The mission of an artist is to make every effort to disappear behind his work. He can’t be a man in the public’s eye. But in this era when communication via multimedia keep on developing and when the techniques are so distract, the artwork disappears behind the painter.
If a painter wishes to be a popular people, his artwork would be harmed. Then these works could only be considered as the dependency of his action, declaration and political views.
Art critique seems to play a decisive role in this era. It is obvious that critique is no longer something essential. This truth can be seen from the relationship between painters and art critics. But if they get along too close to each other, the success of the painter becomes dubious, and the collusion between them is just like an extramarital love affair which is always dangerous. Because it pushes the art creation to a passive position, the creation itself easily becomes frivolous.
The right way should be that the painter paints and the critic writes. The critic looks at the painting and the painter reads the articles and that’s all. They don’t have to do more with each other, then not being enslaved to each other they could ignore each other’s work and continue their creation on their own, individually.
The painters of today are definitely smart. After painting became something professional, strategy turns out to be important. Painters are no longer only the people who do nothing but paint in a pure sense but in many cases, they are the well-known celebrities with just a few works.
The sacred name “painter” is getting profaned and sold by the art brokers (merchants). Even the painters with good and honest character find themselves busy with strategies and hopes to gain fame with these strategies. No doubt, the mechanism of the art world today is already terribly twisted. In the notebook of the honest painters, what’s written is nothing else but “artsphere”, “net of relationships”, “dinners appointments” and other vague or clear words about how to profit from each other.
The operation of “Technism” comes with flippancy and uproar. To the people who have no religion of the modern age, art is more a strategy in a broad meaning. It helps the people with a so called sense of art to decorate the style of their official rank.
In a piece of painting, technique itself doesn’t create the depth of the work. It is true that the oil painting was born with particular techniques but the depth of the work is created by what’s behind and far beyond the technique. Technical production without significance causes games and chaos, yet the lack of the expressive force of technique would definitely put a negative effect to the expression of the content.
In this era of crisis of the religions, people try to cover the emptiness of their hearts by renewing and testing endlessly on techniques and forms. Imitating with no measure; producing and relishing techniques; difficult and wanton researching of techniques and forms. Alas, what they bring to us is an art more moderated, more gaudy and more commercialized.
Style is something that is normal and natural to yourself, not deliberate and inevitable yet incredibly vital to the others.
It’s an unrealistic delusion to breakthrough the predicament of the spirit of art by some simple technical experiments. Although techniques have brought immeasurable fresh blood to the art world from the end of the 1980’s to the beginning of the 1990’s, the more realistic truth is that the spirit of art behind the techniques is more essential.
Part of an article written by Mr. Yin Jinan states as follows: “When the language of art is purified till there is only technique left, to the social identity, the independent position of an artist can’t be taken over anymore.” “ It’s a period of time when techniques supersedes the primary as the secondary, the skills that got more and more exquisite in games support efficiently the social identity of the artists, the exquisite skills are certainly from the training in formal schools and the society, from the classical European oil paintings to the popular installation art with an international standard, there are endless models to study from, modesty gives one progress, one could be realistic, expressive, abstract or choose the installation, action and conception art, if only there are new trends from Europe or America, they respond promptly.” “Objectively, the artists of techniques are more capable of visualizing and materializing more effectively the faddish public points of view(no matter they are from the eastern or western world), and produce a spiritual production which is totally indifferent.”
The loss of religions makes people also loose the ability to fight mediocre reality, and artists loose their courage to face and describe the reality. Reality becomes a vacuum and techniques become a feasible operation. Reality loses power and the stars of techniqueism come forth in large numbers. Skills and techniques come to the surface with all the worse.
The significance of an outstanding painting is certainly not only the innovation and breakthrough of technique. It’s more the spiritual power than it shows. This is very simple to understand. The content itself is more important than its form. The form works for the content but now days the main element of many paintings are the skill and material. The content serves the style here and the painter uses some “effective” methods to paint and to produce and to serve the skills.
The American painter Edward Hopper painted an era during his whole life. He asked for nothing for what he did. As a matter of fact, it takes real courage for a painter to always pay close attention to the society. This courage is closely interrelated to one’s existence and it asks you to treat things like poverty and loneliness just as they are.
If we don’t face up to our state of existence and fail to express our true feelings, then to make up and to borrow would just make us as neither fish nor fowl.
We hope the creation of great work, but we haven’t thought of what we really need. It’s the artists who care about and work for the spirit of human beings and the situation of the society.
Chasing material possessions; gaining present, small profits; mistrust and fear between people; these cause the truest picture of the existence of people today.
Karaoke is for pleasure, for satisfying some sense organs. The oil painting works that take satisfying the sense organs as purpose is vastly different from the essence of art. One is for physical pleasures, while the other is to nourish the heart. Karaoke imitates and puts on airs so it doesn’t live long, for it doesn’t need to be responsible for the heart. Oil painting, as one of the art forms, has to gain its long term charm with its concern about life and heart. Forms and skills will be past. Only heart will be remembered with deep gratitude.
In an open era like today, some painters still prefer the nostalgic meditation, their works are still limited by the subjects such as traditional beauty, beautiful women and trappings. Others win by their geographic flavor. Without further aspiration, let alone talking about the art for human beings, these paintings are almost like a delicate handicraft article, always more than delicate, more than exquisite, but with a real lack of life and heroic spirit.
The end of the century is a great opportunity. It provides a scholarly environment which is free enough, yet some so called artists who are not well educated make this good environment into a real mess.
Paintings are satisfying the needs of people’s heart, they give us either pleasure or pain. In one word, they all have to do with our hearts. The paintings don’t serve our eyes, at least they are not responsible for our eyes.
For example, because some part of a painting looks nice, doesn’t mean that some sense organs are pleased. It implies the satisfaction and needs of the heart in some degree. In the current years, some academics pay a lot of attention to the researches on techniques and materials. They don’t respect the content but the production itself, It’s the common fault of today. Lowering art to a position of “skills”, “techniques” and “journeymen”, has caused the emergence of some fakements of art works. Once art becomes something that can be imitated, it looses its original nature.
I really like the way Edward Hopper handled the combination of the heart and the skill, and the social situation that he paid attention to. To paint something of privacy; to get attention with novel ideas; boldness, speed, hotspots, desperation and fuss, will never get to the highest state of art. Art should be holy, sublime, beautiful, hopeful and bright.
Thinking about the social environment and the ideology, when everyone in the country is busy doing business, making money and getting so scared by his own poverty. When people show off their success with material possession… how many artists are there who still care about the spirit? When a painting style is accepted by the market, imitation comes along immediately, turns art into a technical production with all it’s failigs. In such time of the technism, where goes the basis of our pursuit of art?
