Representational or “realistic” art started centuries before the invention of photography.  According to some scholars the wall drawings in caves and on rocks may predate speech.  In this discussion, “representational  art” should be understood to imply attempts to copy reality as closely as physically possible.  Even that statement has loop-holes.  Over long spans of history, different degrees of ability, availability of media, and comprehension  of accuracy have been considered “accurate”.  For centuries, drawings and sculpture were, in some cultures, as close to intentional representation as was possible, but as skill and the science of perspective evolved, the test and judgment of “accuracy” intensified.  Works once considered accurate, might seem childish and primitive to today’s eyes. 

      Photography changed everything. It wasn’t just that man could not draw as accurately as a photograph; our eye-brain instrumentation actually learned to see better.  Our concept of “realistic” changed.  Photography actually taught our eyes to see more accurately. Until photography displayed the failures in mans attempt to draw realistically, man not only did not see accurately, but there was no actual need for such depictions; we didn’t even anticipate the ability to draw as realistically as is now achieved.  Line and shape and to a degree color and shading can approach photographic realism, but many in general history who have had that skill, did so by the study of and comparison to photography, and-or, with photography as part of the instrumentation.  

      For many decades after the first photographs, a really good artist could still do a better job of accurate “full spectrum” representation (read… copy, and read… color) than could the technology of photography.  But now, there is nothing three-dimensional that a photograph cannot reproduce more accurately than any painter.  Please note that I did not say “explain” or “illustrate” or “copy” (I here intend “Reproduce”  as an attempt to duplicate the realism and accuracy of photography). 

      Personally, I wonder why any artistic attempt should subject itself to trying to perform “realism” better than a photograph; but many artists and buyers of Art agree that the demand for human generated representational art is alive and well.  The very best works of photography are both less popular and less expensive than those who attempt to “photo realism” by means other than photos.   If we take a step to one side and allow purposeful exaggeration and liberty, the market for the French Impressionists is still growing in both demand and in price.  The recent works of recognized contemporary, but traditional, artists are also more expensive than the work of almost all photographers.

      That fact brings a question Why and how can this market for realistic and expressionist work thrive if cameras can record the same scenes with so much more accuracy? 

      There is, I think, something more involved than the accuracy of representation, and the existence of that  “something more” is true in line, color, perspective and the modeling of volume.  I am asking just what that something more is in fact?  

      I here assume to answer; it is (intended, accidental, or unavoidable) the "feeling" that the artist puts into and leaves in the picture.  This “feeling”, even when the artist intends to paint as realistic as possible, exists in that portion of the work that is, in fact, not photo realistic.  If this is an acceptable answer, then there must be something that humans contribute that mechanical reproductions do not!  I think that is the case and… that other humans like those differences.  The combinations of colors which may or may not be true to nature; the arrangement of lines the blocking of mass and shape and somehow (probably unavoidably), the Artist’s arbitrary decisions that cameras cannot do!  Some of these choices, whether conscious or instinctive, are so esoteric and intangible that they are impossibly hard to capture.  They can, in fact, be so subtle that they are even hard to demonstrate or prove.  Yet, those portions of the public which have the dollars, pay for single paintings, amounts which could buy all the photos they could ever want, and leave remaining budget to allow travel anywhere on the globe to watch the photographer taking the photo. 

      So, again, why paintings instead of photos?  Those who follow this line of reason to any logical conclusion, usually arrive to at least one common approach to an answer there is in humans an instinctive awareness of mass, proportion, shape, color, rhythm, line, texture,  etc,  and there is a human instinct which goes both beyond and apart from anything the best photographer and equipment can produce.  If that is true, then humanity needs no justification when it reacts and is drawn by instinct to works that manage to incorporate these tangible materials into artifacts that are non-objective in nature.  The final postulation of this reasoning, is, that like music (and smell… some perfumes smell like nothing but themselves) mass, shape, color, texture, arrangement (adjacencies), proportion, and background can be as pleasing (to at least some humans) on a direct basis as it is, for others when incorporated into a literal representation. 

      And, by the way, we should not let the photographers off too easily.   Even a camera is not actually realistic scale is distorted, the gray tones and colors are only limited samplings, and the quality of the film edits the accuracy.  Color film is always a bit off, and the process and lens together record three dimensions on an essentially two-dimensional surface.  If we refine our science, and really demand accuracy, we will find that even the best photo is also an abstraction.  At some time in the future, I predict that many of these results and reactions in both photography and in painting will have been understood, codified, and explained.  Then, visual art, including at least some that is partially accidental, will have a known and proven "visual" grammar, rhythm, proportion, cadence, and rules.  It will then be as concrete and understood as music is now.  Still…  hopefully and thankfully, some artist will come along and violate and extend the grammar.  That is, after all, what it's all about.

      In every human endeavor I can conceive, this sequence from naivety to knowledge… this process and progress moves from the literal toward the more refined, less concrete, more abstract, and non-objective.  It has in fact, already happened in visual arts.  It has  and is happening in electronic and computer generated art and sound.   As we humans grow to know and understand these technical & novel representations and innovations, we adjust.  Over time we learn to see them as ordinary even when they started as radical as non-objective painting was (is?) at its inception.

       I often ask people who don’t like, can’t understand, or generally have problems with non-objective art, a simple but tricky question; I ask them to think in their mind of their favorite piece of music that does not have lyrics.  Almost everyone has some musical recollection that fits that description.  I ask them what the music is about, or how they feel when they hear it.  I ask them if they can think of it with me talking to them.  I ask them if it gives them some kind of emotion.  Does it make them sad, happy, energetic, restful or…how?  I have yet to find anyone who doesn’t have at least some kind of music (and sometimes… sound) that touches them in some emotional way.  

       When we get to that point…  I then ask why they allow their ears a pleasure they deny their eyes?  By this approach I have, for some, thrown wider the doors of art.

                                                       © Jim Lyle, June 03