In Which Vincent...

Heyo!

You can call me Jenna or Vince (both are part of my name). Feel free to follow, ask, submit, whatever.

I do post about causes and human rights. I'm plenty open to discussion, however, I won't tolerate rudeness or hate. Don't bother sending in if that's the case

glumshoe

Cute barista was talking to me about Star Trek and when my hot coffee spilled out over my hands due to a malformed lid, I didn’t want to interrupt the conversation and ignored it. I just stood there talking with my skin burning until she asked, “….Don’t you want to put your hands under cold water?”

Yes… yes I do.

glumshoe

This is like the time when this guy was watching Avatar: The Last Airbender in the student lounge at 3 AM. He invited me to watch it with him, but as I walked over I ripped a massive gash in my leg on the side of the table and just… turned so he couldn’t see the blood while I stood and watched the end of the episode with him, because I didn’t want to walk out of the good conversation we were having.

slinkanora

You… have very little drive for survival.

glumshoe

I mean… I’d argue with you, but one time I passed out and had convulsions from an intramuscular injection. I didn’t know what was happening, but I felt Very Very Bad and crawled out of my room to look for my housemate. The only person home was my friend Kate, but she was taking a bubble bath and I didn’t want to interrupt her relaxation time. I lay down on the carpet outside the bathroom and said, “When you’re done in there, I may need your help with a medical issue.” She was of course very alarmed and started to rush out to help me, but I tried to convince her to take her time and finish her bath first.

I definitely thought I was dying but, to my addled brain, it seemed really rude to inconvenience her with a medical emergency. (I was fine.)

jordanparrished

So somebody on my Facebook posted this. And I’ve seen sooooo many memes like it. Images of a canvas with nothing but a slash cut into it, or a giant blurry square of color, or a black circle on a white canvas. There are always hundreds of comments about how anyone could do that and it isn’t really art, or stories of the time someone dropped a glove on the floor of a museum and people started discussing the meaning of the piece, assuming it was an abstract found-objects type of sculpture.

The painting on the left is a bay or lake or harbor with mountains in the background and some people going about their day in the foreground. It’s very pretty and it is skillfully painted. It’s a nice piece of art. It’s also just a landscape. I don’t recognize a signature style, the subject matter is far too common to narrow it down. I have no idea who painted that image.

The painting on the right I recognized immediately. When I was studying abstraction and non-representational art, I didn’t study this painter in depth, but I remember the day we learned about him and specifically about this series of paintings. His name was Ad Reinhart, and this is one painting from a series he called the ultimate paintings. (Not ultimate as in the best, but ultimate as in last.)

The day that my art history teacher showed us Ad Reinhart’s paintings, one guy in the class scoffed and made a comment that it was a scam, that Reinhart had slapped some black paint on the canvas and pretentious people who wanted to look smart gave him money for it. My teacher shut him down immediately. She told him that this is not a canvas that someone just painted black. It isn’t easy to tell from this photo, but there are groups of color, usually squares of very very very dark blue or red or green or brown. They are so dark that, if you saw them on their own, you would call each of them black. But when they are side by side their differences are apparent. Initially you stare at the piece thinking that THAT corner of the canvas is TRUE black. Then you begin to wonder if it is a deep green that only appears black because the area next to it is a deep, deep red. Or perhaps the “blue” is the true black and that red is actually brown. Or perhaps the blue is violet and the color next to it is the true black. The piece challenges the viewer’s perception. By the time you move on to the next painting, you’re left to wonder if maybe there have been other instances in which you believe something to be true but your perception is warped by some outside factor. And then you wonder if ANY of the colors were truly black. How can anything be cut and dry, black and white, when even black itself isn’t as absolute as you thought it was?

People need to understand that not all art is about portraying a realistic image, and that technical skills (like the ability to paint a scene that looks as though it may have been photographed) are not the only kind of artistic skills. Some art is meant to be pretty or look like something. Other art is meant to carry a message or an idea, to provoke thought.

Reinhart’s art is utterly genius.

“But anyone could have done that! It doesn’t take any special skill! I could have done that!”

Ok. Maybe you could have. But you didn’t.

Give abstract art some respect. It’s more important than you realize.

sonoci

I remember having a conversation with some family and family friends where they were talking about how they didn’t “get” some art. And they specifically brought up “I saw this ladder with a bucket on it and that was it, that was the ‘art’”

And my response was “In other words it did its job. You don’t remember any of the other ‘actual’ pieces of art you saw, but you remember that ladder, YEARS later. It left an impression on you. It succeeded.”