I was deeply looking at the painting and I hate to bring it down for you but Pam's watercolor doesn't seem to respect proportions, and I was wondering if Jenna Fischer herself did this. Still it means a lot to me but I've never painted could someone tell me how to start ? I'd like to make one of my own.
shareExactly. That's why its "motel art."
shareWell, the word 'Art' can mean a toilet glued to a wall (literally).
Someone wanted to mock what 'art' had become, and they painstakingly glued a toilet to a wall and called it 'Art' to wake up people to realize what's going on, but instead, he got rewarded for it and now that's a legitimate piece of 'Art'.
So Pam's stuff is not half-bad considering what it could've been.
However, it's nothing to type home about - it's unimaginative, below mediocre in all possible ways, there's nothing bold about it, nothing unique, original, and even if we forget the visuals, her 'art' doesn't make the viewer feel anything.
I was recently shocked - I know it's very late, but I have never studied paintings very much - to realize just how much feeling Monet could put into a very 'crappy-looking' picture, so that the painting almost becomes alive in some ways.
A good painting can 'evoke' things, feelings, experiences, even memories of a 'distant life' you forgot completely about, but which seems very real, even if the painting doesn't actually visually resemble anything recognizable, or appear well-shaded or anything.
Proportions do not matter - we have enough of them in real world. It's like complaining that 'real women don't look like that' when looking at a comic book cover where Mary Jane is depicted (real men don't also swing on self-made spiderweb vines in goofy suits all over the city) to have big boobaloons.
I mean, the purpose and ability of a comic or painting is EXACTLY to depict things that are not realistic or real. Sure, they CAN look realistic and 'as real as possible' as well, and that takes talent, hard work, dedication and probably 8 billion other things I don't have, and deserve respect as well.
However, why stick to 'real' or things that can exist, when you can give us 'surreal' or 'things that exist in other realms/worlds/imagination'? If we want boring realism, we have our lives.
Monet was able to create amazingly beautiful and 'detailed' things with amazingly simple methods and amazingly 'non-detailed' paintings.
He was -somehow- a master of creating detail without actually painting any. There's no detail in the painting, but you 'see' the detail in there anyway, because he IMPLIES it. This is so very difficult to do, I still don't know how - Bill Watterson was also able to do this in a more simplistic and casual way in his drawings and comics.
Monet was able to create ridiculously deep immersion with just a few, amateurish-looking paint strokes. How the heck he can create realistic water with such childish-looking, thick lines of simple color is beyond me, but holy cow do his paintings SPEAK!
This is one of those 'impossible to describe' things, as it's experience based on evocation that he was so good at, but for the first time of my life, I am truly discovering 'art', probably in the way it was always meant to be, in a deeply 'feeling-based' way, letting the paintings evoke something in me. Maybe Monet just was attuned to the same frequency or something, I don't know, but one of his paintings made me recognize the feeling of a very exciting place, and I reveled in that experience, but visually looking at the painting, there's almost nothing there, just a couple of pails of badly-painted hay. What the heck? How did he do it?
In any case, Pam's work is not bad compared to 'toiled glued to a wall', but it doesn't have any feeling, compared to what Monet was able to do (although even he fell prey to the 'bridge reflecting trap' where you should see the BOTTOM of the bridge due to the reflecting angle of the river, but he didn't paint it that way, sigh - I guess no one is perfect).
Now, in my viewpoint, a painting or a created picture (I REALLY want to avoid the word 'art') can give you something you don't ordinarily see or feel. It can give you a psychedelic mixture of colors, it can bring you to other worlds, it can evoke deeply..
The ability of something like that to AFFECT YOU is, what I think, this type of thing is all about. If it has nothing to say, if it's just 'mundane', even if it looks relatively good, I don't see the point of it. You have a camera for that.
With a painting, you are more free than camera can ever be. You can do 'impossible angles', you can draw 'mythological beings', you can do 'unrealistic color mixtures', you can have the ability to caress the soul of the viewer with exciting things that don't exist in the mundane, dreary, grey, 'realistic' world we all have to be surrounded by.
You can take the viewer into a journey through cosmic wonder and psychedelic dimensions that expand the viewer's mind or at least viewpoint to what is possible, in ways they might never have experienced before. You can truly change a human being, you can open up possibilities and chakras in them, you can offer them something WILD and EXCITING!
Pam's 'art' does none of these things. They're afraid to go on ANY kind of journey, they don't do anything unexpected, they are as safe as can be. They're like photos, but worse. They're like 'as safe realism as possible, but rendered in a childishly amateurish way'.
This is why Pam can never be a 'great artist', she quit every 'art project' she ever tried, sometimes JUST because she had to learn how a software / program works. She wasn't passionate enough about creativity to go through the VERY EASY process of learning how Photoshop or some illustrator software works.
"Oh, I have to learn how a very easy-to-use software works? No, thanks, I won't pursue my dreams, then."
Doesn't sound very passionate to me.
She has no inner fire, she has no burning desire to express something from within, she has no soul that needs to jump into the canvas as expression of something beyond the mundane.
So she paints what's mundane and safe, doesn't dare to break any moulds, doesn't dare to use colors in a bold way, doesn't dare to show what's really in her
In many ways, she's not really an artist, she's not really a painter, she has learned to use watercolors (which is harder to do than learning how some illustrator software works, but that's Pam for ya), but only on the superficial, technical level.
I mean, what 'good artist' draws an OFFICE BUILDING?
Sure, maybe if you REALLY see something beautiful in its hideous, boxy ugliness - sure, if you really are inspired of the building and can come up with a way to SHOW your own, unique vision of why that building absolutely needs to be re-interpreted from dreary reality into a wild vision onto a canvas, maybe.
But the end result shows us Pam didn't have a vision about it. She did it because it was 'a safe thing to paint', and she did it in the most mundane way possible. Didn't add any 'futuristic perspective', no 'psychedelic twirls of color', no 'deep feeling', no 'different use of colors', no 'what the same building would look from a different perspective (whether that's someone from another planet or a caveman)'.
Just the office building without even one added, unique flower climbing its wall. Nothing. Safe, harmless, boring - definitely not evoking anything, definitely not expression of anyone's creativity in any way.
'Motel Art' is better than anything Pam has ever done.
Did you really need to write a whole essay on this? What is your point
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