comparison of artists - how? who? owh!

today a friend compared my work to that of leon adriaans, a dutch artist (1944-2004). because, according to my friend, he worked so directly from his feeling, intuition, subconscious, or similar phrasing which i don't precisely recall.

be this as it may, i looked at pictures of his work on the internet...and found myself wondering yet again at the way we all look and experience so differently. i do not see any real similarity in adriaans' work and mine, in fact he seems to have worked in a style which is no doubt contemporary but which does not appeal to me at this superficial first webglance. i will come back to it however, since i don't trust my first judgments in these matters.

(you see that i'm following the tower of babel thread from bruegel, previous post).

i'm often left with a feeling that there are ravines as well as distorting static between what i wish to communicate and many -even interested- observers. is this what leads many artists to oversimplification? `if i put something new but not trivial in it, my message becomes open to ambiguous interpretation' ?

gypsy girl, 2007
there is a video women in art by philip scott johnson showing a merged-together sequence of women-in-art. the one thing that immediates strikes me in this video is that the extreme majority of these women are `pretty', doll-like, young...and that the painters use rather conventional realism to communicate the conventional message of conventional beauty...like the so manyth hollywood feature where dashing handsome brave & strong man saves world & pretty (no more qualification necessary) woman from mishap.

(somewhat by quantum association:) it appears to me artists are expected to create visually unambiguous messages, quickly assimilated in existing patterns for judgment. so that it doesn't unduly tax the energy of the casual observer.

in the netherlands, if people do not like a painting, they say: it doesn't resemble anything. as a very negative qualification (this is really true, believe it or not).

so what room does this leave for developing new visual foundations? well, that problem probably holds for many disciplines. writers are supposed to write books with a certain not-too-difficult format, style and characters. composers/songwriters idem.