…is anyone here especially knowledgable, or at least knowledgable about where I can find knowledgable people? The Dope is a great resource for intelligent discussion, but (maybe it’s me) I haven’t seen a lot of talk about painting in Cafe Society and I’ve been thinking about painting very seriously for the last few weeks.
Long story short, I used to paint a few decades ago. Not very successfully, but I hung onto my paints and stretchers and palette knives, thinking that there will come a time when I have a few months in which to paint.
That time arrived this month, and I’ve been painting, just getting the hang of it again, and enjoying myself. I look at stuff differently–I take a walk and it’s “Interesting shadow,” or “Hmmm, if I painted that scene, I’d leave out X, and I’d paint the Y stuff very bright,” like that. I’m having fun.
But here’s the thing–I have very little clue of what’s been done over the last few decades. I visit art galleries in Manhattan several times a year, and museums for the older stuff, but I feel out of touch compared with people who’ve been living this stuff and breathing it the last few years. I have ideas and think they’re so obvious to me, I wonder if someone has done that already, and now it’s even a cliche.
Take this thread, in which I asked for ideas on what to paint on a canvas made (fairly crudely) from a pair of old underwear. I ended making some interesting “canvases” out of old underwear (none based on the ideas offered to me in that thread, though I still might–thanks to all who participated) but I have no clue whether some artist of the 1990s had a famous “underwear” show that was a sensation.
I suppose this problem is common to all artists, not just painters. How can you possibly know whether someone has written the same novel, devised the same choreography, etc. unless you’ve got an encyclopedic awareness of the contemporary arts scene in your field–but there must be a way to get started becoming more aware.
Another idea I’ve been toying with the last few days concerns extreme closeups of body parts, so closeup they’re practically abstract shapes. This seems so obvious an idea to me, and so potentially fascinating, that I’m positive that there’s a whole school of painters who want to make this point (at the risk of colossal obviousness, the point is that obscenity literally disappears if you get close enough to even the most obscene image)–but I’ve never seen such a painting, and don’t really relish the thought of trying to describe this concept to gallery owners and the few painters I know without testing out first whether it is indeed an obvious idea and a virtual cliche. Google-searching “underwear” and “painting” and various other terms got me nothing. and I’m sure if I Googled “gigantic cocks” I would not be pleased with the results either.
Anyway, I’m starting here, because Cafe Society has always seemed filled with smart people who have depths in fields of knowledge that amaze me. But if anyone has suggestions for other ways to get a jump on this sort of awareness (aside from the gallery viewing and Google-image searching I mention above), I’d be glad to read that too.