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My Word's
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vol. 6, #43,
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My Word's
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vol. 6, #43,
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BUT WE KNOW WHAT WE LIKE
I've been reading a fascinating book called Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art, in which the authors, both artists themselves, conducted a scientific survey asking Americans what they liked and disliked in paintings. They asked questions about every possible design element: do you tend more toward modern or traditional styles, do you prefer indoor or outdoor scenes, what color would probably dominate in pictures you chose for your home, do you prefer vivid shades or more subdued tones, do you prefer realistic paintings, and so forth.They analyzed the answers to these questions and used them to paint a composite of our tastes, "America's Most Wanted Painting." Since most people preferred outdoors scenes, it was a landscape. Since most people liked lakes or rivers or oceans, and another large percentage liked forests and fields, the painting included a wooded area and a grassy verge near a large body of water. The painting's predominant color was the one nearly everyone preferred -- blue sky and blue water. Since people liked wildlife in their paintings, two deer gamboled in the water. The answers were mixed as to whether there should be human figures in the painting, and whether those figures should be contemporary or historical, so the final work included small human figures dwarfed by the landscape: three children, and, standing off to the side, George Washington.
And when they Komar and Melamid showed the painting to focus groups, most of them said, yeah, that's pretty much what they liked, though they could have done nicely without George Washington.
Komar and Melamid did another painting based on the elements people disliked most. It turns out virtually nobody likes sharply angled geometric shapes and hard edges of color that don't blend into each other. Hardly anybody much likes yellow and orange. America's least wanted painting was of yellow and orange triangles superimposed on each other.
Interestingly enough, Komar and Melamid did the same surveys in other countries, and found very similar results. The "most wanted" and "least wanted" paintings for Russia, Finland, France, Iceland, etc. weren't all that different from ours. Apparently everybody, regardless of nationality, wants to look at blue water. Nobody wants to look at stark geometric shapes.
This project leaves me with hundreds of questions, like how modern art survives, and why Winslow Homer and Frederick Church aren't the world's best loved painters. It makes me wonder about the way people fall in love with real landscape that is nothing like this ideal -- the snow and tundra of the far north, the slickrock canyons and mountains and the plain parched desert of Edward Abbey country. Since the respondents answered questions about design, subject and color before they were asked about specific artists they admired, would recalling their fondness for Norman Rockwell have altered the preference for landscape? Would a reminder about Georgia O'Keefe have altered the balance in favor of flowers, or the sandy tones of New Mexico?
It makes me wonder if it's even possible to define a taste for certain kinds of colors and subject matter without reference to specific art works. When I think of Monet, I am in love with the cathedral of Rouen, and when I think of Van Gogh I want to stare forever at irises. The painting that moves me the most is Sunday in the Park at La Grande Jette, which fills me with a love of green parks, green trees, and women in long dresses moving in stately splendor. Is it the power of great artists that they lead us beyond our predilections, make us see and love what we have never known or never paid attention to?
And maybe there's a difference between art we revere and art we can live with. Do we wish to be surrounded by art that is restful, or art that demands that we pay attention, think about it, respond emotionally? Maybe Picasso's Guernica, and Gauguin's lush invitations to escape from civilization are safer for us when we only visit them occasionally. Maybe J.M.W. Turner's fierce storms at sea are too unsettling. Maybe it's Mary Cassatt's very coziness and domesticity that makes her paintings easy to live with and relegate her to second class status as an artist.
The artists also asked one open-ended question: if money was no object, and you could hire the artist of your choice to paint anything you wanted, what would you have him/her paint? Few of those answers really match the ideal painting. A scientist wants a painting of an atomic nucleus. A student wants a picture of right-fielder Jim Eisenreich. Someone wants a series of realistic paintings of his friends, another wants "various colors of horses pounding wildly through the surf on the coastline of Rhode Island," and someone else wants a "huge lizard walking across the Sahara saddled by this guy Phil."
What would I have an artist paint? I don't know, because I might not even know I love a particular vision of the world until I see the artists's rendering of it. It would make more sense for me to hire an artist, show her a dozen paintings I care about, and leave her to paint something she believes will capture the same essence.
On the other hand, I love the stark play of light and shadow off the red rock of Monument Valley. If I could bring Monet back from the dead, I would have him paint it, at different times of day, in different seasons. I like paintings better than photographs, so I would have him visit the same villages where Hans Silvester photographed the cats of Greece in his book Cats in the Sun, and ask him to capture in paint the vivid sky, bright sun, stark shadows, and craggy rocks against which the cats array themselves in elegant compositions.
You would have other choices if you could hire your artist, and you might have other questions about the survey, and about whether "America's Most Wanted Painting" really is our ideal. But this book is a splendid taking off point for thinking about what moves us in art, what art we like to live with, whether they are different, and why.
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As I mentioned, I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them. If you want to be notified of when a new one is up, contact me at: marylaine atnetexpress.net, with "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.
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