Pretending to Busk

In my art course today I did a tonal underpainting for a double portrait of street buskers. We painted from the models standing in the studio, but will fill in imagined backgrounds next week.

Got to find a suitable background before then. A classmate suggested adding a cat to the left side of the picture to balance the composition. Adding a cat or several cats sounds very suitable to me!

We had an interesting tutorial chat contrasting the approach of Seurat with that of Cezanne. Seurat's scenes appear more contrived and considered, and the figures seem smooth and simplified as though they are carved out of marble. While Cezanne has a liveliness and immediacy, combined with a rhythm of brush strokes across the surface. It's interesting how different sensibilities have their own expressiveness. It would be easy to classify Cezanne as more expressive, but considered work can also be intriguing and exciting - at least, that's the point our tutor made.

I think that everyone has styles they prefer, but I'm also critical of the fashion of looking down on "tight" painting as staid. What with the likes of abstract expressionism being put to decorative use in textiles and interior design, it doesn't really have the upper hand of the shock of the new anymore (several generations later). I'm not sure there's any kind of plastic art that can be produced fast enough to satisfy the apparently accelerating demand for things we haven't seen before. Might as well learn to squeeze the last juice out of the old... until we discover aliens.