Painting on the Edge (or Art Vs. Craft) - An Opinion

For contemporary painting to be taken seriously in the “real art” world, it is expected
to create some element of surprise, incongruity, or discomfort (if not shock),
be a little off kilter or unsettling - what is
sometimes referred to as being edgy.

Although, like almost everyone, there is much current art that I don’t like, I find the idea that edginess is a fundamental component of art appropriate. This is not a new idea - it has become a thoroughly
engrained part of our culture’s painting
tradition over the last 150 years, with roots
going back 500 years.

Painting, once one of the skilled crafts, was nudged from its utilitarian moorings as a conveyor of information and narrative by (among other influences) the twin forces of Luther and Gutenberg - the former giving rise to the idea of the importance of the individual (and individual creativity) and the latter conveying information by more efficient means.

At first, the evolution of painting from a craft to what we now call art was slow, but by the time photography came along, some painters (most of the ones we deem
important today) were staking out nontraditional territory for themselves in some pretty edgy places: Manet with his roughly executed Picnic on the Grass, (facing page) showing two well dressed gentlemen with naked women in the woods; shortly afterwards the Impressionists with their dabs of paint depicting ordinary subjects (profoundly shocking at the time);
followed by the Fauves (“wild beasts”), the
Cubists and so on through the Pop Artists
and the Minimalsts, et al.

Over the last 150 years our society has come to identify painting with edginess. A certain type of edginess that is frequently identified with contemporary painting is some sign that the painter is pushing his/her envelope - evidence of the process, even mistakes, tentative sketch marks and erasures. Masterful execution and bravura frequently ring hollow - signs of a skilled craftsman or illustrator, but not an artist/ painter.

Edginess now marks one of the boundaries
between art and craft. The arts are full of surprises and tension, the crafts are comfortable and predictable - the arts challenge convention while the crafts are
guardians of the comfortable past (a valuable
and valid role - just not art).

Turner found some of his edges in technique, Manet in social values, the Impressionists in subject matter, the Fauves in color, the Cubists in form, and Pop in the everyday. Some edges are rediscovered and reinterpreted - today, just painting plein air is so reactionary in some academic art circles that it can have some pretty edgy connotations.

Wolf Kahn and Fairfield Porter are modern plein air painters whose work is taken seriously in the “real” art world. The edges that they staked out are now familiar. Ironically (for their time), maybe the edgiest images of the late 19th century were the tiny, abstract, pochade box landscapes of James MacNeill Whistler. The renewed interest, after nearly a century, in the small and intimate scale of “guerrilla paintings” once again challenges convention.

For me, the risk of leaving behind comfortable tricks of the trade, familiar materials and pictorial formulas is that I’ll fail or fall over the edge into shallow contrivance. Pushing the envelope is frustrating, exasperating and uncomfortable, but when I’ve explored a new edge and negotiated it more or less successfully, it sure beats just cranking out another pretty picture.

Stonehenge
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851)
Watercolor on paper, 11" x 16".
Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum

Green and Gold: The Great Sea
James abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)
Oil on wood panel, 5½" x 9¾"
Freef Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC