Category Archives: painting

Damien Hirst: Practice Makes Perfect

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“Anyone can be like Rembrandt. I don’t think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius. It’s about freedom and guts. It’s about looking. It can be learnt. That’s the great thing about art. Anybody can do it if you just believe. With practice you can make great paintings.”

The artist poses in front of his latest show

The Telegraph reports that Hirst: “made the comments as he defended himself from critics of his latest exhibition at the Wallace Collection in London, which has been described as “an embarrassment” and “shockingly bad”. He admitted he had a long way to go before equalling the 17th century Dutch master, but dismissed the idea that Rembrandt was a genius and claimed that, with practice, he could learn to paint like him.”

While I might not entirely disagree with Hirst’s comment, it’s hilarious that he is getting defensive now. Apparently putting animals in formaldehyde for ridiculous amounts of money required no comment. He really branched out with his work, and kudos to him for taking that kind of risk. At the same time his idealism- anybody can be a great painter if they just believe- isn’t working here, at least according to the critics. Maybe he needs more practice?

Your newly-humbled blogger

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I am a writer. Often, when I’m in a group of artists and I identify myself that way, they tell me that makes me an artist. I can be in the club. And it’s not that I don’t agree. But I realized that I really have no idea how you guys do what you do, and I went out and bought some acrylic paints and brushes.

This is a long-delayed gratification. I’ve always wanted to try painting, but it’s an expensive thing to try. So I bought red, yellow, blue, raw umber, and white and came home to try painting on cardboard. I thought it wasn’t such an expensive thing. Until I tried to paint and realized that a) I had no idea what I was doing and b) what I was doing absolutely sucked. That is when it seemed like a waste of money.

I’m not throwing in the paint just yet. Quite the contrary. I instead bought gel medium and better brushes and a pad of canvas. I also borrowed a book on acrylics from a friend. I’m not hopeful that anything great will come of it; I enjoy just messing around with the colors.

But I have gained something: greater respect for artists and a dose of personal humility. The respect thing clearly comes from the experience of how hard it is to apply paint to canvas (or cardboard) in the most basic way. As to the second quality, I’ve never been that person to walk around a museum muttering “I could do that.” Yet I do basically saunter around judging the art I see to be good or bad, and–god help me–I couldn’t do the worst of it. Well, maybe I could do the worst of it if I tried really, really hard.

So there you have it, a newly-humbled art blogger. Writer.

Meaty Topics: Bacon Retrospective at the Met

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Head III, 1949
After some anticipation and debate about whether he was that good, I went to see the Frances Bacon exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. First answer, yes! He’s that good. What he does in terms of color and composition in his better works is great.

Three Figures in a Room, 1964

All Bacon’s paintings are visually arresting, and tend to remain interesting beyond any initial shock value. Maybe one’s value range for horror shrinks when you go into room after room of screaming popes, carcasses, and melting face portraits because I ceased thinking about the subject matter with revulsion. Well, a few still jolted me. Some of the pictures (often his more well-known pieces) left me flat. Perhaps it’s something about the nature of his paintings: that when one works, it really gets you, but when it fails and leaves you flat, you have to struggle to see why those flat planes of garish color, those undrawn fragments whose only lines entrap people, and that vacuous, repetitive sense of horror could ever move someone.

Head VI, 1949

In the middle of the exhibition, I wondered if Francis Bacon could paint. The obvious answer is yes, but it’s also a less obvious answer when you look at his beginnings. Bacon was self-taught, and he worked with a lot of art historical images. Taking images like Velasquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, Bacon ripped apart and painted these images again and again. And he kept doing ‘studies’ as if he was merely practicing. I rather think he was. He said later in his life that he wished he hadn’t wasted so much of his youth in gaming and drinking because it had kept him from his painting. When I got to the last room of the chronological exhibition, I saw what he meant. Here were some beautiful works. Paintings that made me stop in my tracks.

Jet of Water, 1988

In his later paintings, done when the artist was in his 80s, you still see the amazing use of color with no fear and more balance that you might suspect. His composition, which for the most part had always been sophisticated–if only because he was aping the greats to get it–becomes sparser, apparently influenced by Modernism. In some ways, Bacon was both an early and a late bloomer. He was talented and always created stunning works in a visual vocabulary distinctly his own (perhaps his distinctiveness came not only from a unique outlook but a self-created technique) yet later he grew into a really accomplished painter as well.

Blood on Pavement, 1988