
John Berger: Drawing is discovery (1953) - Thevet
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/art-and-design/2013/05/john-berger-drawing-discovery
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Spearchucker
This article seems (or attempts) to describe an artist's style. When you start
out all you're doing is copying reality onto paper. That builds spatial
awareness first, and interpretation (style) second. I can draw anyone's face
and produce a perfectly accurate replica. I cannot, however, stylise that into
a caricature. And that's why I'm no artist. This skill does have other uses
however, like developing focus on detail whilst maintaining a sense of the
whole.

Tongue in cheek, bit this makes me wonder sometimes whether artists like Dali
skimped (or even skipped) the first, jumped to the second, producing something
that resonated with a buying audience. As I said I'm not an artist, so all
this may well be my imagination.

~~~
eludwig
>>I can draw anyone's face and produce a perfectly accurate replica.

I think you meant this as "one can", but if it's true, you can do far more
than most trained draughtsman can do and you would certainly be considered and
"artist", for there is no way to do this that doesn't imbue it with your
personal style. Style flows from observation and execution, or at least it
should--not the other way around. At least it does in good art schools. Having
a "style" is quite frowned upon for beginning students. Style is earned
through dumping preconceptions and truly seeing without prejudice.

But to talk to your points, as the sibling reply points out, here drawing is
being singled out as glimpse into the exploratory mind of the artist that a
finished work cannot give. Its the difference between learning and knowing.

I don't think you were serious about Dali, but you should know that he was a
master draughtsman, as was Picasso. These two made conscious choices to twist
their hard-earned observation of the real world in ways that made
them...happy?...satisfied? But make no mistake. It was all earned on the back
of serious study.

~~~
theoh
It's nonsense to say that there's no way to make a perfect representation
that's not imbued with personal style.

Many mediocre contemporary realist painters achieve this all the time, as you
might expect from the definition of the problem as a case of exact replication
of reality.

Of course, subject, setting, framing, lighting etc. all distinguish their work
but only incidentally. Not conceptually.

The impact of photography and the increasingly boring trajectory of figurative
painting are the reason that art has moved away from valuing imitative skill
and talent/facility. As art forgers know, a personal style or flick or the
painter's wrist is almost always an easily reproduced or pastiched
affectation.

I feel like the ghost of PG as painter is hanging over this discussion,
dooming any endorsement of the developments in art since WWII...

~~~
eludwig
>>It's nonsense to say that there's no way to make a perfect representation
that's not imbued with personal style.

I apologize for not communicating what I was trying to say better. What I
meant was that if you were a classically trained artist that had studied long
enough (by which I _don 't_ mean that you trace photographs of people or anime
characters from the web) to be able to draw freehand renderings that are
convincingly accurate, you would have a style already based on your long hours
of study and by virtue of the way your hand moves and touches the paper. Where
you take your art after this is up to your personal style (in every sense of
that word)

The word style is notoriously difficult to define wrt the art world. I was
just trying to say that style is another word for "how you do what you do"

For the record, I think that the post-war art world is hugely fascinating.
Some of it moves me, some doesn't.

