Making things look like other things.

Animation and Painting are my two main activities in art, animation i havent done in a while, but i'll get back to it soon enough, things are brewing.

I guess most art is, although often very subtly (like cinema or dance), about making things look or seem like other things. But, maybe it's a coincidence, but the two main things i do are by their nature possibly the most open about that process of making things look like other things. Paint and plasticine, both have very specific characteristics of their own, both rely a lot on colours. Paint is about mimicking what something looks like, or in the case of Magritte, exposing that illusion. Claymation is about making things move and act like other things, making a ball of clay portray some kind of character.

Its on my mind because i saw these paintings by Watteau and Chardin, who i really love, and they were satirical showing an ape painting, sculpting, and antiquarian..ing. As if to say artists who only look and copy are monkeys, monkey see monkey do. But it just struck me that everything starts with reality, wherever it digresses to. Or starts with our view of it, although maybe its a cliche that we all view the world in our own way. I mean, yes everything that happens to us is viewed at through our past experiences and memories. But a leaf or a tree, thats the same for me as for you, maybe i notice more or less or different things about it to you though. But its a mistake, i believe, to assume that Munch or Bonnard or Van Gogh or Picasso or Kirchner actually saw the world how they painted it. To borrow from a Chardin quote, they painted not with colours, but with feeling. They were, expressionists, as all good painters are. Maybe that's what Chardin and Watteau were getting at, that you don't just depict the world, you depict it in your own specific way, filtered through your head. In which case the ape paintings are only half the argument.

Well now i've sort of cleared that up for myself this whole post seems a bit pointless now..

All art is taking something from life, whether it be an image (i won't say surface, cus it's all surface), a sound, a feeling, an idea, an emotion, a dream, a peach, a movement, whatever the fuck it is, and transforming it into something else, via you. It's like following the route of light, from its source, bouncing off different things, and fading out or being kept enclosed, only you never actually see the light itself, just what it bounces off. I think i've lost myself with that analogy. Here's some paintings that are 'for you'-

It's not just about that.

Am also very much in love with that word Pentimento, which was commented on the last post. It seems to sum up so much more than painting.