I look somewhat mournfully at past sketches in which I did not fill the entire paper.
When Max Beckmann taught students in America he insisted that when they did a still-life that they paint *everything*. He was always doing that in his own work, and didn't hesitate to call the vast array of objects in nature simply, "gifts from God." He considered that if one didn't learn all these things to incorporate into one's work "like musical notes" then one is sort of making "handicraft".
It's something I've learned from him. It is not so much that it makes a work "complete" as it makes the work, paradoxically, "narrower" in the sense that it becomes more a work set apart, sundered, from its creator. It has its own space. One can enter it or not, but if one enters it one must create with the artist.
I thought of the previous drawing (the other with the bottle) after I drew this. I kind of like this one better.
2 comments:
+JMJ+
I know it's harder to fill up the whole paper, but I like your art better when it does.
There's something of that dreaminess again in that bottle--which I thought for a few seconds was the towel warping before my eyes.
I look somewhat mournfully at past sketches in which I did not fill the entire paper.
When Max Beckmann taught students in America he insisted that when they did a still-life that they paint *everything*. He was always doing that in his own work, and didn't hesitate to call the vast array of objects in nature simply, "gifts from God." He considered that if one didn't learn all these things to incorporate into one's work "like musical notes" then one is sort of making "handicraft".
It's something I've learned from him. It is not so much that it makes a work "complete" as it makes the work, paradoxically, "narrower" in the sense that it becomes more a work set apart, sundered, from its creator. It has its own space. One can enter it or not, but if one enters it one must create with the artist.
I thought of the previous drawing (the other with the bottle) after I drew this. I kind of like this one better.
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