

Ask HN: What art would you recommend? - chunky1994

Since PG's spoken a lot about painting and hacking being alike, what art does the hacking community enjoy? What would you recommend a beginner artist to do in order to start learning an artform?
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ForrestN
I edit one of the largest sites about current art, Contemporary Art Daily:
<http://contemporaryartdaily.com>

The best and first place to start experimenting with art is drawing. Don't
worry about focusing on realism, unless you want to. Sitting down with a
pencil and a blank sheet of paper is exactly like making any art, only with
less decision making up front. The magical thing about art is the total
absence of any criteria. Here's this sheet of paper, and this pencil, and
literally anything you choose to draw is totally acceptable and equivalent to
anything else you might draw. So you have to start asking some pretty
interesting questions to figure out what to do. Photography is also
interesting and accessible for similar reasons.

Apart from that, I think just like with programming the best thing to do first
is to start consuming the sort of thing you eventually want to make. If you
aren't familiar with much art, it will be harder to understand the
possibilities and decide what interests you. Get to a contemporary art museum,
if there's one nearby, or go to the library and grab a book on contemporary
art. If you arrive at any specific questions or want to find more art akin to
something you find that you like, feel free to e-mail forrest@ the above URL.

~~~
chunky1994
Thank you! This is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for, I shall indeed
begin with acquainting myself with various art-forms that you've suggested,
I've always been fascinated by Van Gogh, I'd be grateful any idea how I should
grow this fascination into something more!

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robfitz
Procedural art is fun. If you combine it w/ real world tools like
projectors/cameras or even something like a laser cutter, really neat stuff
can happen

The processing page has a nice gallery and also happens to be a very pleasant
way to program this sort of thing: <http://processing.org/exhibition/>

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EgeBamyasi
I enjoy Dada, Fluxus, Procedural and Avant Garde.

Cant speak for painting but after a couple of failed attempts to pick up the
guitar in my teens I one day started playing what I felt like instead of
trying to play some fast hard rock riff, instant success and now I play guitar
every day and starting to be genuinely good at it. So, paint what you feel
like. Explore other painters and artists and try to copy their work while
still maintaining your personal touch to it. Get a mentor or show what you do
on some site for showing art, feedback is really important!

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thristian
One vote for photography here: you can get as technical as you want (or as
your wallet allows) but you can produce great work with just your phone's
camera. You can show it off to other people, or just keep your laptop supplied
with desktop images.

I have found, however, that while I really like photography and I really like
coding, it can be very, very difficult to switch between the two - on the
order of weeks to go from "thinking like a photographer" to "thinking like a
programmer". Perhaps that will improve with time.

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sgentle
I've been doing some sketching lately and I highly recommend it. It's the root
of a lot of visual art, so you get to learn a lot of the important art things
(perspective, lighting/shading, how utterly and completely your eyes lie to
you about the size and orientation of things). But what's really unbeatable is
the convenience. Materials required: 2B pencil, eraser, paper. Put them in
your bag. Draw when you've got time. Done.

