People are important.
They are, you know it every time you glance in a mirror or sneak a peek at your family's portrait on the mantle.
But if that's true why do so many artists shy away from putting people in their paintings?
Maybe you were too busy Saturday night to take in the 18th Annual Maritime Show. The paintings are beautiful, but they are lonely. For all the majesty of the South Coast there was no one present in those paintings to enjoy it.
Sure I've heard the rumor, no one buys paintings with people in them. And while I do approve of artists working as commercial artists, making their work pay its own way, I have to admit, I don't believe every picture has that potential. Nope, some paintings are just not going to catch the public eye. And that's okay too. But if it is true that not every painting has the magic to sell, why aren't there people lounging around in some of them?
Fashion changes, take a look at the Impressionists for all of their wild-eyed radical zest they filled their canvases with people. Look a few years later and you'll find Norman Rockwell making people the centerpiece of his Saturday Evening Post covers. Fast forward a decade or two and Leroy Neiman takes a wild swing with a brush full of paint and fills brightly colored canvasses with sports figures, legends like Mohammad Ali. People.
Photographers haven't forgotten. Yousuf Karsh snatched the cigar out of Winston Churchill's mouth at the end of a grueling session and captured all of the tenacity and pugnaciousness that statesman fought the Germans with when his country had little else to fight with. That iconic image forever embodies Churchill. A person, albeit a very famous, legendary person.
So where have all the people gone? Part of what makes Van Gogh so relevant to us is the long series of self-portraits he did as a record of his decent in to depression and madness. We see the man drifting away a little at a time.
There must be some painters on the South Coast who marvel at the infinite variety of the people, fishermen, crabbers, timber men, loggers, merchants and all of the others. Take a stroll through the Farmer's Market and see if you don't find a face which makes your imagination tingle.
People have been the backbone of art for seven thousand years, that we know of. Those men in the caves of France drawing on the walls with charcoal and ocher they needed to leave a record of their existence. And part of that record was people.
Maybe the Maritime show is all about the sea and I'm missing the point. But I have a hunch Ahab would want a place on those maritime walls, maybe even Starbuck or Ishmael,
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