On Jun 26, 2009, at 7:40 AM, [email protected] wrote:
Is mark the essence of a style of each artist?
No, a mark is a mark.
A mark is a distinctive visual artifact.
Style - from stylus, a writing instrument, a thing that makes a mark.
Mark - a touching of a surface, a line made as an indication or record
of something
The marks left on the surface--of a painting or of a sculpture, even--
embody and preserve the action of the maker's hand, that is, his
*sytle*. No two people make identical marks, or make marks with
identical physical characteristics. Forgeries or handwriting or of
paintings are produced by mimicking the marks of the original, or the
characteristic qualities of the original (as in the Van Meergen
fabrications of Vermeer paintings). Analyzing the characteristics of a
painter's marks--brushstrokes--is a basic skill and tool of art
historians who seek to attribute a work to an artist. And a lot of art
history and appreciation is a history and appreciation of style, both
the personal and unique style of each artist and the commonalities of
many artists, grouped together under the rubric of one style name or
other.
A mark is more than a mark--it is, if you will, a hologram of the
artist, a way of seeing the entire picture in a single element.
Moreover, emphasizing the uniqueness of an artist's mark, small or
large, underlay all of the discussions back in the 60s of the action
painters, who worked 'inside' the painting and whose veritable
gestures as he swung his arms and distributed paint were recorded by
the paint on the canvas.
Who knew that Miller's remark was all about Pollock, his bete noire?
BTW, Miller asked about whether any *writers* "used the word 'marks'
and made it important to the aesthetics of painting and drawing." His
question was directed to those who wrote about art, i.e., the
sycophants, acolytes, factotums, and other altar boys of the great
modern art swindle, not the actual swingers of paint and leavers of
marks.
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
http://considerthepreposition.blogspot.com/
