jesus, what a crackpot.

[cimorene]

stop david hockney rewriting art history.

this guy's gone on major news tv trying to claim it's impossible to paint or draw to life without tracing projections and suchlike, and that all the great masters of art have used such devices.

um.

uh.

yeah.  i'll just...

:boggle:

Comments

[annlarimer.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, WTF is up with this site's equally crackpot notion that signing a petition can in any way discredit an historical theory? It's not the sort of thing that is determined by vote. Only evidence can do that.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

it's a bad slogan. apparently they want equal air time for the more acceptable theories. i suppose they don't want constant tv watchers who are really gullible to all suddenly start believing him... .

[annlarimer.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. Of course, gullible constant TV watchers don't really tend to go for yer fine arts programs.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

i don't claim it makes sense, but artists generally feel that way. the world of art teachers is saturated with indignation at not being taken seriously by the wider world. my mother practically steams when she talks about funding for arts education, or the fact that music gets more in the local schools... .

[lm.livejournal.com]

Have you seen that dude's drawings?

I mean, not to brag or anything, but I've taken one freakin' drawing class, and I've done stuff (all by "eyeballing it") that's better than anything I've seen of his.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

yeah! and ohmigod, those drawings are TRACINGS. i mean. he can't even TRACE any better than that?

[lm.livejournal.com]

The thing that really makes them so bad is that they don't look 3-D. And that's exactly because he traced them. I mean, I've done drawings of my hand before where I traced the outline, but it still wouldn't look like my hand if I didn't have enough skill to get all the value etc. down to make it look like more than a traced outline of a hand. He just seems to be incapable of getting that far.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

the masters may have been a matter of talent but there's plenty of evidence that pretty much *anybody* can be trained to draw fairly realistic figures, from adults who've 'never been able to draw' to very small children to the clinically retarded. i wouldn't've believed it myself without seeing some of my mom's art teacher books.

but the point is--he's got no formal training, as you see in that article, and that probably accounts for a lot of it. even with as little artistic eye and intelligence as he evinces, with training he could draw better than he traces.

what an ass.

[lm.livejournal.com]

Exactly. It's skill more than anything. I couldn't draw jack before the beginning drawing class I took earlier this year. There's only so far you can go without a little formal training, unless you're some kind of insane genius. Which he very obviously is not. I can totally understand the attitude of "I don't need training and I don't want any!" but in order to have that attitude you have to be willing to allow that your work can't be compared to people who have had same training, because it's coming from an entirely different perspective. I think this is true in any area, not just art. I haven't had any training in web design, and though I think I can whip up damn good webpages, I'd probably still have to work hard to do well in an HTML class, because I've learned without any kind of structure or method. He seems to think he can have it both ways, but he simply can't.