Time Painted: Spring 2010
Nothing much today, just a lovely picture of lotus.
This was drawn during the Chinese Painting Class I took. That’s why there are characters in the corner. The teacher gave us a set of characters that had the same approximate sound as our names to write on our assignments.
For this piece, the composition wasn’t original. We were assigned a piece of art that vaguely looked like this and told to copy it. Since art is very individual, we all had different results, none all that close to the original.
This sort of thing is apparently pretty common in Chinese art classes. And it used to be common in Western ones, too. A lot of the really famous painters got their start copying the art of the masters to figure out what tricks they used.
There’s still some remnants of it in US art classes. The occasional rare assignment to sketch another person’s art when we go on museum field trips and the like. But it’s nowhere near the months-long deliberate study of a single art piece that used to happen.
It’s a reaction to the rather strict copyright rules of the modern day. Even tribute pieces get looked at askew.
And it’s actually hurting art teaching. Most artists get started by seeing art they really like and copying it, and then enjoying it enough to keep at it while picking up the skills they need for original compositions. That’s why fanart is so popular, both to make and to look at. It’s both entertaining and educational. It’s really too bad it exists in such a gray area legally.
Modern art classes lost a lot of focus when they dropped that. It meant a switch from mastery of one piece to dabbling around looking at many pieces, learning what you can without copying more than a little here and there. Like this piece, where all I copied was the composition.
It’s no wonder I mostly dabble in various art forms, rather than focus on one and actually master it…
