Hi! I LUV art...but one problem taht i am facing now is that i don't understand what is realistic art, stylize art and abstract art(sorry if i made any spelling error). Please tell me what is realistic art, stylize art and abstract art. Thank You. :)

i guess realistic is a literal (more photographic) representation of an image. eg. old masters classical art. stylized is more iconic, a stylized art piece tends to have a set of rules, a very particular style, in its representation of an image, almost like a code for the 'reality' of the image, like art nouveau, with its simple curvy lines, imitating natural forms like plants and hair etc. or comic book art with its exaggerated muscles and sharp lines and shadows. whereas these two represent images in a straight forward way, abstract art is just a mess. -just kidding, most abstract art doesn't really represent an image, more an idea, or feeling. therefore it usually doesn't have any recognisable objects in it, it is colours and shapes that, i suppose, are intended to stimulate the fundamental emotions and ideas of the viewer. --kk

Hi Jaxintha,
I would love to be able to answer your question in a clear and concise way, but I´m afraid it´s very easy to get lost in a tangle of categories, definitions etc. However, I´ll try... To make such an attempt at all possible, I´ll start out by stating that here I´m referring to paintings and the history of painting, as it is normally understood.
What is usually called realistic art, is renditions of recognizable 3 dimensional objects or phenomenons on a 2 dimensional surface. In realistic art recognizability is part of the game and therefore the artist tries to match his colours to those of object, he uses perspective and so on.
Stylized art differs from realistic art in the way, that emphasis is placed more on what is the narrative content of the picture, than on the picture itself. Instead of ie. portraying a king and his court as they look like, the king is depicted larger than his courtiers in order to point out that he is the most important figure in the picture. Stylized and abstract art touches upon each other in the sense, that a child´s drawing of a human face is highly stylized and an abstraction of the human face...you know, two dots represents the eyes, a line represents the mouth and finally a circle is drawn around these signs as an outline...ooh, this is getting messy; I´ll try again: In stylized art, it´s okay to use any means of pictorial simplification, as long as the intention gets across, whereas in realistic art the artist tries to make a pictorial representation of the visible object ( and not only the underlying intention.) Just to make all this even more foggy and fuzzy, the realist artist often has his realistic reprensentation as his personal intention...oy, vey.
O.K., abstract art... Well, in a sense all representative art is abstractions: A painting of an apple is an abstraction; real realism would be to exhibit the apple as it is! In everyday language the term " abstract art " is often used about highly stylized art; ideally, abstract art is art that doesn´t refer to anything, but itself. Hence all the desperate attempts to produce " pure, abstract art " by painting canvases entirely white, blue or what have you... At least some artist has acknowleged that this " purity " is an impossibility: Just to exhibit a bit of canvas is to make a reference to painting and the history of painting etc. ad nauseam...
For now, I rest my case, having given it my best shot. I hoped you find this useful, interesting, amusing or whatever...
BTW, if you´re still interested in the subject, I can recommend E.H.Gombridge´s " The history of art " as down-to-earth and thorough reading material.
Have fun in the brave new world,
Kim

In our European culture,
Realistic Art :
Trying to exactly "copy" the reality .
When you look at a realistic artwork, you must get the sensation that you're looking at a photography(exact copy of reality), or that you're looking trough a real window with a real view.
Realistic Art has been the essential kind of art until the end of the 19th century.
For example, we always wanted to have pictures representing us, in the old times(no photography)we used to ask painters for that, and now we can see what our ancestors looked like when we look at their realistic portraits.
Even during the middle age(until 1492), artists tried to do realistic Art but it doesn't look really realistic because of their lack of technic at that time.
Realistic Art has been contested by french philosophe Pascal who said "Art is vanity because people give admiration to a painting when they don't even bother look at the original landscape".
Realistic Art started to be rare because it has been replaced by the discovery of photography.

Stylized Art:
I think stylized Art has mainly begun with the impressionists.They wanted to represent the impression they get when they look at a landscape more then the detail.For the first time, we started to see "dots" of paint that give impression of light and colors.
Impressionists were very contested, almost everybody use to say "it is horrible" or "they don't have any talent", people juged impressionists "scandalous" at the end of the 19th century because it was not Realistic Art.
At the very beginning of the 20th century Symbolic(painter Klimt)Art(which is stylized Art too) has quickly been followed by a new kind of stylized Art called Expressionism mostly represented by painter Egon Shiele(Klimt's Student).
Schiele used to concentrate on the accentuation of the models expression and body language.
After the first 10 years of the 20th century, the raw fight of impressionists and expressionists revendicating freedom of the artists to paint what they feel trough what they see gave birth to a new field of totally FREE expression wich is:

Abstract Art:
Abstract arrived with the Dada or Dadaism during the 10's, Dada became the Surrealism with Breton, Picasso, Picabia, in France.They were still painting blue skys or sand dunes, but they introduced objects sometimes looking real but in those objects, a part of realistic aspect was abstracted, a face without mouth, an upside down tree with the texture of marble.
Again, they were very much contested, people said it was soooo scandalous again.
The surrealism has been the first major revolution in Art and led us to what we call abstract Art now.
An abstract Art object now is not representing anything else than the metaphysic feeling a painter has from the reality .
With abstract Art, painters are now free.

I said to you before that from the Impressionists, all the new kind of expression were banished from the people. But we notice that as time is advancing, people evoluate and learn how to look at new kinds of expression, they stop spitting on it and instead, adore it . But it takes time for our little brains to understand .

yeah i think aurelia gives a good set of examples and description of these things. however all these styles of art have been around as long as people. prehistoric people, cave men etc. painted pictures of the animals around them, and each other, and made them very stylized at times (along comes writing) and also produced abstract forms, carved stones and 'jewelery' for instance. it seems humans have always felt the need to produce this full spectrum of creativity.

Really, Aurelia, when I read your last posting, I couldn´t help thinking that you´re not that interested in anything else but your own kind of work ( I´ve seen your web-pictures...). If you honestly believe that all figurative, realistic or what you want to call them, painters are interested in is doing with paint and brushes what might as well be done with a camera, you´re leading an impoverished life in terms of experiencing paintings.

I paint " realistically " because I like it, because it means something to me; it has become an emotional necessity for me. Besides that, it has so many facets that mere " abstraction " doesn´t have. No matter how " realistic " I paint I still face the same artistic challenges as everybody else: Composition, figure / ground, colours etc.
And if you´ve ever tried to paint " realistically ", you too would have learned, that you don´t just simply " copy nature ", it´s an impossibility. Trying to paint a picture of an apple, in which the apple shall appear a real apple, means endless analysis, both of your own perceptions and of painterly technique, endless trial and errors ( and successes ). This aspect alone is extremely fruitful ( pun intended ) for further work and then comes the problem of trying to achieve a proper balance between the content (the motive ) , the form ( how you choose to paint it ) and the total impression the picture makes. In all, what you have to say about " realistic " art is superficial and banal.

Regarding your statement about impressionst art as stylized art: I don´t know which stupid book you picked that up from. The aim of the hard-core impressionists was exactly the opposite: To do away with stylization. Through hard work they discovered that the most true ( and beautiful ) renderings of natural phenomena was achieved by disregarding all the had learned about " High Art " and instead relying on the own senses ( A hard thing to do, as everyone who has tried it knows ).

" With abstract Art, painters are now free ", you write. What do you mean; artist have always been free to do what they wanted to, it´s first when you begin to concern yourself with outward success, that you forfeit your artistic freedom. It´s with abstract art as with everything else: 99,99 % of what is being done is being done for immediate financial or emotional success and therefore it´s only natural that masterpieces are few and far between.

Finally, it´s beyond me how you can twist poor old Pascal´s statement to be an attack on " realistic " art; it´s quite clearly an observation on an superficial, vain, one-dimensional public.
And judging from your entry such a public still exists...

Sincerely,
Kim

I've read most of your replies and by now you should be more confused than ever. Many people have their own ideas about the various kinds of art.
#1.All art is an abstraction of reality (duh, it is not real), but that does not mean it is non-representational which most confuse with abstract.
When you can tell what you are looking at; a horse,or a person, it is said that art is natural/representational based on reality, but not necessarily realistic, because it may be abstracted from reality, or stylized in some way. When you look at Pollock or Kandinsky (squares, lines or just pure color, no horses or recognizable objects) we refer to that as non-representational. Sytlized is when an artist chooses to devise a pattern to represent a more complex texture or part. For instance, if I were going to draw a lamb, and I didn't want to take the time to cover its body with individually drawn curls, i might make rows of bulls'eye marks to represent the curls. Realistic is not a term used by art historians. Realism refers to a 19th century movement that had nothing to do with the way a work was painted but more about the feelings of the artist. Super-realism was a modern movement 70's, 80's to today, where an artist uses a photograph as the basis of his work (Richard Estes), but he too, may abstract his work. Look at Chuck Close for super-realism; blown-up close-ps of faces, but when you get close all you see are tiny areas of color or sometimes stylized marks.

Moving up

One day I met a teacher who was an extremly good one,I was 15 years old.I was doing figurative stuff, and everytime I use to show to the teacher my paintings she used to say(while looking at my nude woman),"Well, I see a woman".
I know the feeling of doing realistic Art and it's just not doing well with what I feel now, it's ridiculous to feel injured by my words, come on I was just trying to give my point of view!
And I want to defend Pascal,"Art is vanity because people give admiration to a painting when they don't even bother look at the original landscape", and this is f***** true!!
+Painting has become something really more special since the surrealists.
If you can't swallow what I say, come to Paris wich is the city I live in and learn from the museums I visit almost everyday!

Djehan

Here is a link that might be useful: http://www.angelfire.com/fl5/hendeka/

Nice to hear from you, prof and Aurelia, this place was drying up...

Prof, what you write about representational / non-representational art is very well stated. However, I don´t meet very many people who has given the matter much concentration and I try ( maybe to hard sometimes...) to make people understand that there is more to a painting, in which you recognize an apple than " A picture of an apple."
You write: " All art is an abstraction of reality ( duh, it´s not real ) " and here I apparently have another experience. As time goes by, I find myself less interested in " the arts " and more and more fascinated by paintings and the paintings are very much real. It´s the reality, the actual happening of the experience of life itself that really great paintings give me, that makes the greatest impression on me. And I´m not talking about trompe d´oeil or photo-realism; quite the opposite in fact. The late self-portraits of Rembrandt for example; the paint surface is rough and messy, outlines blurred etc., but the paintings as a whole exudes so much life it´s almost eery. Such powerful experiences makes most contemporary art pretty insignificant. It´s useful for me to remember that almost all of Rembrandt´s contemporaries were pretty insignificant too, so it´s not just a matter of " They were better artists many years ago ".

Aurelia, I´ve taught painting myself and met a lot af art teachers, including some ones ( well, actually most of them ) who could say something like " Well, I see a woman" and I get really pissed off every time I meet that attitude. It´s not only disrespectful, it´s also implies that the 15 year-old girl isn´t a proper artiste. Well, most 15 year-olds aren´t and that´s quite the way it should be. Kids and young people should paint and draw whatever they really want to. If it so happens that they continue to have a passion for painting, they will invariably and naturally use the skills they have aquired for their artistic purposes, if such purposes is of any importance to them.

I didn´t mean to attack Pascal; I actually agree with him, but I still feel that his remark is pointed at the public and not at the paintings. I´ve met many people outside and inside the art-biz, who wouldn´t recognize neither natural beauty or a piece of art, if it bit them in the ass.

And, yes, painting has become something else since the cubists and the surrealist, but it doesn´t necessarily follow, that all of this " something else " is also " something better". Listen to the composers who were the contemporaries of the early avantgardistes; Schönberg, Webern, Varese etc. While their work is both fresh and beautiful, their followers ( Stockhausen, Boulez, Berio etc. ) produced mostly sterile and academic exercises.

Finally, I´m actually going to Paris later this month. And I look very much forward to seeing tose fantastic paintings again; Olympia, Dejeuner..., Le fifre, La maison du pendu etc. You´re so lucky, you have the opportunity to experience those paintings as often as you like.

Bye for now,
Kim

You miss the point, this Art teacher has been the best teacher of my life, and I had quite some horrible boaring Art teachers too, I was at the hampstead school of Art when I was 19 and it was horrible to practice boaring nude and still life all day long drawing a hairy male model or a half fat but very feminine female model.I was admitted to classes at the Beaux-Art of Toulon on the riviera when I was 10 years old.I've studied Art history and I was reading the Impressionists encyclopedia when I was 12.More, when I was 7 years old, my first and only vocation( until now) was to be exactly whith children words you know"an expert in painting, expert en tableaux", I've been doing realistic drawings until now but only as an easy recreation, but as abstract painting is taking me all my energy, I prefer to only reserve myself to that now, because the teacher I had when I was 15 has been Cesar's student and other teachers at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, she has exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou(that you can visit by the way as you come to Paris I've red), absolutly all her student went in the best Art schools Paris counts(4 exactly), she was first prize on the fith year of her study finishing school at les Beaux Arts, she's the teacher who allowed me to be selected to offer 2 of my paintings to Francois Mitterand in 1994, and 1 of my paintings to Jacques Chirac in 1995.
When she used to tell me "I see a woman" on a painting, I've learned to recognize in her eyes that what she meant was "I want to see more", so I've decided to do more and go deeper in my mind to find a kind of infinite poetry nobody has ever seen before, and I've found this poetry in abstract Art.And I knew since a long time that I was an artist when I was 15, by the way I was all the time first in my painting classes, even with this teacher who used to tell me "I see a woman"(here is sadism), with marks as 19,5/20 for subjects as painting like Matisse, or reproduction of f**** Mona lisa, passing trough Egon Schiele teenager period, or cubism, impressionism, mixed media, acrylic, watter colour, divers deviated materials, sculture, modelage etc,etc, even comics or a multimedia producer degree.All my life has been about pictures, even when I was 4 years old, as I was violently rejected by all the other childrens, they use to pay me attention because I was drawing the best despite my left eye who can't turn left, my eyes are my life and I always knew that .
As for listening to Varese, I live myself with a contemporary musician wich is Laurent Mialon and I go to la maison de la radio to Francois Bayle concerts, Bernard Parmegiani, Christian Zanesi for the GRM, Xenakis at le Theatre du Chatelet, all the compositors you mention I judge them a bit old now but it's my personal opinion.
Voila, have a good trip in my beautiful city
I recommand you to check out the last days of the Mondrian exhibition at le Musée D'Orsay, it's very refreshing somewhere .

But my opinion on the differents abstract, stylized, or realistic Art remains the same.Just don't take it too personal as I try to be neutral.
I want to paint now, I need to paint Hendeka

Hendeka

Aurélia-Djehan Derungs

Here is a link that might be useful: HENDEKA : WTC FALL

Hi Aurelia,

I didn´t so much miss the point as try to make a different point. While I was much impressed with how well you´ve gone through your various schools, I can´t help thinking that there is a problem in how the teaching of "art " is most often carried out.

Very often I get the impression that the teacher more or less conciously tries to push his or hers own preferences down the pupils throat. A good teacher should at least try to avoid this and concentrate on giving the pupil an opportunity to learn the basic visual vocalbulary. If there is a great artist somewhere in the pupil, it´s up to the pupil to realize that and to evolve from there. It´s easy and therefore tempting for a teacher to learn the pupil some tricks and techniques, that make a painting " look exactly like art ", but then the whole point is lost.

One of my artistic " heroes ", Friederich Hölderlin, wrote: " Learn about life through art and learn about art through life " and I find that the most precise expression of what I am rather helplessy trying to state. But of course, he ended up stark raving mad, so perhaps he ( and I ) have got it all wrong...

Looking very much forward to visiting your fascinating city,

Kim

PS.: Can you help me with some suggestions for good art-book shops ?

I´m getting nostalgic...

I think it's a disservice to try and simplify what is a complex issue. "Realistic" may mean photographic to most people, but it needs to be acknowledged that photography is representation (as opposed to documentation just as much as any other cultural product. The problem in attempting to provide a so-called objective definition is that these terms are culturally specific and inter-related. In other words, stylization is described in terms of how far it departs (and in what ways) from some imagined norm of "realistic" representation. This norm derives from the Renaissance and has gained mass acceptance through the medium of photography. It seems to me that it's important to keep in mind, not only how artificial these distinctions are, but also (as someone else has pointed out ) that the process of representing itself depends on abstraction. The art historical narrative and much writing on art builds on the flawed (and bizarre) premise that there is a such a thing as an accurate depiction of appearances in a scientific sense as i.e. that what is taking place in the creation of "realistic" images is transcription as opposed to translation.

Perhaps I am repeating what has already been stated but this is a complex subject! Allen Fletcher did a great job of addressing this. Kim did a good job defining but i'd like to add my bit. realistic art, stylized art and abstract art are fairly fluid terms. The terms can be applied in unison to one work or may describe a work with just one term (this is less likely)

Realistic art aims at the naturalist (according to nature) visual reproduction of reality.... There is a specific art movement called Realism (with a capital R) as opposed to generalized realism. Realism (R!) was realism with a political purpose. (See Courbet's The Stonebreakers or Repin's The Barge Haulers of the Volga. )

Stylized art is according to a style or stylistic pattern rather than stricty according to nature. This may mean the simplification of an object to represent something, like a circle containing 2 dots and an arch to mean a smiley face. Stylized could also be according to a "type", like Inge's women who are most definitely stylized. Stylized art predates impressionists thousands of years..... (cave art! see lascaux, ect.) Aurelia needs to brush up on her art history.

Abstraction is NOT a 20th century invention and predates dada, ect. (by the way.... futurism predates dadaism as a movement )
Abstraction is to depart from accurate representations of the natural world, to a variable range of possible degrees.
Abstract art in the modern sense usually expresses something about the subject or artist and is an attempt to convey the essence of a concept or form. (expressive=subject and expressionistic=artist)
Modern abstract art has 3 basic forms: non-representational, formalism and abstract expressionism.

Goya and Turner are both good examples of pre 20th century artists with whom the 3 terms (realist, stylized and abstract) can really confuse. Modern art doesn't begin in the 20th century.... this is one of my pet peeves!

A lot more interesting than hacker/sales posts. I hope some one is still around to add to it.

If the intelligencia could just find the time to post something once every few days, I think we can easily send the trash down to the basement. It really is pathetic that the admin put this resource up and then aparently forgot about it. Who's payng for the hosting??? and bandwith???