Inpirational Art Quote and Thought for the Day

I just opened Robert Henri's The Art Spirit and the first thing I saw was a paragraph on originality:

"Don't worry about your originality. You could not get rid of it even if you wanted to. It will stick to you and show you up for better or for worse in spite of all you or anyone else can do."

I think this is especially true for beginning students- the desire to for ones work to be instantly recognizable is a strong one. What many students of art don't realize is that contrived stylization of what they are observing has been done the same way by countless students looking for a shortcut to a "style". It is very understandable, as most famous artists (especially those artists who are famous in mainstream culture) have an easily recognizable style.
The thing that makes one person's work different from another's is that there is a different brain attached to more or less the same eyeballs (that is what makes visual art 'work'- everybody's sense of vision is essentially the same). Even if a class of students are all drawing a relatively dry still life- there are infinite ways to render that still life in a way that it becomes more than the sum of its parts & communicates something of the human experience (and, the experience of the artist).

...of course, there are just as many ways to execute a still life in a deeply flawed manner.


Lawren Harris
Beaver Swamp, Algoma
1920 Oil on canvas
120.7 x 141 cm (47 1/2 x 55 1/2 in.)
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

...and just because images are more important than words, here is a painting by Lawren Harris, one of the Group of Seven- a group of Canadian painters that were active in the early part of the twentieth century. The drawing/compostion in this piece is quite strong, and the brushwork is simply amazing- plus the imagery is not unlike what we find here in Maine. In my opinion, their use of color was far superior to the vast majority of Modernist painters.