"...picking the subject matter." There's the rub. I go ages between projects, looking for subject matter. I look everywhere. An artist friend told me the trouble with me is that I see too much (can't help it, I'm a retired cop). I'm tormented by the myriad of images... but I can't pick one, none speak to me, none stirs my soul.
Ayn Rand says: "It is an artist's sense of life that controls and integrates his work, directing the innumerable choices he has to make, from the choice of subject to the subtlest details of style."
I think the point is: one may look "without" for subject matter, but one needs to look "within" for it's interpretation. After all, art is but man's (the artist's) interpretation of our physical and spiritual world. It's not what we see, but how we see it that matters... our own unique version of reality. Josh (artmetal member) once said "Where one sees only scrap, I see a birds wing, a body, a claw or an eye of an animal."
"Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value judgments. Man's profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires knowledge by means of abstractions into his immediate, perceptual awareness. Art fulfills this need: by means of a selective re-creation, it concretizes man's fundamental view of himself and of existence." - Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto (1969)
Paula,"...picking the
Paula,
"...picking the subject matter." There's the rub. I go ages between projects, looking for subject matter. I look everywhere. An artist friend told me the trouble with me is that I see too much (can't help it, I'm a retired cop). I'm tormented by the myriad of images... but I can't pick one, none speak to me, none stirs my soul.
Ayn Rand says: "It is an artist's sense of life that controls and integrates his work, directing the innumerable choices he has to make, from the choice of subject to the subtlest details of style."
I think the point is: one may look "without" for subject matter, but one needs to look "within" for it's interpretation. After all, art is but man's (the artist's) interpretation of our physical and spiritual world. It's not what we see, but how we see it that matters... our own unique version of reality. Josh (artmetal member) once said "Where one sees only scrap, I see a birds wing, a body, a claw or an eye of an animal."
"Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value judgments. Man's profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires knowledge by means of abstractions into his immediate, perceptual awareness. Art fulfills this need: by means of a selective re-creation, it concretizes man's fundamental view of himself and of existence." - Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto (1969)
J.R.