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I have some skin in this game. I'd say that painting is not difficult at all. Depending on your preferred style it can be as easy as literally throwing random pigments on whatever surface you prefer to target.
Painting (or drawing) to some degree of visual similarity requires practice, so some effort is needed. You have to "rewire" some muscle-vision-brain coordination. It will be perceived as hard only because a) you will know how easy it is to snap a photo and apply filters/photoshop (or, propmt an AI), and b) because you will be your own worst critic. Others will see you progress quite fast if only you do the training part.
What is hard about it, really hard, is making a living from it. Or, even getting small change out of it. Most often, if you've not been to the right schools and intermingled with the right people in the right way at the right times (with an added very big portion of sheer luck) you are not going to make it, ever. Even then, it is unlikely. Regardless of your talent.
Talent does not bubble up like you would imagine. You can not just build a better mousetrap and they will come. This is a very controlled market, and also one where the different niches are working in very different ways. Even in very different ways from other markets you would know about.
It's not sour grapes, it's just a fact that for every art market niche there are only a very small amount of people able to gain a foothold while there are thousands or tens of thousands that may have an equal amount of skill/talent but these people just does not make it.
> This is a very controlled market, and also one where the different niches are working in very different ways. Even in very different ways from other markets you would know about.
Are you talking about making "art"? Because if you don't neccessarily want to make "art", but just paint paintings ordinary people will enjoy, the market is not controlled at all. The skill level required is very high, but if you can product museum-quality non-abstract paintings of subjects people are interested in (e.g. pastoral landscapes, or landscapes of the US South West), then you can probably sell them at non-negligible prices - a couple hundreds to even a couple thousands dollars a piece.
The task is difficult, because there's so much competition that your work needs to really stand out, so that people will pay $1000 for it, instead of say paying $100 for painting done with good, but not great technique.
I guess it’s about the ”different markets”. I know the nordic art scene a bit and it looks like it’s hard market for ”good artists” trying to sell quality art as in order to ”qualify” for the scene there is a limited amount of gatekeepers and it’s not about skill for sure. The most talented artist I personally know retrained as doctor because art market was just too hard (this should tell something about the talent level - his art was impeccable and regarding his other qualities just choosing to go to medical school - into which many people try to get into for years - displays his other skill levels). So high end - it’s about luck, connections and brand rather than skill.
If one chooses to operate in the non-gallery market, I’m sure it’s a bit easier. But also I guess this locks you out from the high-end prestige art market. Because - you know - selling to the plebs is so disqualifying (the latter part is my own inference and if some people know better please do counter me).
> not difficult at all
Replying to my own comment only to admit that it is fairly easy to give yourself a task (ie. a problem to solve through the medium of painting) that will be perceived as hard, or even extremely hard. I do not negate the difficulty of solving creative puzzles.
You will experience that your ability to subject yourself to difficult problems will improve with time. That is, you will become better at what you do. This does not in any way correlate with creative style. There will be quite hard problems in non-figurative painting just like there will be in painting visually identifiable stuff.
The upside is that problems that were once considered complicated may not continue to be so. And, that you are your own employer, and you decide the when, how, or "if at all" of the solving.
This sounds similar in some ways to the startup/VC ecosystem - with enough practice you can produce something marketable, but with out the right connections, it's probably going to go nowhere, and even then there's no guarantee.
Robert Hughes was a real treasure. His archive is worth exploring if only for his honesty and no bullshit approach. He was incredibly well informed and erudite.
His book “The Shock of the New” is a landmark to this day for anyone interested in getting a perspective on how modern art, culture, and western humanity intersect and wind through history. The BBC made a TV version he narrated in the 1980’s that’s very good too - about 7 hours of content. You can find it on YouTube and you don’t need to be an art enthusiast or even too knowledgeable about the subject to appreciate it.
This seems to be about how making a living as a painter is difficult.
I've often thought that drawing or painting is difficult for ego reasons. Few things demonstrate my incompetence to myself better than failing to draw something. There is nothing I aspire to do that would be more uncomfortable than drawing or painting a self portrait. For these reasons, I've often thought about trying, but I'm scared.
Learning some ability to draw and paint takes roughly the same amount of persistence as learning to write. That is, you have to recall what a struggle it was to hold the pencil and make a steady mark from the wrist...and then apply that to the kinds of marks you make for drawing, which can be longer, more varied, and use a different grasp on the tool.
And then you also have to learn some "shape literacy" if you want to control how you see things. This is likewise comparable to learning to read in that there are ways of breaking down images to understand them as "letter", "word", and "sentence".
When we know how to write but not to draw, we draw like we write, using motions from the wrist and observing things in terms of symbolic meaning - the human figure flattens out into a hand shape, an arm shape, an eye shape.
But there's very little mystery to "what do you do about that" - you grab a book of exercises like Keys to Drawing or Natural Way to Draw, and you try to see the object you want to study through the exercise. Because we recognize silhouettes first, and we make marks as lines first, contour drawing is a typical starting point for practicing both "seeing" and "doing", and that's something you can spend many months on just by itself.
If you want to force a designed result, rather than the result from your eye and hand, you start to apply technology, and that can mean a very old technology like using a grid and rulers(as old as the ancient Egyptians), or it can mean digital tools and tracing over photos.
This is accurate. Many people claim to be “bad” at art or music, but both can be learned by almost anyone up to a certain functional level in the same way you would learn a vocation. You won’t be Picasso or Hendrix, but you’ll have a level of competency to accomplish most tasks.
As an adult I learned to draw and to write legibly because—-to me—-those are valuable “intrinsic tools”.
I made sure my daughter received a foundational music education from a young age, and she can play several instruments with a high level of proficiency based on hours invested, not natural talent.
We often don’t value the arts the same way we do other practical skills, and to me, that’s a shame.
We need to value and develop arts pedagogy as well.
I was lucky enough to have art classes growing up but they were entirely wasted on me because there was almost no explicit/ systematic instruction.
Asking me to look out the window and paint a tree was about as productive as asking a kid to estimate how tall it was without teaching them any geometry or trigonometry.
Most people use feedback to draw: they keep on adding lines until they like what they see. Picasso, however, could draw with just a feed-forward network, i.e. a single stroke would do it ...
I basically got good enough at drawing to do simple thumbnails, storyboards, and concept art for the 3D art I actually enjoy making. I used to be better, but it was always a slog, and I quit. There's something different about working directly with objects rather than constructing them with lines on paper. But the ability to quickly iterate with primitives and cropped detail sketches on paper is hard to beat.
This probably relates in some way to why I prefer working with a MIDI roll and virtual instruments in a DAW over trying to learn a "real" instrument. Noodling on a pad controller locked to a scale leads to interesting melodies, but it's far from the end goal.
I've also recently noticed that we're surrounded by a massive amount of ambient artwork - from advertising, logos, artwork on products, book covers, magazines & newspapers, websites and funny memes.
I recently started looking for pictures to print out for my kids to colour in, and there are thousands online that people share.
So at any time there must be hundreds of thousands of people creating content of various degrees of quality all the time.
> You won’t be Picasso
This is a really interesting contrast with the comment from farther up:
>>> This seems to be about how making a living as a painter is difficult.
If we're contrasting those two concepts, Picasso seems to have been much better at painting-the-career than he was at painting-the-skill.
Excellent comment. I'm one of those people who always thought: "I can't draw". Now I understand that for me it is a matter of practice. I started with Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
crq-yml, I think I accidentally down voted your comment. I apologize for that. There doesn't seem to be a way for me to undo that.
Priit Pärn, a legendary cartoonist and animation director from Estonia [1], has used an excellent term, "mileage of the line". I DeepL-translated (with rough editing) a couple of excerpts from interviews he has given.
First excerpt:
Q: How is your inner self-critic working, are you satisfied with the results of your work?
PP: Yeah, I think I'm a very good drawer. One of the best.
Q: How long do you estimate the mileage of your line at the moment?
PP: For "Gabriella", I tried to calculate how many final frames I drew, about 10 000 to 15 000, 50 cm of line for one frame, so five to seven kilometres for one film. It's the kind of consistent drawing neccessary for an animator to keep his hands in. A beginner animator who is at the beginning of the road with the search for their own line and is making a film is forced to draw hundreds or thousands of drawings with the same rudimentary line. A cartoonist is not limited by his own predetermined rules, he can experiment and search. In most cases, one has reached a line of one's own by the age of about 35.
---
Another excerpt from another interview (rough translation again):
"It has come with decades that you can draw without any preparation in all sorts of angles and dynamic positions. And it also emerges from somewhere that you can draw in whichever way you want, but it's still your drawing. This requires a very high degree of thoughtful line mileage, which means you have to think while you're at a line."
(Priit Pärn is actually a trained biologist, so his way of reasoning is always very precise and synthetic, clearly influenced by an education in the natural sciences. Always a joy to read his interviews. Quite obviously, in addition to his views on the technical process of drawing, this level of analytical thinking also manifests in the hyper-multi-layered black humour and visual language of his animations [2, 3]. A national treasure for Estonia for sure.)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priit_P%C3%A4rn
2: A short animated commercial, 1988 Cannes Bronze Lion winner: https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=NkCuh8K4L8s
3: More stuff: https://invidious.protokolla.fi/playlist?list=PLeD_epa2UKjtx...
> This seems to be about how making a living as a painter is difficult.
Eh? It's a review of a biography of the impressionist painter Claude Monet (whose "almost [...] last written words were a shaky scribble in the autograph album of Paul Valéry’s daughter, Agathe: ‘All I can say is that painting is terribly difficult.’"), with some introductory remarks about severe corruption in the art scene ("that nexus of artist, dealer, critic and curator") which the author traces to the "critical mass" in that sector that arrived with the impressionists.
Well since you've identified it as a problem and the real consequence of failure is just to have to keep doing stuff until you're better at it... maybe just do it?
I get that's easier said than done, but as a random on the internets all I can do is encourage you to try- because simply becoming okay with failing at things is a useful skill.
So, as a rando of the internet, consider this a challenge/ encouragement: do it and fail, and learn to embrace the fail, for if you can learn to suck at stuff with grace, the world will open itself to you. :D
I say that as a person who really had embraced the suck: it's a valuable skill that you can learn just by being bad at stuff and paying attention to different aspects as you fail.
One method is to do quick sketches on bits of paper, and just mentally plan on throwing them away, regardless. It helps lift the subconscious weight of thinking someone else might see how bad it is, or that you've ruined some final product.
Resketching the same thing repeatedly helps too, just nit pick what you hated about the last iteration and try again.
I've been doing that often as I pick up art again. Early, I had started a portrait of my late dad but because I initially tried to make it good, I felt resistance to doing more out of fear of ruining what I worked so hard already for (which is fairly blocky and cartoonish anyway hah)
I'm good at drawing. You're exactly right. Making drawings that you care enough to put a sincere effort into, but won't mind throwing away after, is key.
When a pianist practices, they don't record every time. The nature of drawing is such that practice is intrinsically recorded, but it is better to treat it the way the pianist does. The only ones you keep are the important ones, the hundreds rest are throwaways just for the practice.
It's a cheeky-powerful feeling when I go out with newsprint and charcoal and draw in public at a museum or downtown then crumple it and toss it in a bin. People who notice are aghast because my work is pretty good. But I can just do it again.
A stroke of the brush does not guarantee art from the bristles, but you don't need to be talented to draw something. As with most skills, it can be learned.
i've taken mechanical design courses where we kept a sketch book and had to do a sketch-a-day kind of thing. it's something you'll just naturally improve at the more you do it
Though the article isn't about the act of painting, I just wanted to encourage anyone who wants to get into art to check out the Procreate app. It makes it so much easier and faster, though you don't end up with a "real" painting (this is an advantage sometimes).
Having an undo button makes "painting" much more fun!
Speaking from second hand experience, not having an undo button can be a lot of fun too because it can inspire you to paint something you hadn't intended to when you started out, or force you to try what you were doing in a very different way. What started as "mistakes" can end up being your favorite part of a painting.
That said, painters also have a lot of options for fixing errors including repainting over the whole canvas. The few painters I know often revise old works adding or removing elements months/years after they were first finished.
It seems like painting in general is a lot of fun "real" or otherwise, although personally I've never been any good at it, it's still usually a good time.
Honestly, I undo so much in Procreate I never get anything done. I'm best with it if I start with a rough in actual pencil, snap or scan it, then finish it in Procreate.
"There are no mistakes, just happy accidents"
- Bob Ross
> There, he employed six gardeners, one of whom had the job of dusting and washing the water lilies
This reminds me of a humorous book I saw in a museum gift shop once, supposedly about "wives of great painters." "Mrs. Matisse cleans the goldfish bowl" is the page that stuck in my mind.
Anyway, great article. I knew nothing about Monet, which is probably the way he wanted it.
Worth noting that this is by Julian Barnes, author of one of my favourite books The Noise of Time - among others.
I really enjoyed Tim's Vermeer (about how Tim painted a Vermeer):
The first half of this, about criticism and how it shapes art was fascinating.
To then go on and list canonized artists whose work will have unattainable prices is revolting. It's a bit of self referential irony.
The title, is a farce as well... Bob Ross is rolling over in his grave right now! Learn to paint, do it badly, or find its something you can do well. Buy what you like, locally, and hang it on the wall of your house.
It's HN, we all have those friends who think that what we do is magic, that we are some sort of tech priest class or wizards. It's a skill, some of us have a knack for it. Art is just the same, every one can few will be great, lots can be serviceable.
Now go make something!
Just to humans. Not to an AI.
I don't think AIs are particularly good at applying paint to a canvas using a brush. Maybe the word you were looking for was "printer"?
I think people will continue to value human-made paintings much like we still value human-played chess games.
One of the things I enjoy about doing a painting is that it doesn’t involve technology, just me, a canvas, and paint. Machines equipped with mechanical arms are no doubt going to soon be churning out fine painting after fine painting, but nevertheless, it’s an enjoyable human activity, made by humans for humans.
> One of the things I enjoy about doing a painting is that it doesn’t involve technology, just me, a canvas, and paint.
You would actually be surprised at how much actual technology there is in the canvas, paints, and brushes. Especially, if you want the paint not to be toxic.
I think those pointing out the tech missed your point. It's fair to say that making paint is a technology but "painting" is an art and the two are very distinct.
An artist can create art with most anything, dirt and sand for example.
My wife has been painting lately. She has two sisters that paint as well and they're all remarkably good at it. So was her mother, and her mother's uncle was as well. He did a mural in the Ames, Iowa Post Office that was a WPA funded project that's pretty cool. Makes me wonder if there is a genetic connection :D
https://ameshistory.org/content/evolution-corn-post-office-m...
sorry to say that "paint" meaning colored inks are a technology
further, machines which churn out fine painting after fine painting already exist and are old boring technology by this point
the least old instance of this tech is inkjet printers
What AI does isn't painting.
I mean, couple it with one of these, and it is...
Ok, I think this is a funny comment but if you think about it for more than a second it really condenses what a lot of the AI handwringing is about: humans value what's difficult to humans, or at least what's difficult to a lot of humans. We get upset when something shows up that can even partially mimic a creative process that's valued for its scarcity.
There's still zero progress made towards generative AI doing anything but mimicking existing work done by humans, and very poorly and inefficiently I might add.
Please tell me where I can find research demonstrating truly novel output from generative AI.
# What is this article about?
This text is a review of the book "Monet: The Restless Vision" by Jackie Wullschläger, discussing the art scene in New York, the ethical issues in the art world, and the life and work of Claude Monet. It highlights the corruption among art critics and curators, Monet's impact on the Impressionist movement, and the influence of his work on modern art.
# What might a reader gain from reading this?
A reader would gain insight into the complexities of the art world, including its ethical challenges and the profound influence of Claude Monet on the Impressionist movement and modern art.
This did not prepare me for the framing of the crusty Robert Hughes introducing the overflowing filth of corruption swamping the art market. I mean, one of the sentences mentions it, but it's a pretty pale summary.
I'm not sure how useful AI summary even is. It's a best-case scenario: translate input data into 'what most people might think of this', which is a core competency of LLMs. It's stripping away the ability to convey intention or a specific vision, though, and that's a significant lack.
I'd love GPT-written summaries for articles on the front page. Dang, would such a bot be allowed?