Tenets and Tangents
Tenets shape forms. I’ve been collecting tenets for years. When something falls apart, I make a note of never doing that again. I collect these rules to make my art more precise to my intentions. It works, I think.
But I know that every time you bring up another rule, you separate yourself from everyone that is not employing the rule. I noticed that as my interests hone in on just one type of art, I refuse to include the other types. It could be that I just don’t know enough about installation art for me to even say much about it. It is merely a reluctance. I am open to anything — except for those things that are precluded by my parameters.
I prefer paint over anything else. I like drawings with traditional materials, but I do not draw with such tools; I draw with acrylic paint, and that has suited me enough that I only entertain something like charcoal when looking at somebody else’s work.
When I think of the field of art or the occupation of artist, they are synonymous with painting and painter. I use artist and painter interchangeably, accidentally alienating sculptors, for example. Everybody does this. In class, many of my students interchange the two words as if all art were paintings.
I don’t mean to because I like sculptures very much. I have hardly ever done them. Given my limited studio space, I find the fact that a single work of art can potentially take up so much more space than a flat painting as a liability. And I have noted that many sculptors are not discrete about their feelings of superiority over painters. But I wholeheartedly include them in the realm of art, anyway.
Photography is the newer medium which still has its public questions of if it is art or not. It certainly can be art, but I think it is hard to make art with a mechanical box. There are too many pics everywhere, and they are associated with the universal power of devices and trinkets any non-artist can use. Nevertheless, I can appreciate a well-crafted exception that does cross the threshold into art. It doesn’t matter that I have zero interest in photographs of almost any stripe. My opinions are meaningless here. What matters is that this is definitely a possibility.
Then, there is everything else, and that is where personal beliefs get murky.
I don’t usually go for technological art, unless there is a good reason for it. There is nothing to see in people trying to attempt art with screens and devices if nothing is meant by it.
I like comic books. But I don’t like all of them. The superhero comics are not to even be considered, unless made by a creator that excelled, like Steve Ditko or Frank Miller — and back in the old days, these same comics were considered junk; so it is a distinction that carries a complex value. Aficionados of Ditko know what makes him great, but very few people outside such circles would understand this level of appreciation.
Art comics are good, but too much whining about your own life is bad. A little bit of that can go a long way, and when you get every art comic book creator going on about the life of a comic book artist, it becomes exactly as boring as it sounds.
Weird comics that do something different can generally be good, unless they’re done badly. However, badly-made comics can be good if the craftless “esthetic” somehow works with aspects of the work.
If a comic is too weird, it better have a damn good reason. Weirdness for the sake of weirdness is old news and almost nobody’s flavor. Comics are only as good as how every element comes together as a whole.
And that means that a well-drawn comic that has nothing else to offer is only transient eye-candy because it offers nothing else. If there is something under the surface, a reader or viewer can glean more out of it.
But if a creator is playing with too many secrets, then it is a waste of time, as any reader can attest when they can’t understand something that has too many layers of meaning.