What is Art to You?

Art, it’s one of those funny things in our society, such as music, that we can’t exactly explain. It is a way to communicate and express ourselves or tell a story.

It probably all started with those stick men in the cave drawings we all hear about, but let’s skip forward in time to the time around the romantic period. The times of Mozart or the renaissance paintings with amazing perspective and life like representations. For that’s where all art has evolved from.

People have always enjoyed creating art, with many famous art schools and artists throughout history. If we quickly skip through these we see trends change from the perfect perspective to movements such as Cubism with Picasso as one of the best known artists.  Also Dali with his weird distorted realities of the surrealist movement.

Art is always evolving, Influence by the events of the time, such as Dada was inspired by world war two.  It was an anti-art movement intended to shock and when against the preconceived ideas of the civilised world.  But its downfall came as it became recognised as an art movement.

Now we are back in the present time. Art and the modernist movement are the latest event of the art world. No specific trend runs through the art scene, we have to decide for ourselves what we consider art.  In a time when someone can paint a single black dot and sell it for thousands, is this really art?

As one of the members of the only Churchlands TEE (Last year Top level course) art class, of only ten members, it amazes me the little amount people know about this subject. The shear mass of work this subject takes is phenomenal. People look through your sketch book commenting; “Oh how lovely I would do art if I could draw like that!”  It makes me wonder if they could, because although being good at drawing May help, the present day art course is hell.

Now you may think I am exaggeration but I put less time into my Cham and Physics classes and still get better results!  It’s not just me either, there are only three people in art getting better marks than me and that’s because they are insane.  The art course is all about time, and how much of it you put in. You could be the most amazing painter in the world and still fail this course. The combination of the stress to keep an accurate diary of ideas, to be inspired the second you are presented with a project and to have an amazing knowledge of the history and right vocabulary needed. To have all these and combine them in just the right way with a little natural talent makes this course so very unique to all the others I have experienced.

If you come across one of us quirky and sometimes delusional people the day a project us due, I can guarantee none of us had got tho bed before two in the morning. Most of us will be running on coffee, the high after a long time without sleep or still intoxicated with the disgusting fumes of turps and oil paints. As an organised person I must say this last minute rush for completion is not because of bad time management. As said by Leonardo da Vinci: “art is never finished, only abandoned” and It is this that keeps us franticly working until the deadline, until we must finally abandon our work.

This is not the way art should be done; we all know the amazing diary’s that recount our working processes are artificial and cheesy. The conditions we are forced to work with are not realistic and so block inspiration, leaving us generally unhappy with our work. But this also brings us to the issue of how we would then mark this work produced? And overall back to the question of what is art? Can we really set criteria to judge the creativity and emotions displayed through paint and other media? Each piece of work is just as individual as the person who made it. We should not be able to put a mark on how good we think it is. For art, like many other visual forms of communication, presents a different meaning to everyone lucky enough to view it. Something needs to change, this is not the way we should be educating young artists. The art world is already hard enough to break into, why make it harder?

And to help recognise some amazing art works here on DA i would like to share with you some of my favourites.

Portraits:
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Animals:
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Angel:
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Landscape:
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Twilight:
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Horse:
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Vampire:
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Nature:


Fairy:
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Other: