Art And Artists by Dr. Peter S. Ruckman

Author:Dr. Peter S. Ruckman [Ruckman, Dr. Peter S.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: BB Bookstore
Published: 2011-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Cowardice versus Quality

For a moment, let us pretend that we can paint (or at least want to paint) something; something besides our mouths, eyes, toenails, or a storage room. Our “options” are without limit, literally. You could paint any of nine (or ten) different school’s ways of handling a subject; you could choose any subject: organic or inorganic, human or non-human, objective or nonobjective, real or unreal, actual or imaginary, historical or mythological, from 6,000 years of man’s life on earth. That would include what men THOUGHT and IMAGINED during that time.

This means that you can attempt—whether you have the forms or figures in your imagination or not—to paint a landscape somewhere in North or South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Japan, Australia, Great Britain, the “Indies,” etc., at any one of four different times of day, from four different “levels,” choosing to reproduce anywhere from one-fourth of a mile to twenty-five miles of pictorial space. One might say that such alternatives offer the possibility of a minimal 800,000 paintings, with no two alike. But if you added houses, or buildings, to this landscape (or, say, some animals, cars, trains, etc.) you would have at least another 200,000 paintings. Now double this number if you are going to paint “seascapes.” Double it again if you decide to do some “still lifes.” You now have 1,400,000 different paintings. But if you added the possible portraits you could paint (the world now has about 5,500,000,000 people in it), at least one out of ten could be different, so you would add 5,500,000 to your 1,400,000. But portraits can be painted from a left or right profile, a three-quarters view, or full front face: triple the 5,000,000. You now have 17,500,000 possibilities.

But I haven’t begun, for you can take any one of the world’s 500,000,000 adults (men and women) and paint each one of them at the ages of 20, 45, and 70, and then dress them up in the garb of an Egyptian slave (2000 B.C.), or a Sumerian scribe (2000 B.C.), or a Jewish priest in 1500 B.C., or a Hittite warrior, or an Oriental potentate, a Barbary Coast pirate, an English judge, a courtesan of Louis XIV, a Cavalry officer in Napoleon’s army, a housemaid for an English nobleman, a chimney-sweep in Germany, a guerrilla fighter in the Philippines, an Army nurse in World War I, a South American gaucho, a musician in the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, a news boy on the street, a prima donna in the opera, an Iowa farmer, a boxer or wrestler, a Madison Avenue executive, a seamstress, a pearl diver in the Gilbert Islands, a Civil War drummer, a Mafioso from Palermo, a high caste Hindu woman, etc. ONE MALE FIGURE, painted three times (at, say, the ages of 20, 40, and 70) would supply you with enough work to keep you busy for eighty years, painting two pictures a week.

One glance will show you that the average “artist” would never tackle such a job.

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