The Fine Art and Design Blog of Darren Daz Cox

  99daz.com the greatest artist blog in the world! I drew this angel washing her dog today.

It’s a happy image! I usually draw angels as nudes, representing truth (as they have nothing to hide), I didn’t invent that concept. it was widely used in the Renaissance.

I suppose this angel has something to hide then hmmm…

The greatest masters have never done pictures "out of their heads."  is a quote from The Painter in Oil, by Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst who was pretty strict in his opinion of how an artist should paint the figure, directly from a live model or suffer artistic failure!

I challenge this closed-minded thinking and propose that you can get better results by working "out of your head".

Parkhurst was also a student of arguably the most proficent painter of all time, William Bougereau.  Being proficient however doesn’t necessarily equate to "good", after all, most people don’t know who Bougereau was but most everyone has heard of Vincent Van Gogh and a majority of them consider Van Gogh to be a "good" painter.

 Van Gogh sold so few paintings because most art patrons in his time expected work in the neo-classical/accademic style of painters like Alexandre Cabanel. Cabanel, like Bougereau, painted with a technical perfection that had echoes of Renaissance master Raphael.  Raphael will forever be beloved and stand as one of the greatest masters, so why not seek to reach his level of perfection? When you work from a live model and know all the techniques to make a 2d picture look 3d you can produce some stunning paintings, but you have to add in the human factor to be considered "good". 

I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don’t care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity. - Emile Zola

Poor old Cabanel and Bougereau were only upholding the ideals of masters like Raphael when they blocked the Impressionists from the salon, they thought they knew what was "good" based on an idealized perfection that could only be achieved through superior craftsmanship. But craftsmanship alone is not enough for things to be regarded as good.

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman. - Emile Zola

I think that the sketches Michelangelo did ‘out of his head’ rank among his finest work, here is one of them.

MICHELANGELO di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

(b. 1475, Caprese, d. 1564, Roma)

The Fall of Phaethon

c. 1533

Black chalk, 41,3 x 23,4 cm

Royal Library, Windsor UK

Michelangelo made many erotic drawings for Tommaso dei Cavalieri, including the Rape of Ganymede, The Punishment of Tityus and this one with Phaethon being zapped by Zeus for his reckless behavior.

This is a drawing that Michelangelo drew for pleasure, a drawing with real passion and stands as sweet example of non-accademic proficency, perhaps Parkhurst had never seen this sketch at the time of writing his book?

Another example that counters Parkhurst’s statement is arguably the most famous and referenced figure drawing of all time, Leonardo DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man. No model was used for that one!

I suggest that if want to stand out of the crowd and shine then seek to be good at what you do rather than to be proficient at what you do. This is not mere sematics. Proficiency encourages work that seeks to reach an ideal, an ideal is a generic concept and generic concepts don’t grab you by the heart until they are made specific. Making something specific requires that you make your stand, get off the fence and lay your cards down etc etc. You can be romantic but you don’t truely know what love is until you take that leap and risk having your heart broken.

The first time people saw Michelangelos fresco of god as a rugged old man with white hair it captured the imaginations of all who saw it, but a thousand variations on the theme later the idealized concept of god as a white haired man loses it’s punch no matter how well it is painted. 

Thomas Kinkaid’s lighthouses and sunbeams show the concept of god in a different but far more popular way these days and while Kinkaid is not highly regarded as an innovative painter he did take that leap to make his art specific to something rather than just follow the idealized concept of ‘pretty art is good’.  Take that leap, find a step off point before reaching ‘perfection’ and don’t be afraid to pull an idea out of your head.

Originally posted 2008-01-24 13:07:38. Republished by Old Post Promoter

I’d like something good to happen to inspire me as I just feel blah right now. I’m going to meditate and clean up my apartment and look for synchronicity… Three pencil sketches with digital paint addeded, sometimes more IS more! You can see what style of motifs I draw when I concentrate (the figures) and what motifs I draw when I’m just ‘winging it’. I think what makes it interesting is the combination of the two methods, deliberate (conscious) and random (from the subconscious). What I’d like to do with these is have them printed large, wall sized, and then paint more details over them. Would it be graffiti to have your future self draw over your art from years back?

One of the things that you can learn from the discipline of General Semantics is to learn to consciously label yourself in distinct separate times for the purpose of clarity. For example the me in 2004 is quite a different person mentally from the current me in 2008 so while it’s not inaccurate to say ‘this is my art’ it is clearer to say ‘this is my art in the year x’ or from ‘when I watched a lot of tv and worked that job where such and such happened’, anything so that you associate the art with a specific time or thing you used to do etc. Of course you already do this unconsciously, but if you consciously index your work mentally it is apparently easier to notice synchronicity when it occurs, and synchronicity is magic!

Originally posted 2008-05-09 08:12:04. Republished by Old Post Promoter

~**Girl under the moon, unfinished oil on canvas by Darren Daz Cox**~

Still unfinished but I’m about to work on it as I suddenly got a second wind after listening to a few David Wilcock talks. For a moment there I was all tweaked out about evil illuminati and all that but after listening to hundreds of such talks I’ve decided that just being fustrated and angry isn’t worth it.

I don’t want to just ignore the bad things in the world, I’m not a coward so what can I do?I can create things. No, I’m past the point of thinking that I’d be happy if I was a rich and famous artist.The very act of creating these things and you looking at them changes the world for the better.

…and here’s the finished painting!

The girl under the shiny happy magical moon of love and happiness

Oil on canvas with irridescent acrylic paints.

I’ll change the title as often as I want thank you very much!

love, Darren Daz Cox

Originally posted 2008-03-03 09:30:03. Republished by Old Post Promoter