I really like painting people, mainly because figurative art is hard to do and I sort of melt into the subject while I’m painting. My subjects are mostly women, which makes sense to me. And they are original, mostly. The rub is selling figure work, it’s the worst and why many of my local peers have sadly turned to painting 8×10 plein air pastoral scenes. The supply of figure work is astronomical, the demand an elusive trickle. Still, I do it, it piles up and makes me feel bad that no one cares.
The solution, it seems, is abstraction. Peruse social media or any of the bazillion on line galleries and behold the magnitude of figure work mutilation in all its fantastical forms. Few patrons, it seems, want to hang a picture of someone they don’t know unless its highly stylized. Couple of common denominators – somehow a lot of artists have access to super model women and a second observation is that interestingly, artists will leave the faces alone, which of course, are beautiful. Everything else is fair game. Trendy as hell and with Digital, you never know if the figure is hand rendered or a doctored Giclee.
The eye is incredibly brutal looking at the human form, even abstraction has to be spot on to be credible. Abstraction that works, is way harder than representational work, trust me. Anyone with a shred of talent can watch Youtube video’s and with steady practice, paint credible looking people. There are sweat shops in the far East, staffed with artist slaves chained to their easels, who will generate a credible oil portrait on canvas from your photograph for $150. Available on Etsy. Dafen China is an entire village of reproduction painters, with about 8,000 artists producing massive quantities of paintings for Global Art markets. They are said to produce 60% of the World’s oil paintings. http://surfacefragments.blogspot.com/2012/01/chinese-sweatshops-reproducing-fine-art.html
Abstraction is where I want to go with my work, it’s the only place to go. So, to maintain some self respect, I also paint abstract landscapes, not just because they actually sell, but more, there is method to the madness doing both. Figure and abstract landscape work are synergistic. Abstract landscapes for me, are like candy. They are fast, stream of conscious, get dirty, fun works that are helping me loosen up and inspired to keep experimenting so I can bridge the chasm. What of the 10,000 hours to master a skill principle, which translates to about 9 years at 5 days a week, spending 4 hours a day to become world-class? The lesson – mastery is more than a matter of practice.