Art and Taste Part 2

What to do with the potato chips

They Came From Far Away is a piece I made last winter, inspired by the visit of a rare bird, and with that many bird watchers, to our yard.

Note: An exhibition I recently curated has me thinking about what it means to be an artist. To me, it’s definitely more than being able to make a painting or drawing. It’s also about having a point of view, digging deep, and living in the questions.

In my last post, I used the metaphor of potato chips to represent more superficial ways we try and grow our taste in art, and by that I’m mostly referring to scrolling social media.

Sometime around 2015/2016, I noticed a new trend in the painting courses I taught. Students would come to me with phones in hand, and say, “I’d like to paint something like this,” and then they would show a painting posted by an artist on Instagram or Pinterest.

At first, I had no idea what to do with this because I didn’t have anything to compare it to from my own student experience.

The internet was in its early years and blogs weren’t even a thing yet. We looked at art in books and magazines and, though we actively studied the work of other artists, by and large, we didn’t seek to copy them. We wanted to express our own things, in our own ways. Even though that meant struggling, floundering, and messing up a lot. In some ways the mess became the point.

These past ten years or so, certain viral painting trends have had firm hold, but it seems that could finally be shifting with the influx of AI. Anyhow, when these Pinterest and Instagram photos came my way, I would try to explain that one of the objectives of assignments given in a college-level painting class was to help students learn how to come up with their own ideas.

Which, of course, is easier said than done. Idea development and furthermore, developing one’s unique, visual voice takes time. The best things always do.

Still, social media is a tidal wave much more powerful than my personal pet peeves and good teachers adapt, so I started trying to figure out ways to work with these requests rather than push against them.

Here’s how I started guiding students, and how I think those potato chips (social media posts) can help us get at defining our aesthetic taste (but they don’t replace concentrated study and looking at art in person!).

Analyze the Art

What is it about this work that you are drawn to? Is it the color, contrast, composition, subject matter?

80% of the time it is the color palette. So we’ll use that for this example.

Let’s drill down a bit deeper. How would you describe the colors used? Are they light and bright, soft, or tonal and moody?

Really study what the artist is doing with color. It’s probably more complex than it looks. If the palette is light and bright, for instance, there are possibly some tonal colors used that we don’t really notice but are important to creating the overall effect?

How can you apply some of what you’ve observed in this artist’s use of color in your own work, but in ways that make it unique and truly yours?

This might mean using a similar palette but with a completely different type of subject matter, for example.

Zoom Out

Look at the saved albums in your social media files: the ones with your favorite art images. Study the work you’ve saved by different artists and make note of the common denominators.

They are there, I promise, and will help give you a direction to follow.

By focusing on the overlapping things you like in multiple artists' work, you will start to get a broader sense of your taste and preferences in art. Then you can start thinking about which of those things you might want to apply to your own work.

Here’s the truth:

Whenever we try to copy another artist’s work, it shows in the work. It’s not as good. It will never be as good as the original. This is one of the reasons I’m never hesitant to share a lot of details about how I make the things I make. It’s taken me many years to develop this visual voice and no one else can see directly into my mind so I know the work can’t really be copied.

After many years of doing the work to figure out what my aesthetic taste is, I’m also confident that I can always come up with new ideas.

The long road is worth it.