"Paintings With Personality"

'Drawn To The View', watercolor sketch

      I have had an exceptionally busy week with our son and his wife visiting. It was wonderful to see them again and I look forward to the next time we are together. As it turns out, I had no time for painting but I have big plans for tomorrow. The ideas are exploding out of my head, demanding to be put on paper.

According to Wikipedia, “Robert Henri (24 June 1865 – 12 July 1929) was an American painter and teacher. He was a leading figure of the Ashcan School of American realism and an organizer of the group known as "The Eight," a loose association of artists who protested the restrictive exhibition practices of the powerful, conservative National Academy of Design.’

Following is an excerpt from “The Art Spirit,” by Robert Henri.

Robert Henri in an address to the students of the School of Design for Women, Philadelphia. Written in 1901

      “The real study of an art student is generally missed in the pursuit of a copying technique.

      I knew men who were students at the Academie Julian in Paris, where I studied in 1888, thirteen years ago. I visited the Academie this year (1901) and found some of the same students still there, repeating the same exercises, and doing work nearly as good as they did thirteen years ago.

      At almost any time in these thirteen years they have had technical ability enough to produce masterpieces. Many of them are more facile in their trade of copying the model, and they make fewer mistakes and imperfections of literal drawing and proportion than do some of the greatest masters of art.

      These students have become masters of the trade of drawing, as some others have become masters of their grammars. And like so many of the latter, brilliant jugglers of words, having nothing worthwhile to say, they remain little else than clever jugglers of the brush.

      The real study of an art student is more a development of that sensitive nature and appreciative imagination with which he was so fully endowed when a child, and which, unfortunately in almost all cases, the contact with the grown-ups shames out of him before he has passed into what is understood as real life.”

      I think Henri’s words could apply to working from photographs as well as working from casts. I am thinking, again, about painters who copy from photographs and never move on, past the student phase. Creating art is hard work and it is far easier to draw or paint something exactly as it appears, but the painter who designs their composition and expresses the emotions they feel about their subject will be the creators of great art.

Photography has become very good over the years, there are artists who have let themselves become dependent on everything the camera sees. It is important that the painter interpret but not copy their reference, whether the subject is from life or from a photograph. There is no reason to copy exactly what you see in front of you. A ‘reference’ is a note and meant to be used as a hint, not a fact written in stone.

Paintings that appeal to art lovers stir their emotions. The details of the subject only bring an admiration of the painter’s method.

“An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.” – Robert Henri

I really would like to know what you think about the subject. Please comment below.