Sometime in the 14th century, Cennino Cennini wrote Il Libro dell’Arte as advice for how to be an artist. One of the most interesting passages, I think, is how an artist should go about developing a personal style. Cennini begins:
take pains and pleasure in constantly copying the best things which you can find done by the hand of great masters. And if you are in a place where many good masters have been, so much the better for you.
The point of the exercise is to learn from the source. This means that the choice of master to copy is important. Cennini continues:
But I give you this advice: take care to select the best one every time, and the one who has the greatest reputation. And, as you go on from day to day, it will be against nature if you do not get some grasp of his style and of his spirit.
Selecting the right masters to copy is still not enough. Cennini recognized that the particular interpretations of one artist needed to be studied consistently:
For if you undertake to copy after one master today and after another one tomorrow, you will not acquire the style of one or the other, and you will inevitably, through enthusiasm, become capricious, because each style will be distracting your mind. You will try to work in this man’s way today, and in the other’s tomorrow, and so you will not get either of them right.
By choosing the right artist to study, and by studying his work consistently before studying that of another artist, one will achieve the preconditions for finding a personal style:
If you follow the course of one man through constant practice, your intelligence would have to be crude indeed for you not to get some nourishment from it. Then you will find, if nature has granted your any imagination at all, that you will eventually acquire a style individual to yourself, and it cannot help being good; because your hand and your mind, being always accustomed to gather flowers, would ill know how to pluck thorns.
Looking at an old text like this, the advice will obviously seem dated. The challenge and pleasure, I find, is in thinking about how get past this impression and see what is relevant and useful today.
For example, a contemporary artist might spend a lot of time copying from photographs. How would this relate to Cennini’s warning about selecting masters carefully? Does a photograph have a “style” in itself that can influence an artist, or is copying from a photo the same as studying from life?
I think there’s validity in the idea of a painter copying a painting (mindfully!) and coming to understand, through that intimate engagement with a great work, the elements that contribute to the “style”. This is in addition to learning specific techniques of brushwork, color mixing, etc.
However, there’s not the same possibility in photography. You can try to make a photograph in the style of X, but then you already have to have some idea of what constitutes that style. You can’t just learn it as you go, at least within a single picture. You can, of course, make lots of pictures and analyze them. In some cases (e.g. landscape photography) you can photograph in the same place, and no doubt that can be instructive.
The basic problem seems to be that you make the whole photograph at once, so you can’t break down the learning process into tiny bits like drawing a certain line, adding a certain spot of color.
Steve,
Interesting, I didn’t think of it from this point of view.
It seems that with certain special problems, e.g., still-life, the photographer could approximate the copying idea, but it’s obviously not the same as with painting.
However, what about the idea of a photographer “copying” a photograph by making a sketch? With the element of composition, this should be as informative as it is for painters in their work.
I am learning dune patterns by photographing or drawing them sitting outdoors.
I have also drawn from memory a particular pattern after I photographed and processed it on the computer. So far, I have not wished to draw patterns by actually looking at a photograph.
Karl and Steve,
In doing the Cubist imitations, it became clear to me that copying brushwork and shadows and lines and fragmented shapes and whatnot was not sufficient to actually achieve a painting. I don’t mean a good painting — I mean, just getting to the point where I could put the paint onto the surface.
I initially thought it would just take a little serious looking and playing around to make an Ok-for-the-event work, but as it developed, I found I had to get have a sense of the whole to begin to make the composition, to take the charcoal and strike the first mark.
So I guess I’m saying that in my Cubist experience of copying paintings, as Steve said about copying photographs, “You can try to make a photograph in the style of X, but then you already have to have some idea of what constitutes that style. You can’t just learn it as you go, at least within a single picture.”
That said, I do think that imitating and copying and studying the work of others is a phenomenal way to learn. While the paintings I produced were beyond mediocre (wrong side of beyond), I think I am a better painter for having produced them.
Steve, what do you think of the many books and courses that promise to bring out your inner Weston or Adams? I recall having a book that purported to teach something called the “zone” system. Surely the reach of the instruction went past mere emulation, but it seems there was an inference that you too could create a masterly Half Dome if you but applied yourself.
The museum had – and maybe has – a policy of allowing qualified students to copy paintings, granted they were of a different size from the original. Frankly I never saw anybody successfully capture anything essential – the size clause being superfluous.
The key problem for the student, should he or she be looking to gain more than a semblance, was that the painting before them was a finished product and did little to reveal the peculiar circumstances and experiences leading to its production. There was and is a veil of silence across such works that can often defeat the art historian and certainly the student seeking practice.
June, I salute you for undertaking such a risky venture and allowing us to watch. Quite frankly, I doubt if anybody can do a compelling version of a P or B analytic piece. You would have to learn how to stand before a camera in baggy clothes, hand on hip with a cigarette palmed in that continental style. You would need to throw sketches in the air like confetti and move compositional ideas about with scraps and push pins. Then you would need a circle of kindred spirits with loose-limbed minds and attitudes who would debate ideas on alcohol and adrenaline far into the night. You would need to absorb influences like a dog sniffing hydrants. And when you woke up some afternoon, hung over and wondering who that was next to you in bed, and noticed a new painting in the corner and realized through the haze that the strange apparition was yours, then you might want to consider the forgery business. I imagine that Portland is full of alcohol and adrenaline, so there you go.
Karl,
Copying a photograph through sketching would probably be a very useful exercise for composition, as you say. But even though I’m very interested in composition, and I bet it would help me, I’ve never tried it. It seems more a tool of trained artists — not most photographers. Our loss!
I have always thought that copying from an old painting in the same style may not yield anything new to the painter other than slavishly producing an exact copy of the painting rendered before her/him. On the other hand attempting to do a painting or a photograph in a uniquely personal style would not only help develop your style but would also help you appreciate and interpret the original subject work that you used/appropriated to produce your stamp.
Cannino’s advice might seem a little dated today but would have been relevant reading in the age of guilds, freemasons and artisan workshops where adherence to a particular style might have meant the difference between hunger and sustenance…
Jay,
Our last comments crossed and I didn’t notice yours until now. On photography books, there are plenty giving good instruction on craft that will help whether you’re emulating a great or not. And there are many that promise more and provide less. As far as attempting emulation, Adams himself published the best guides to how he made his pictures, and they have been helpful to many photographers. But I have never seen a really good analysis of his (or anyone’s) style in the kind of detail I’d like. It has to be gleaned from snippets of insight in many places. Maybe that’s for the best.
Keeping in mind today’s art, Cennini’s advice might sound a little bit too conservative, but there is some truth in what he wrote. Nowadays, we give too much importance to originality; every artist needs to be clearly identified from the onset of his career, as if decades of one’s career are not enough to establish a style.
One of my art teachers, who was very dogmatic in his persistence for us to be trained in a classical manner, always said that you have to know the rules before you decide to break them. In class, he would analyse a classical painting or a sculpture and then make us do studies of it. He would also give us assignments to produce paintings in someone else’s style. Not to create copies but to capture the spirit of an artist. In those days, most of it seemed futile, but today I really appreciate what he made us do.
Looking back I realise that the process of trying to understand how a painting was made, made me discover a lot of techniques that otherwise I would have never discovered. Trying to understand other artist’s frame of mind, might give you the possibility to discover something new.
Sunil,
I have often pondered whether copying or imitating would inhibit personal style. Many of my friends believe this to be the case. And I suspect it could be in some instances.
But for myself, whether because I’m too stubborn to be heavily influenced or too inept to partake fully, the imitations I take on are wholly enriching to my imagination. Looking ever more closely at what the artist had done as well as trying to sort out the process by which she achieved what she hoped to achieve make me far more aware of possibilities and potentials in my own work.
The danger, I think, can lie in the other direction — that once seeing what another great mind, eye, and hand have achieved, I can imagine becoming intimidated and stopped cold. But I’m too old to let my own ineptitude stop me — that would be foolish — it would be a refusal to live my own life to the fullest.
Jay,
Portland is definitely full of adrenaline and alchohol, but I’m not exactly part of that scene. Although adrenaline isn’t so far removed from my own scenario.
But you are certainly right — I would even venture to say that once Cubism has had its moment, it’s unlikely to make a contemporary comeback, regardless of the life style the contemporary artist takes up.
But that’s not the point, is it? The point is/was far more for me to try to see and imitate, however ineptly, a piece or two of Cubist art in order to become a better, more thoughtful, more ept painter myself. I think I’ll forgo the ciggies, though, and the person I wake up next to is a pretty settled affair.
June:
Settled, but an affair nevertheless. Glad to see the flame is still alight.
There’s a carver out on Green Road who does devotional sculpture for Catholic churches. He copies things. Want a Riemenschneider? He can set you up. Walk into his sales room and it’s like a high end gift shop. So? He may be exhibiting his own expressionistic style in certain works, but you wonder if it isn’t another knock off.
To my mind, copying is not an end onto itself. Those who will most benefit from copying have already entered with a place to stand. What it may do for someone is sharpen the senses, enhance visual stamina, further hand-eye communication and force the individual to really pay attention to something for a period of time. Go look at Cezanne’s example: he was a copyist by nature – other paintings, magazine illustrations – it didn’t matter. He was a copyist manque’, but a synthesizer with few equals. The more he copied the stronger and more original he became.
Jay,
The way you described the world that P and B were part of sounds similar to what is said at http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p=a&a=i&ID=1147
about Pollock’ s and de Kooning’s environment
.
What Karl innocently called a ‘concept’
seems to have been the product of hallucinations induced by mind-altering substances.
I am interested in the topic of mental illness and visionary art. I once did a post on it.
From an art historical perspective, Cennini’s methods really aren’t that outdated. What he’s describing is the Academic way of learning art which was pretty much the only way to learn to be a painter until the Impressionists broke out with their own Salon show and opened the doors to non-Academic art.
DeKooning, among others, had an Academic education and when teaching others to draw and paint, relied on those methods, too.
I think it’s incredibly humbling to try to imitate a master in any medium. I once fancied I could do black and white photographs a la Mapplethorpe. It took a huge amount of time and effort on my part to prove I could not but it was a great learning experience!
Birgit:
You might notice that I kept my comment entirely gender-neutral. Google Popova. Or pop on ova to Popova as suits you. Those Russians.
altered states constitute an under-reported aspect of the creative process. Absinth may have made the heart grow fonder and the art go yonder.
Steve:
Interesting about the Adams book that you mentioned – you’re saying, I gather, that even he could not pave a path to his own door.
A Scientific American arrived here with an article about intuition. The central emphasis of the story was on just how big and pervasive is the subconscious, the dimensions of which have yet to be fully fathomed. More and more, our consciousness is seen as an overlay, an oil slick on something very deep and wide. Let’s say that art is generated largely by subconscious processes and that good art reaches well into the viewer to a place where the mechanics of critique are superfluous. You can teach to the oil slick, but the deep moves to its own rhythms.
Jay,
Popova is powerful. Inspirational!
I did not know that pernod which I drank as a teenager in France was absinth. Checking in Wikipedia, I also read that Wormwood is supposed to be nontoxic, contrary to what one of my students claimed in her term paper.
But that is old hat. Nowadays, one seems to taps one’s subconscious below that ‘slick of oil’ using various mediations.
Birgit.
Scientific American was excited.
Do you mean to say “mediations” or “medications”?
Birgit:
It’s hot here – got your drift all wrong. Scientific American’s state of excitement has nothing to do with your point. Disregard.
It is hot here too. I meant meditations. What issue of Scientific American?
Birgit:
The June/July edition of Scientific American Mind.
Jay,
I’ll look for the Scientific American. I agree that the unconscious is huge and has a great impact on art, but I’d allow conscious thought to contribute more than an oil slick’s worth. After all, there are many conscious decisions in artmaking that tend to at least set larger parameters, as well as more minor details. I imagine, for example, that most painters are thinking about most brush strokes, even if there’s more behind the gesture than they’re aware of.
Steve:
An oil spill then.
One of the ongoing discussions here at A&P seems to revolve around the value of rendering in art. Some of us emphasize the importance of being able to accurately portray what is serving as a model. I can’t render much of an opinion as I can’t render, period.
That said, there is room, perhaps, to consider such rendering in a greater context. in some cases, it might be a kind of penmanship where the elegance of the gesture exceeds the eloquence of the message: the hand being of equal value to the bookkeeper as to the poet. Behind Michelangelo stands a great synthetic power.
I am becoming more aware of Karl’s drawing which is beginning to speak to me. I’m becoming more comfortable with the technique and I’m being caught by gestures. There’s the woman with her hands resting on an outcropping as though it were an aid to her devotions. For me, Karl’s painting technique is a fine evocation of a period and a place, but the outcropping…that’s where a sense of mystery enters.
I used to be a bit of a rockhound as a kid and I know that many of the finest crystals are formed by what percolates up from below. I’m sure that everyone here enjoys his or her crystal moments without really knowing what is causing them.