After a lifetime in health care with varying degrees of responsibility, it was a joy to retire and do something less critical. Art would be about footling around with paint and getting charcoal on your nose, and nobody would die if I forgot who Matisse was. I was wrong on all counts except, obviously, the […]

The meaning of art — Conboyhillpaintingmedia

This is a re-post from one of my OCA blogs sparked by a series of exercises that seemed, in the current context which, in all fairness, the author of the course unit could not have anticipated, empty, trivial, self indulgent, and belonging to another era. Are people really interested in an artist’s socks painted in coffee? Is it reasonable to use food stuffs as painting media? What actual value does making twenty postcard sized paintings of ‘found’ images have? Or twenty self portraits using a twig? These are exercises, not works for a market or for any purpose other than fulfilling course requirements, but should not meaning or communication be part of the thinking for students, even at this stage? I think so.