week 3

[dragonofdispair]

doing this early this week...

Focus Questions: How is drawing different from a photograph? How have imaging devices like scanners and photographs impacted drawing?

... is o-matic supposed to be an artist's name? 'cause when i typed that into my search i got a hundred different responses that had nothing to do with art...

drawing and photography... at it's root, drawing is different from photography because the solutions an artist needs to come up with when drawing an object or scene regarding size, value, and arrangement in space are unneeded when taking a photo. the artist's individual rendering (such as my heavy lines verses other's soft, light lines) is also absent, since in a photograph there are no lines to divide the positive and negative space.

second question... i think that photography has pushed drawing further into the realm of the abstracted and the non-objective art than i personally like. i understand the the shift -- what's the point of drawing a perfectly rendered and colored leaf when some moron with a scanner can scan a bunch of leaves and have even more perfect leaf-renderings than any artist using a pens an paper ever could? (...well because scanning leaves like that gives them a really odd displacement because of the unique light of the scanner that shouldn't be replicated under any other conditions...but that's beyond the point and i'm seriously digressing...)

i personally would have preferred it if abstracted and non-objective art hadn't gotten as ... let's say "overly emphasized" ... as it had. i like knowing what i'm looking at. one can theoretically write volumes on the meaning of a dozen blocks welded together. but i've never seen any real meaning behind such things. shapes, landscapes and creatures that have been abstracted down to their simplist forms, like a bird being shown only as a curve of wings in flight are one thing... but --

--okay. off the tangent train... back to the point.

and part of the point is this week's artist(s) -- i think i get it on the multiple artist things though...i'm supposed to look at them all and tell how they're related or some such..

so william kentridge and walton ford... probably a pair of examples of what i was talking about regarding the abstraction of things. walton ford's bird prints are very realistic, with every feather in its place, while kentridge's are line drawings with overlays of cirlcles and lines that have little to do with the subject. even found on of a bird, fancy that...