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...
>>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.
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...