Mt. Taranaki, and an inquiry into the philosophy and praxis of art

Before we talk about the piece up top, I'd like to remind everyone that we're now five chapters deep into Class Analysis and Revolution, and if you haven't checked it out yet and are interested in modern leftist theory at all, you totally should. I'm releasing a new chapter every day right here on Tankie Doodle, and the last chapter will drop on the last day of the Trump (or maybe now the Pence?) administration.

Anyhow, back to the subject at hand. My friend Graciela took a picture of Mt. Taranaki in New Zealand and posted it on Facebook, and I thought it was beautiful enough to draw. And surprisingly enough, I found the time to sit down and do that just now, from start to finish in one sitting. My last artistic foray took me a couple weeks, but it was a bit more complicated, with a lot of human architecture and highly articulated trees, leaves, and blades of grass in the field of vision. This has little of that; it's a study in striking silhouettes at sunset setting a sentiment. (You're welcome for that sentence.)

I'm happy with it; I really like it as a piece of art. But there is a little bit of a problem I have with it, and if you look at the original photograph after the jump, you might see it.

The color's a bit off, and IMHO the original has better color. What I did is fine, beautiful even; I'm not beating myself up as an artist or having a crisis of artistic self-esteem. Far from it; I've always been good at art as long as I can remember, and my skills have only grown over the years. But they do that because I can healthily criticize where I fall short, and there's clearly space for me to get better at the coloring aspect of this.

I don't usually post up the original photographs I go off of when I do art of this nature, because I always throw in a couple embellishments here or there as artistic license, to make it mine, to be more than a reproducer of the source material. There's a picture I drew of the city of Genoa at sunrise when I was 16 that I consider to be my arrival as an artist of professional quality. I found the picture in National Geographic, and I intend to make a post here about it eventually, so I won't go into too much detail yet. But I messed with it some: I did a self-insert in the foreground, a window inside a high-rise building. It wasn't the same picture, not quite, but it was close. But I paid very close attention to the colors, and got it close on that. Perhaps it was the particular time of morning that made it easier to draw, or the tint of the camera, who knows.

I can say that I'm not too terribly thrilled with the color range offered for sunrises and sunsets in the standard Crayola sets. You can get there through blending, and my style involves saturating the paper with blended color lead anyway. But I've noticed that the more colors you introduce to be blended eventually by your lightest color (usually white), the harder it is for them to fully blend. It's lumpy, like gravy. It gets particularly hard to blend darker or even midrange colors with lighter ones in places where a gradient needs to be expressed, as in a sunrise or sunset. This can be mitigated to a degree with patience, a quality I'm not known to possess in spades, but art may give me an opportunity to hone.

But a lot has changed in the art world since my teenage years. My colored pencil skills aren't significantly better; I'd say I'd learned 80% of what I needed to know on that front by the time I drew Genoa. But an entire field of digital art has sprung into existence and even matured. You can get degrees in it now. Everyone dabbles in it; anyone who makes memes or websites is a digital artist to some degree. I'm a digital artist; you can go read the archives of the webcomic I'm slowly getting back online to see some halting evidence of that.

But I hadn't really blended the two fields much more than cropping scans of my art, at least until tonight. It's not that difficult to adjust color, brightness, contrast, hue, and saturation in the greatest digital art program I've ever used (which is not only intuitive and highly moddable, but also completely free): Paint.net. So I decided to try; I should improve my coloring game anyway, but even if I do, that won't help what I've already made here. Anyway, this is the result:

I like that a whole lot better than what I drew. But is it "art" in the same way that what I actually drew clearly is? I mean, I could just as easily make and sell prints of this as I could the original. But the original doesn't look like this; I couldn't hand you a piece of paper full of colored pencil lead that my hands had labored over that looked like this the way that I could for the first image.

The liberal world just sold a banana duct-taped to a wall that someone was calling art for $120,000, and then someone ate that banana. So their answer is obvious and predictable: anything's art if you want it to be, and especially if you can get someone to buy it as art.

But, in case the hammer and sickle up top of this blog wasn't a dead giveaway, artistically I'm a socialist realist, albeit one with impressionistic and occasionally art nouveau characteristics. I don't think the liberal answer is particularly satisfying. Some of the defining characteristics of socialist realism is that it be "truthful," and understandable to the workers. Is digital editing to this degree "untruthful" in some fundamental way, a bait and switch that could deceive the workers? I can definitely see a potential argument along those lines that could be made. It is definitely no longer the pure colored pencil piece that the original one was, and passing it off as that would be untruthful. It's mixed media now, and there's nothing wrong with that, so long as it's presented as such. But if I were to sell prints of this, which would people be likelier to consider "art"? Does it even matter, or am I overthinking it? I'm genuinely interested in your opinion on this subject down in the comments.

But that's a nice transition to the last subject I'd like to talk about: selling prints of my art, as well as the originals. Selling art was the very first real job I ever had, weird as that may sound. I sold tattoo designs, colored pencil art, and graphite sketches in high school. First to classmates, then to a local tattoo parlor, and eventually to tourists in Baltimore's Inner Harbor on days that I'd play hooky. It's something that I'd like to get back to doing, if at all possible. The agricultural collective is gonna need resources to grow, and I would rather earn those resources honestly than ask for charity from people also struggling to get by.

More specifically, if I were to do this, what would you guys like to see? Should I set up a Patreon and "sell" prints as rewards for so many dollars every month, with the originals either auctioned on eBay, available to a higher tier of patrons, or raffled off to a drawing of all patrons? Should I become a Deviantartlet instead? Should I just have an online store somewhere that I integrate into this site somehow? Would you buy my art, either on its own merits or to support the socialism I'm building in Nevada? Again, let me know in the comments.