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Tag: fine art

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Monday Morning Art School: what is fine art?

High Surf, 12X16, oil on prepared birch painting surface, $1159 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

What is fine art?

Fine art serves no practical purpose. It’s created for its aesthetic value and emotional impact rather than to do anything useful.

Calling something ‘fine art’ is not an assessment of quality. Something can be utter dreck and still fall under the heading of fine art, and fine craft is frequently better-executed than fine art.

The line between fine art and other disciplines is blurry. For example, Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth were primarily illustrators, but they’re also considered among the best painters of their generation. And by any narrow definition of purpose, most pre-Renaissance painters would be lumped in with illustrators, since one of their main goals was to explain and amplify the Bible. What is fine art, then, is a difficult question to answer.

Sunset over Cadillac Mountain, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 includes shipping and handling.

What is the difference between fine art and commercial art?

The primary difference between fine art and commercial art is intent.

While fine and commercial art are both tools of communication, fine art’s focus is emotional, visual, and intellectual. Commercial art is made to sell a product, service, or idea. It is functional.

Fine art generally seeks to speak to its audience one-on-one, whereas commercial art is directed towards markets.

Fine art is judged on creativity, expression, technical skill, and its intellectual underpinnings. The individual artist and his or her vision is paramount. That means fine artists have the freedom to produce work that nobody cares about (although that’s likely to result in penury) whereas commercial artists generally work under another person’s guidelines and requirements.

Camden Harbor from Curtis Island, oil on canvas, $2782 unframed includes shipping and handling in continental United States.

Do fine art and commercial art use the same media?

There is no distinction between what is used in fine art and what is used in commercial art, although certain media (for example oil painting or lost wax casting) are more suited towards fine art. Other media (for example, neon or digital imaging) are more suited toward commercial art.

Belfast Harbor, oil on archival canvasboard, 14X18, $1,275 unframed includes shipping and handling in continental United States.

What is the difference between fine art and fine craft?

The line between fine art and fine craft is even squishier. Traditionally, fine craft creates functional objects, although that has never been absolute. Grinling Gibbons was Britain’s most celebrated woodcarver. He was an excellent businessman and much of his work falls firmly in the area of fine craft. However, he also produced amazing confections in lime wood that transcend any purpose.

Since both fine art and fine craft can create decorative objects, the distinction is usually a matter of focus.  Fine craft is said to emphasize skill and technique, whereas fine art emphasizes ideas.

The most comfortable distinction is in media. Fine craft includes ceramics, glasswork, textiles, woodworking, goldsmithing and other disciplines where the materials are critical to the results.

Which is best?

Since the 18th century, critics and gallerists have tried to rebrand fine art as an intellectual discipline, (although its practitioners generally remain stubbornly practical). Because of this, fine craft, illustration and commercial art have been perceived as lower art forms. This is an absurd distinction, and one that has led us to the worst excesses of conceptual art.

I’ve been both a commercial and fine artist, and I pursue some crafts. None is inherently better than another; it’s all a question of what you’re called to do.

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Transcending popular culture

Daybreak, 1922, Maxfield Parrish

One of my students chatted with me recently about Maxfield Parrish. “I erroneously dismissed him as a pop artist for too long,” I told her. “He was that and much more.”

“What’s the difference between a fine artist and a pop artist?” she asked.

It was a bad choice of words on my part. There was a 20th century movement called Pop Art, which encompassed the likes of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. It was fine art commenting on popular culture, rather than a part of popular culture. (The difference between Warhol’s Brillo boxes and the ones made by the soap company was that Warhol’s were in museums. Now even that distinction is blurred.)

I was talking about of the art equivalent to pop music, and I don’t think there’s a word for it. Parrish was part of the Golden Age of American illustration, along with N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, Jessie Willcox Smith and others. Our modern concept of illustration doesn’t begin to encompass the range of their work. They were riding a revolution in printing technology, and they were visionary.

Sheep Pasture, Cornish, New Hampshire (sketch), 1936, Maxfield Parrish

A world now gone

Parrish’s Daybreak was the most popular art print of the 20th century. At one time, one in four households had purchased one. Printing is so cheap for us today that we can hardly imagine what it meant a hundred years ago for working-class people to afford a color picture for the dining room, or to read books and magazines with color illustrations.

Today’s illustrators work to someone else’s idea. When Time orders up a caricature of the president for next week’s issue, the artist has little scope or time. In their heyday, magazine covers were self-contained paintings, often narrating a little story of the artist’s own invention. The Saturday Evening Post discovered Norman Rockwell, who went on to create more than 300 covers for them, and John Philip Falter, who did 120 covers. All the best magazines, ranging from Harper’s Bazaar to Life to Boys’ Life to Popular Science, hired top illustrators for their covers.

Hill Top Farm, Winter, 1949, Maxfield Parrish

The best of them, including Parrish, were wildly successful. It’s not just that they were in it for the money; everyone is just in it for the money. It’s that they succeeded in making a great deal of it.

Today magazines are filled with photography. The only major magazine still using stand-alone art on its cover is The New Yorker. Meanwhile, there’s a surfeit of wall decoration available to us, ranging from bad department-store art to high-quality prints of masterpieces. There’s no room in the market for pop painters in the style of Maxfield Parrish.

Birches in Winter, undated, Maxfield Parrish

Parrish can be credited with many things, including the craze for androgyny that has bedeviled fashion for a hundred years, and for introducing a shade of blue that now bears his name. He was a consummate commercial artist, but he could also really paint. In 1931, he told the Associated Press, “I’m done with girls on rocks,” and focused exclusively on landscapes, particularly those of his adopted home state of New Hampshire. They were never as popular as his nymphs, but he still made money. He painted until he was 91 and lived to a few months shy of 96. That’s a recurring trait among successful artists; painting is a healthy vocation.

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