Tag: realism

I gotta give y’all a heads up. I am a college student that’s getting an visual arts bachelor’s degree. This is an OPINION, not a research article/journal. If I can find “proof,” great. Otherwise, you can just enjoy the writing if it means anything to you.

So, I stumbled upon this argument online.

I can’t say I disagree with most of the points, as I feel neutral about it. But one thing that stuck out to me was the part about having to study realism to have good art?

Tell me y’all, what’s your idea of realism? You probably won’t be wrong, but I’m sure we all will have different opinions on it.

So, what is realism?

Well, realism is when a picture represents reality. It’s simple.

That leads to when a picture is realistic. Commonly when one thinks of realism, they see hyper realism, photo realism, Baroque art, renaissance art, Leonardo da Vinci! Yes, those are realistic, but those aren’t necessarily the same type. In a contemporary art class, I learned the word mimesis—the deliberate copying of the real world. It was a very interesting concept to me because it was never my intention to copy anyone’s art completely. Mimesis, in the book/article we read in class was used to describe copying a picture exactly. The author claims that it is impossible to copy nature exactly and what we are really doing is denotation—which is the literal representation—but that doesn’t mean that we are replicating reality, but in fact, representing it. (This is taken from Reality Remade by Nelson Goodman)

I’ll use a common denotation.