Herschel Mair wrote:
Devil's advocate here...
Photography is the only art form in which people still expect the
artist to previsualize the final result in some way.
Is it? When did painters stop planning? I've certainly seen many
pencil sketches and oil preliminary works planning out parts of bigger
works. That seems very much like planning to me.
So if they get a good piece of work they didn't expect, some say it's
"lucky"
Of course it's lucky. Like drawing the card you need in poker, or
winning the lottery. Sometimes you get lucky.
Great painters don't start out with a clear idea of the finished work
(Flemish masrers with Camera lucida aside perhaps)
Well, the art world probably doesn't consider the people whose
preliminary sketches I see to be "great painters" (or else they're far
enough in the past that the "any more" clause could rule them out).
But how many of the current great painters do you actually have good
information on how they work? (Not my field or interest so *I* don't
even know who they are).
It's all hit and miss. The work changes throughout its plastic stage
and in the end it's a product pf all the thoughts and changes of ideas
that the artist went through as he applied and re-applied paint to the
canvas.
Of course it is, but that isn't contradictory to some previsualization
at the beginning.
It's a creative maleable process.
Why are there so many rules attached to photography.?
To help people of basically artistic temperament through the tech side?
I don't really know.
I've also caught a gathering of artists discussing brushes, so I'm in
the mood to be skeptical about the facile clever comparisons between
photographers and painters.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/dd-b
Pics: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum, http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
