everything in…
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The only artist I’m aware of who has received any recognition for digital painting in the contemporary fine art world is David Hockney, and that’s just because anything and everything he creates is automatically reviewed. Gerhardt Richter has the same kind of status, and some of his threadbare digital art is taken seriously, but it’s…
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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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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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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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