art appreciation, a study after van gogh, and an old rotring-pen drawing

study after van gogh (own work, 2013, 30 x 21 cm, click on the image for an enlargement)

always drawing, always thinking... i also share some other artistic characteristics with van gogh. like lack of artist recognition :-). [van gogh was very avant-garde, i'm just plain old-fashioned (except in the `details'): painting, drawing, sculpting.]

seriously, after having had three exhibitions this year, i find myself wondering once again what it takes to get people interested in art? it hardly seems to matter how hard it is and how long it takes to achieve a certain artistic mastery, it seems to be all about `buzz' (generalized page rank...see previous posts).

with just little recognition, at times i find it difficult to keep up my motivation to go further, work harder, push beyond my current limits. but on the other hand, i find the work to be its own reward and its own recognition. there something special in having drawings that i made 30 years ago, and from every period in between till now, and see the development, see aspirations coming true.


horse (own work, 1984, 20 x 30 cm, click on the image for an enlargement)

(this drawing i made with a rotring pen...and i'm still drawing with rotring pens over 30 years later.)

there is also some artistic merit in lack of recognition: it gives a lot of freedom, and quiet. especially the quiet i'm starting to appreciate more and more.

[a year ago i wrote on this subject also, see this post on frida kahlo. the downside to my dedicated-to-art blog seems that inevitably i repeat myself. i also have trouble highlighting other artists (much as i would like to!) since i'm always running behind with putting up my own work on the internet, due to health issues.]

again drawings (6): pine valley in painstaking line strokes

pine valley (own work, 2007, 21 x 30 cm, click on the image for an enlargement)


pine valley (detail 6.7 x 9 cm, click on the image for an enlargement)

one reason for adding the detail: it might give an inkling how many lines this one drawing took to complete. i find it interesting to note that this level of detailing inevitably leads to image files which are significantly harder to compress than average photgraphs. in the case of this drawing, the compressed .jpeg file is about 10 times as large as when compressing a normal photograph...showing how much information is packed in such a drawing.

oh, and i should add that the file (around 1.2 Mb) still doesn't do the real drawing much justice.