Walker Percy on Art and Science in School

"If science is exciting and art is exhilarating, the schools and universities have the achieved the not inconsiderable feat of rendering both dull. As every scientist and poet knows, one discovers both vocations in spite of, not because of school."

-Walker Percy in Lost in the Cosmos

Game Design Lectures by Jonathan Blow

"If our medium is powerful, we should be have the capability to do things that we should be ashamed of, and then make the choice about whether we are going to do them or not."
-Jonathan Blow

I found these lectures by indy game developer Jonathan Blow fascinating, engaging and applicable to mediums other then video games:

• Programming is Easy; Production is Harder; Design is Hardest.
• Programming, Design, and ‘Art’
• Design Reboot (the above quote is from this one)
  
• Indie Prototyping (.mov) (Why questions over How questions in game design)
• Two video lectures on game design
• Interview with Jonathan at the Indy Game Dev. Podcast

Check out Jonathan's blog/website here: http://braid-game.com/news/
The game he's been working on for at least 4 years, Braid, is something I'm looking forward to.

storytelling in art history

James Gurney (author/illustrator of the Dinotopia books) has been blogging the making of the his Dinotopia paintings. In a recent post he writes about the place of illustration, animation and comics in art history, he offers these two diagrams by Dennis Nolan:

"The problem with this analysis is that it doesn’t take into consideration the forms of art that real people—like your great grandparents and my great grandparents—were excited about, namely illustration, comic art, and animation. In art history courses we never heard about these forms, nor about the artists who told stories with pictures."


"Dennis’s diagram puts the storytelling forms squarely in the center of the mainstream history of art, where they directly inherit the legacy of the ages. The modern movement still plays a significant, if culturally marginal, role as agent provocateur."

This makes a lot of sense to me. In the midst of the new mainstream I would add all film matte-painting and concept art. I've always felt that some of the stuff on say cgtalk.com or conceptart.org had much more in common with Rembrandt and da Vinci then most modern 'fine' art.

In addition to the centrality of Story-Telling that Dennis highlights, I would also add that illustration, comics etc have the following in common with traditional art most of which modernism lacks:

• Art as Storytelling
• Art has healthy relation to Science (Anatomy,Optics, perspective, and now physics)
  
• Art as Work (commissions, making money isn't bad)
• Art as Representation
• Art that in some way is Beautiful

(more ramblings on this topic here)

So, perhaps modernism will only be an ugly short-lived curiosity in the final story of art.

Notes from John Sloan's Gist of Art

"If you don't want to be serious about playing, do something of no account. Go into banking. Buy collar buttons at five cents a dozen and sell them for five cents a piece."
-John Sloan's Gist of Art

That may sound harsh, but I think he was getting at something similar to something Tom Peters(author of Leadership) said: "Any company that exists purely for the purpose of making money is likely to fail."

But back to John Sloan:

"A negative, anti-thing can't be great. Anti-bad art, anti-liquor for instance.The kind of art made for anti-reason, anti-war, anti-humanity, and so forth, can't be great art. It can be important propaganda, satire, but not great art."
Would that many a garage band took this to heart.

"No great poet, no great artist ever allows facts to interfere with the truth. Facts are not necessarily truth. Poetry can convey truth more than a statement of fact.The history of the Civil War has more meaning through the book, John Brown's body, then it has through the facts of history."
I think perhaps this has to do with a rationalistic, enlightenment view of history as a non-story, if we think of, and approach, history as an impersonal collection of sequential facts instead of a divinely told story then it will have a sour taste. Stories are personal, art is personal.


"Work for your self first. You can paint best the things you like or the things you hate. You cannot paint well when indifferent. Express a mental opinion about something you are sensitive to in life around you. There is a profound difference between sensitivity and sentimentality."
Indifference. I believe the world was created to demand a response, to be neutral (that quest of scientism) to the created order is to be jaded. This is why nihilist art is not often good, it's indifferent, by definition. The best scientists were never 'neutral', but awe-struck.

"Paintings must have some stimulus. Keep the mainspring of life which gives you the creative urge. Keep your humanity."
Art is about life, art is not about art. Art is about the world, not the 'art world'.

"There is such a thing as looking at nature too calmly, without any excitement." I don't know if he knew why, but I do, nature is all about the Glory of God, and the Glory of God demands a weighty excitement, a heavy awe.

"The artist must get a kick out of something in nature before he can create. If you only get kick out of other works of art you should not be an artist. You should be a connoisseur, or a buyer or a consumer of art." Might I add: Anime fanboy to the list?

All this from the first few pages!

david lynch on worldbuilding in film and nature and culture

"A sense of place is so critical in cinema, because you want to go into another worl. Every story has it's own world, and it's own feel, and it's own mood. So you try to put together all these things-these little details-to create that sense of place."

"When you see an aging building or a rusted bridge, you are seeing nature and man working together. If you paint over a building, there is no more magic to that building. But if it's allowed to age, then man has built it and nature has added to it-it's so organic.

But often people wouldn't think to permit that, except for scenic designers."

-David Lynch in Catching the Big Fish

beauty and final truth

"What Capa's photograph shows is a truth-a common, terrible, and therefore important truth. But again, does this mean the picture is beautiful? Is Truth Beauty and vice versa? The answer, as Keats knew, depends on the truth about which we are talking. For a truth to be beautiful, it must be complete, the full and final Truth. And that, in turn, leads me to a definition of beauty linked unavoidably to belief."
-Robert Adams, Beauty in Photography

I like what he says here: beauty is final truth. Beauty is eschatological truth, what all of nature groans after, the world as it should be, and as it shall be.

Andy Goldsworthy on Nature and Culture

"The older I become, the more connections I can make between times, experiences and places. I have always felt uncomfortable with the easy categorizations that people sometimes apply to my art. I remember overhearing a comment by a member of an audience waiting for me to give a lecture who was saying that I only use natural materials and no tools. My commitment to what are described as 'natural materials' is often misunderstood as a stance against the 'man-made'. I need the nourishment and clarity that working the land with my hands gives me, but at various times I have made us of light and heavy machinery, and I see no contradiction in using the technology of photography. Pretending I could do without such tools when I need them would be a bit like pretending I could swim to America. Likewise, I live in buildings and should, on occasion, work in them."

-Andy Goldsworthy in his book Time

"The subject of this anthology is of the greatest importance, not only for the understanding of the art produced in traditional civilizations, but also for understanding of the real nature of human condition and knowledge of what it means to be human. To be truly human is to reflect the Divine Image here on earth. By virtue of being human, man creates and makes, and by remaining faithful to his primordial nature produces traditional art, in the vastest sense of the term. Such an art reflects her on earth the Divine Artist, thus making possible the creation of the forms that lead to the world of the Spirit and the Formless. This understanding of art has been to a large extent forgotten in the modern world as a consequence of modern man's forgetting who he is, why he is here on earth, and where he is going. This anthology is, therefore, not only an exposition of the significance of traditional art, but also the means for rememberence of what it means to be truly human, to be the pontifical man who is the bridge between Heaven and earth and a channel of grace for the world around him."

-Seyyed Hossein Nasr in the Preface to Every Man An Artist: Readings in the Traditional Philosophy of Art

This looks like a goldmine. I'll probably be quoting it here this summer. I like the connection of art to eschatology, which I've talked about in a few posts too.

Richard Wilbur on abstraction in painting and poetry

"There must be some poets who have very little visual imagination, even though the eye is the primary sense. Everybody's agreed on that. Since the middle ages I think. Even D.H. Lawrence, who made out a strong case against the primacy of vision, was a painter.
...
I think I can say why there are more painter-poets, or poets who are would be painters, than there are poets who have to do with music. It strikes me that music is infinitely more abstract then painting or poetry. That you can't make any precise statements as to what music is up to. Poetry simply has to be exact and concrete or it bores to death. And on the whole, I think--despite some successes in abstract painting-that it's the same with painting."

-Richard Wilbur, Conversations with Richard Wilbur

creativity creation, and originality

"A creature is not a creator, and cannot be. There is only one
Creation, and we are it's members.

To be creative is only to have health: to keep oneself fully alive
in the Creation, to keep the Creation fully alive in oneself, to see
the Creation anew, to welcome one's part in it anew.

The most creative works are all strategies of this health.

Works of pride, by self-called creators, with their premium on
originality, reduce the Creation to novelty-the faint surprises
of minds incapable of wonder.

Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In lone-
liness one assumes a responsibility for oneself that one cannot
fulfill.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness."

-Wendell Berry in What Are People For?

Vander Wende and Heade

I was at Barnes and Noble the other day reading (I think) John Updike's Essays on Art. I was struck by how a Martin Johnson Heade painting reminded me of Richard Vander Wende's concept paintings for Willow.

Paintings by Heade:


Paintings by Vander Wende (3 from Willow, one from Aladdin, and one Riven render):



Edit: I remember now, it also reminded me of another concept artist: Doug Chiang. Here is a screen shot form his Robota trailer:


Robota eventually became an illustrated book.

Christianity and the Arts Conference and David Taylor

Check it out! Eugene Peterson, Jeremy Begbie and others will be in Austin, April 2008 for Transforming Culture: A Vision for the Church and the Arts.

Check out David Taylor's (of the excellent blog Diary of an Arts Pastor) announcement.

While your at it check out his previous post:
Beauty Better Save this Tired World:

"The ugliness of this world, ethical or commercial or otherwise, will not be reversed by mere abstention from it, the "Christ against culture" behavior of Richard Niebuhr's analysis. It will be turned around only by gracious, generous, muscular acts of beauty.

We must act beauty out in the stuff of our lives. We must act it out even if it means looking foolish, like the very serious joker, in the eyes of a worldly wise society. We must act beauty out in order to give it a chance to reverse the imbecilic, poisonous effects of sin."

Art as Work

"There seems to be much confusion about what we mean when art . I have a recommendation. We eliminate the word art and replace it with work and develop the following descriptions.

1. Work that goes beyond it's functional intention and moves us in deep ways we call great work.
2. Work that is conceived and executed with elegance and rigor we call good work.
3. Work that meets it's intended needs honestly and without pretense we call simply work.
4. Everything else, the sad and shoddy stuff of daily life, can come under the heading of bad work.

This simple change will eliminate anxiety for thousands of people who worry about whether they are artist or not. But this is not the most significant consequence. More importunately, it can restore art to a central, useful activity in daily life--something for which we have been waiting for a long time"

- graphic designer and illustrator Milton Glaser in his book Art is Work

quotes and links

“...this is the ultimate aim of all making: to make a thing which does manifest spirit, which shows feeling, which makes God visible and shows us the ultimate meaning of existence, in the actual sticks and stones of the made thing.”
-Christopher Alexander as quoted in
An Architectural Reflection on Sandra Schneiders and Philip Sheldrake’s Understanding of Christian Spirituality (This is what I was thinking about in these posts)

"The main problem with narrative in film is that when you become emotionally involved, it becomes difficult to see picture as picture. Of course, the laughing and crying and suspense can be a positive element, but it's oddly nonvisual and gradually destroys your capacity to see.

-- Michael Snow, speaking to Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema, Vol. 2"

Great discussion on this seeing and film at Jeffry Overstreet's blog:
Are movies increasing your "capacity to see"?

"It's his sincerity that gets Bruce Herman into trouble, the moderation of his temperament, the well roundedness of his craft. His forms are a delicate balance between abstract emotional expressions and realist figure drawings: "Some artists feel like they have to be in one of the two camps, as though there are only two—iconography or iconoclasm, realism or abstraction. And by choosing one side, they feel the need to put down the other.""

-Bruce Herman: Painter of violent opposites

"The whole natural world, in all its glory and pain, needs redemption that will bring shalom. The world isn't divided into a sacred realm and a secular realm, with redemptive activity confined to the sacred zone. The whole world belongs to God, the whole world has fallen, and so the whole world needs to be redeemed--every last person, place, organization, and program; all 'rocks and trees and skies and seas'; in fact, "every square inch,' as Abraham Kuyper said. The whole creation is a 'theater for the mighty works of God,' first in creation and then in re-creation."

--Cornelis Plantinga - Engaging God's World (p. 96)"
-The Native Tourist

"But "Leaf by Niggle" is also about Tolkien's profoundly religious philosophy of Creation and Sub-creation. True Creation is the exclusive province of God, and those who aspire to Creation can only make echoes (good) or mockeries (evil) of truth. The Sub-creation of works that echo the true creations of God is one way that mortals honor God.

...
Niggle's yearnings after truth and beauty (God's creations) are echoed in his great painting; after death, Niggle is rewarded with the realization (the making-real) of his yearning. Or, if you prefer, Niggle's Tree always existed -- he simply echoed it in his art."

-Various Tolkien Fans on Leaf By Niggle (Tolkien's semi-autobiographical short story which deals with the relation of ethics and aethetics, as well as creation and subcreation.)

digital art and the return to a pre-modern notion of art

Self-Portrait by Arseny Gutov


This is an in-progress ramble I'm still rambling on.

From what I've seen the digital art communities like CGtalk.com and Conceptart.org, the digital art movement seems to return a return to 4 things that the 20th century art left to the past:

Story, Work, Science, and Realism

Story
A return to art as primarily storytelling. Through-out history artist were visual storytellers, they illustrated stories from sacred texts, mythology, history and literature. Then suddenly in the 20th century, artist who continued this tradition were named, in a diminutive tone, mere illustrators. (As if Michaelangelo and Rembrandt were not) This is related to the 20th century notion that of Art with a capital A, and the Artist who was someone above the tasteless masses, and who somehow didn't take commissions. In the digital art world (partly because of it's close ties to illustration, concept art for the entertainment industry, and film) we see a return to storytelling. The images that fill books like Expose and win awards at CGtalk are almost always telling a story and usually doing an excellent job of it. This is related to the return to realism, we live in the world of history, the story of stories.

Work
-Work/art/ craft

In the 20th century, art was elevated to Art, and so became something different then it really is, it was puffed up, self-serving, and introspective. It was too important to humble itself to tell a story, it refused to submit to the limits of visual reality. The artist was someone semi-divine, a Creator, not tolkien's sub-creator who must work with the already existing creation (story, nature, and annoying neighbors). And so the endless quest for originality. Artist of previous generations copied their masters and sought fidelity to the visual universe around them. Before the 20th century the artist was a workman, a craftsman, a paid laborer. True originality comes through limitation, true leadership is servanthood.

Digital art is a return to this. Jonathan Hardesty, now a classical non-digital painter, started his education in this atmosphere at conceptart.org. After studying under some tradition classical painters he can trace his artistic heritage back to Leonardo da Vince. This isn't arrogance, it's true humility.



Science
A return to acknowledging the scientific side of art, and using art to advance science,
-Topology Research
-Anatomy
-medical illustration

the empirical world, which leads to realism

Realism
...


www.cgtalk.com
www.conceptart.com
www.goodbrush.com
www.dusso.com

Kierkegaard on seeing nature as art

"The Reason I cannot really say that I positively enjoy nature is that I do not quite realize what it is that I enjoy. A work of art, on the other hand, I can grasp, I can—if I may put it this way—find that Archimedean point, and as soon as I have found it, everything is readily clear for me. Then I am able to pursue this one main idea and see how all the details serve to illuminate it. I see the author’s whole individuality as if it were the sea, in which every single detail is reflected… The works of the deity are too great for me; I always get lost in the details. This is the reason, too, why people’s exclamations on observing nature: It’s lovely, tremendous, etc.—are so frivolous. They are all too anthropomorphic; they come to stop with the external, they are unable to express inwardness, depth."

-Søren Kierkegaard, Sept 11 1834 (Journals and Papers, Vol 1)

In modern times, I think surely this has to do with the loss of seeing the world as the free creation of God. Seeing it and knowing that it does not have to exist, and is held in existence by him. I have another post on this here, about the feeling of exploring a beautiful computer game vrs the real world.

Stranger than fiction.

After reading about a movie by that title last night, I was thinking about that today at work

Truth is stranger than fiction, because God is a better writer then man. Truth is stranger then fiction because God is has all Authority, and hence he is a better Author.

On a similar line, I was reading an article by Doug Wilson in an old Tabletalk (I borrowed some old ones from my grand-mother). The article is called 'Out of Nothing' into the Liturgy, he says:

"True "creaturely" creativity of any kind (aesthetic, liturgical,etc) must therefore come from acknowledging that God is the only one who is creative ex nihilo. Those who lose their lives for Christ's sake will find them. In the same, way those who abandon all hope of autonomous creativity amaze the world with their creativity. The one who is creative is the one who knows he cannot be."

That must be one of the reasons why Tolkien is so amazing. He starts out not as creator, but as sub-creator, knowing we can only "make still by the law in which were made" to quote his poem.

This also must be why so much modern art is so amazingly bad. It seeks to make ex nihilo. In visual art, it refuses to representational, and use the visual language that God made. In music, it refuses to submit to the order God created, wanting to create ex nihilo, all that is left is noise. (Reminds me of the two poets in Chesterton's the Man who was Thursday, the poet of order and the poet of chaos.) In architecture though, the modernist can work hard to make buildings look like their about to fall down, but thankfully they can't escape working around God's physical laws and landscape. Even if you try, you can't construct a deconstructivist building.

Back to the topic, the strangest truth that hit me today was that I'll be back at college station in about a week!

Girl in the Iron Shoes, illustration, and cg art

That is 'The Girl in the Iron Shoes' a digital painting by the great Chris Beatrice
It was based on the Fairy Tale the Enchanted Pig. Perfect Painting for a great story. Painted in Painter 8 (I use painter Classic, but there pretty much the same) He has a great gallery of Fairy-tale paintings here. Here is a very informative article by him on the making of this piece: (here)

I love illustration. 100 years of illustration has a great collection of classic book illustrations.

(warning, this is going to develop into a rant about modern perspectives on art)

It's always annoying to hear Modern Artists saying illustration isn't art. They always want to exclude Norman Rockwell, calling him a mere illustrator. But somehow want to include all the renaissance artists who painted (or 'illustrated') the Bible, or mythology. I think illustration and narrative Art recognizes that History is a story, indeed His Story (God's story), our lives are stories, and so people and places are inevitably going to be painted in the context of story. To try do disconnect them, is gnostic. It makes sense, though if you believe that history is not a story, but a collection of random events. Why paint people in story? There is no story.

Any way, one of the reasons I like, and am interested in CG art, Matte Painting and Concept Design, is that it very tied to story. One reason CG art has been tied to story because of it's use in the development and production Film and to a somewhat lesser extent video games. (Check out Dusso's matte painting) Also good art in these cirles is more tied to good craftsmanship and skill then merly to originality. Originality will flow from a mastery of the craft. This in a way recognizes God as the only original artist, and craftsmanship is simply learning to re-present his work. (Greg Wilber has interesting thoughts on this, that I don't entirly agree with) Also it has developed nearly independently from modern art theory taught in universities. Making it much more like classical art or natural art. Because CG Art developed with computers there is a much friendlier relationship between Art and Science (think Leonardo Da Vinci). Which is good, because there not that different. Only in modern times have they been in antithesis.

There has also been a revival of classical art in the traditional art world as well: www.artrenewal.com

This might be somewhat scatterbrained, but it's a start...