ART & ORGANISM

IDEALISM versus REALISM

notes

.      Here is the point of view from Ryno Snart’s art blog: He said,

“Inside every artist, there is an inner conflict between the ideal and the real. We either paint the ideal woman or this specific woman; the ideal horse or this specific horse; the ideal setting or this specific setting.

Any picture done from imagination is necessarily “ideal”, so it is essentially when we work from life, that the question of realism or idealisation arises. The artist paints a model in Victorian dress, relaxing in a chair. Right next to her, balanced on a box, is an electrical heater. Do you paint the heater, or ignore it?

As an artist, I am concerned, even obsessed with two things, beauty and truth. Also I love working from life, as much as I do working from imagination. The question, as always, is what is truth? In the case of our Victorian model, there are two truths, documentary truth and narrative truth. When we tell a story, nobody is concerned with factual truth, rather, we look for a consistency, an inner and inescapable logic with a set of laws as inviolable as nature’s.”    It is worth reading the rest at  https://rynoswart.wordpress.com/2010/09/26/ideal-v-real/