Art Rant Timeout
Granted, my painting experience, limited in any case to school, is primarily with watercolors and secondarily with acrylics (which my professors, anyway, said were harder than oils). And, Putney deserves a great deal of credit for understanding that drawing---and painting---are skills, and therefore available to anyone willing to practice, since it's been my experience that 9 out of 10 americans---or more---fail to grasp this fundamental. (Anyone wishing to learn how to draw, by the way, is directed to that excellent teach yourself publication, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards)However. Kimball already seems to accept that he can draw, and paint with watercolors. Especially before Delacroix came along, there was no argument that drawing wasn't the absolute foundation of painting. Once the student masters anatomical and perspective drawing, the rest of the techniques are generally considered to fall into place. In fact, it's still more or less a truism that drawing is the foundation of painting. This doesn't mean that Kimball couldn't have profound doubts about his abilities---just that they probably shouldn't've been based on his difficulties learning to use oils. (I would've been a little more sympathetic to the idea if he didn't consider himself competent with the watercolors, but so far as I could tell, he---and Putney---seemed to think he was.)
As I said, Putney deserves real credit for delineating craft, or execution, from art, or design. (Or aesthetic, if you prefer, but I'm trying to limit the artspeak here.) Confusion between the two is a very common misconception. Granted you don't achieve the sheer wonderful technical brilliance with paint of a Rembrandt in a day---with luck, you keep learning cute little technical tricks of the trade for the rest of your life. But it is the step from inchoate emotion, or memory, or visual reference, to the idea that takes years to master and separates the competent from the great---not learning to use the tools. Transferring the idea to paper is a demand of technique, and though it looks magical to outsiders, the hard work has already been done.
And what does this have to do with the novel? Well, Kimball simultaneously achieved the kind of aesthetic, idea or what have you that takes most artists (even great ones) years of experimentation to master, yet could barely control the paints, which generally comes pretty early on in the career, and---this is the crucial point here---had no faith from his previous experience with other media, during which he presumeably developed that aesthetic that he would develop the technique for oils. This contradiction really, really bothered me, because I was forced to make one of two assumptions: either Kimball had absolutely rotten, dead technique (and there have been some very famous artists who fall into this category---Magritte comes to mind) ---though that's not very likely, since he does finally learn, or he was a rotten artist, despite everyone else's opinion.
My difficulties were compounded by the historical element. Kimball's strongest pieces happen to be based upon a well known body of work that, despite my relatively sketchy knowledge of history, nevertheless I strongly suspected (and a visit to Canaday's Mainstreams of Modern Art confirmed) would have been very unlikely to have been accepted by the public at that time. The real artist never showed this stuff to anyone, certainly didn't make engravings for public sale, and it fact the series was only discovered after the artist's death. While I had no difficulty believing that Kimball had experiences or emotional makeup to create such pieces, I felt a more realistic public reaction would have been rejecting. (And, though I recently read that authors absolutely hate having their books rewritten by wannabe reviewers, I think such public dismay might have heightened the importance of Rebecca's encouragement.)
Okay, so the last few paragraphs have been a giant nit. I admit it. But it seemed to be a fairly obvious one. There are some other ways Putney might have got around the problem, such as having Rebecca emphasize more strongly the power of his drawings.
Besides what I perceived to be slightly off kilter motivations, my other major difficulties, again of an arty nature, have to do with the theories of the era. I have to admit that I felt smug that I guessed the painters upon whom Kimball and Seaton's styles were based, though I grant you anyone with a modicum of familiarty with European art history (yeah, I mean the freshman survey course) during the early 1800s could easily duplicate my guesses. I positively cringed during the scenes when Kimball explicated what he thought was the meaning of Seaton's paintings when they first met. It was Artspeak at its worst, and though artists speak it all the time, I like to think that most (of the good ones, anyway) are conscious that they're spouting claptrap. Kimball struck me as awfully earnest, there, which I suppose was acceptable, since he's a beginner, but Seaton shouldn've known better---surely his ego wasn't that monstrous.
Though the technique appears to be relatively well researched (Paint bladders, huh? I thought they they just mixed up the vehicle and pigment as needed, until tubes were invented, about the time the Impressionists started painting outdoors---they had the technology, you see, but it makes sense to have something intermediate between true tubes and spending 2 hours grinding paints every morning---well, gee) I wish the theory behind the movements of the times had been incorporated a little more carefully. Because Seaton was based so firmly upon a famous neoclassicist, I had troubles with him painting in the Romantic manner, likewise, I doubt very much Kimball's horrific paintings of war would have been successfully hung in the Royal Academy Exhibition, because those bodies tended to be very staid.
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Sylvus Tarn Last modified: Fri Sep 11 11:24:30 EDT 1998
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