Friday, January 06, 2012

Picasso could draw?

I saw the image on the left in a post on Simen's beautiful blog, and I immediately thought "What a beautiful Pollock", and then "Norman Rockwell could paint like Pollock? Then why didn't he?"




Later, I read this post by Vivek Haldar about Iteration in painting, and I realized that some people would think "Picasso knew how to draw realistically? Then why didn't he?"


What is my point? Other than that I am an elitist intellectual?
Not, of course, that Rockwell should've painted like Pollock. It's that when I look at Rockwell's paintings, I see a technician, someone who could paint, but I wonder why he bothered. What he did, others could do too. Picasso and Matisse had technique, but they then tried to tried to do with the medium what others had not done.
Ironical, because what I have written is hardly original, but these two paintings illustrate this point so beautifully that I felt I had to save this juxtaposition for later. In this blog post.
There is a problem with this point of view, of course, and I'll address that in my next post.

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