In this weeks puzzle I chose to learn more about “What does ‘Realistic’ Art look like? (Painting, Drawing). This puzzle wasn’t limited to just painting or drawings but also with live or movie theatre, literature, etc. This puzzle first discusses that we as humans initially can distinguish between “realistic” and “unrealistic” art. As in a baby drawing something or just a kid drawing a sky that is above the sun compared to a landscape painting like Claude Lorrain, The Return of Odysseus (1644) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Lorrain_024.jpg which is realistic in the sense of spatial relations. In that example just think of a picture a 1st grader would make with stick figures and they sky just being put in at the top of the page and how that isn’t what most of us think of when we think of a “realistic” painting.. When we think of a realistic painting or drawing, our initial thought (mine at least) is something of Claude Lorrain’s painting of a ship return to the harbor. In this puzzle we will discuss what it means to have some form of art to be “realistic”. We will look at an essay by Ernst Gombrich, discuss his three theories, and then I will give my opinion on whether I agree or disagree with Gombich’s theories. (Gombrich is a well know art historian that was born in 1909)
What does “realistic” art look like? In Gombrich’s essay, he first asks us “what does it mean to say that one picture looks more realistic than the other?” He points out that our obvious perception of “realistic” art is actually mistaken (think back to my example of the 1st grader and Claude Lorrain’s painting). We fist start off by learning about the “naturalness assumption”. Our instructor, Joshua, helps to explain this assumption in helpful examples. He starts off by explaining to us that pictures are amore natural art form than others in a sense that we are born and grow up with the tools that we are able to distinguish and understand pictures or images. We understand these images and what they mean but don’t have to “read” them, or don’t need any special learning or training to understand these. Our instructor gives a nice example of this in his lecture and I will try to do the same in my own words. If you think about your favorite book (or if you don’t like to read think about reading in general, maybe even the simplest of things as reading this blog) and realize that you were born with out the knowledge of language (being able to read that book/blog) and were taught how to read from you parents or other for of guardian. The “naturalness assumption” states that we can depict and understand, or “read”, images/pictures without any form of learning form our parents/guardians. We are able to look at a picture (Claude’s painting I alluded to earlier) and realize that the painting depicts the images of a boat coming to harbor, and I could realize that without reading a description of the painting. Now this picture of Claude’s boat helps explain Gombirch’s next assumption called the “naked eye assumption”. Think about Claude’s painting again. This painting holds an image in our head that is when we see his painting, we think it to be realistic because, if we were ever at that place, that is the image we would imagine it to be. Or as our instructor puts it, if there is an image of an apple, we know it to be an apple and we don’t need any special training to understand that that is a picture of an apple. (on the contraire I believe that know what an apple is, or a boat or anything like that is learned when you are younger through language, but the point is that even if you don’t know what an apple is called, you can still put two and two together.) The image of the boat in the harbor brings about the same reaction we would have if we were there seeing the boat coming into the harbor, according to the naked eye assumption. Our instructor gives a great example of this in his lecture and I will give you a summary of that. The instructor tells us a story of two painters that are competing in a painting contest a long time ago. The first painter paints a picture of grapes so realistic that birds fly up to the painting, thinking they are grapes. Now the second artist painting is revealed when the curtain is opened. His painting is a painting of that curtain. Now his painting was so realistic that it fooled the audience into thinking his painting was the actual curtains. The moral of the story, to help argue the naked eye assumption, is that the audience, the birds are included as an audience, didn’t need any special training to understand what painting was what. If the two men were in a poetry contest, then the birds would not understand the meaning of words for they cannot speak. This is basically giving the argument that paintings/drawings or anything thing of the visual still media are more true of an art form than literature or music. Now Gombrich goes on to argue his theories for what realistic art is.
In Gombrich’s first argument, he states that “the artist, clearly, can only render what his tool and his medium are capable of rendering”. Our instructor gives a great example of this first argument in his lecture and I will try to give you an example in my own words. In our voice thread discussion this week I explained this, I feel, in a pretty good way. First think of an artist that is drawing a picture of a sunset. His lines are fluent and help render that you are looking at a picture of a sunset. The only problem here is that there is no color in this sunset, and the artist can only depict shadow and shading with small hatch markings. Now if you want a realistic picture you would first think of obviously the color of the sunset. But this artist medium has limited him to only shades of black, white, and grey and has limited him to shading using cross hatching and hatching which is really “realistic” is it. A more to the point example would be that an artist is given all the oil colors he would need to paint this sunset, but he is not use brushes or pallet tools, but only his fingers and hands. Now this painting may turn out very well but your initial thoughts of “realistic” art may be that it has to be exactly like that sunset. In this argument Gombrich is trying to state that even though that sunset was used with greys, blacks and whites and the shading was used by cross hatching, it very well could be a realistic rendition of that sunset. Or even though the artist had to use his fingers to paint that sunset, it still may look very much like that sun set.
You may now make the argument that maybe a photograph may be the only real rendition of “realistic” art, but Grombrich has a valid argument for that as well. In this next argument, the instructor of the course helps explain this and I will try to summarize it for you. The instructor starts of by familiarizing us with a story back in the day when painters were trying to figure out how to paint a horse (not physically paint the horse but paint it on the canvas) while it is in stride or galloping. Before the camera was invented our naked eye could process the way a horse would gallop fast enough so a lot of paintings were of horses usually just standing. When the camera was invented we were finally able to see how a horse galloped. Now when we got these images, we would pain them but it just seemed funny to us to see a picture of that horse mid gallop. It just wasn’t natural looking to us (it was natural to us then because we were never able to process that in our minds/actually see it happening, so it was therefor foreign) therefore we naturally rejected that notion of the galloping horse. Gombrich’s argument is painting out, in my words, that certain things that are natural motions that we cant seem to process with the naked eye are unnatural to us, so maybe they deem to be more unrealistic to us.
In Gombrich’s, last argument, he argues that certain images will look more realistic or unrealistic to certain people. How I can explain this the easiest way is by summarizing the instructor’s example, and by realizing the different cultures of the world (which the instructor touches base with). In the instructor’s example, he explains it by taking two different painters, one from the Renaissance time in Europe and one from china. The painters paint the exact same landscape but they have vastly different modes of technique. Now when an audience (Europeans and Chinese) is asked which painting is more realistic, the Europeans say the Europeans painting is more realistic and the Chinese say that the Chinese artist painting is more realistic. This is just a basis of different cultures and what we grow up with. The way I can explain this is the different representations of Latin/Hispanic renditions of Christianity and say the American renditions of Christianity. When you see art from the Hispanic culture about the day of the dead or even their renditions of Jesus Christ you find them to be different then what we may see in our renditions of Jesus Christ. Although the renditions are similar, our culture has brought us up learning certain values and we tend to be more biased towards our way of life (our familiarity with the paintings we are used to) which helps explain Gombrich’s theory. I think he is arguing that our beliefs and values give us a certain bias towards what we see to be realistic art compared to another culture which sees their artwork as realistic.
When we were first asked the question on “what is realistic art?” I would immediately go to pictures or paintings in my mind that almost imitate (I thought of the mimetic theory of art and what we learned last week in natural beauty and how we tend to look at a landscape and make it a picture/piece of art in our mind immediately) what the artist is painting/drawing and I would deem that to be realistic art. Or the pictures of hyper realistic art pieces that are tough to distinguish between a photograph and different mediums. After reading Gombrich’s essay and the instructors lecture, I have opened my mind and have agreed with Grombrich’s arguments. In his first argument I feel I make a pretty good back up argument for him with the artist that is only allowed to use his fingers to paint the sun set. I agree with Gombrich on this argument because it does depend on what media the artist is using to render something. Just because it doesn’t look like a photograph of that exact item or landscape etc. than it doesn’t mean it isn’t realistic. The artist may choose what technique he/she wishes and make a picture of something but Gombrich argues that we can tell what an apple is (without any training) even if it is not “perfect” per say in the rendering of that apple. I feel his arguments are all backed up by each other which help convince me that I may be able to look at Claude Monet’s paintings and say that (even thought I knew what he was painting before) his Impression sunrise painting, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impression,_Sunrise is completely realistic (even though it doesn’t look like a photograph) because I am in an understand of the media and techniques he uses. I also like that Grombrich argues against that photographs may take away form the realistic element of a picture because our mind may not be able to process the speed of certain objects. This in turn takes away from the “realistic” element of an image because we cannot actually see the legs of a cheetah when it is moving at full speed. This in turn makes it hard to see the legs of a cheetah, at full speed, and deem that to be realistic. I guess what I am trying to say is that I agree with Gombrich but more so that it is hard to think of a painting to be more realistic or unrealistic because of what we discussed above.