Deskilled figuration: a slow and seemingly inevitable decline towards a world devoid of beauty, where everyone can paint but really no one can”
Ian Goldsmith, 2024
Technical knowledge, like colour theory, anatomy and how to build up a painting are no longer taught at regular art academies because it is believed to disturb the creative process.
About a hundred years ago readymade paints became widely available making it unnecessary to research materials and pigments, resulting in a decline of technical quality. Nowadays students are interested in technical skills, but the teachers who can teach them are becoming scarce to non-existent.
Minerva is the last art academy in the Netherlands with a painting laboratory: a place to make your own paint and learn about pigments. Sadly, the workshops (paintmaking, woodworking, lithography, metalworking etc.) which hold a crazy amount of technical knowledge are hardly integrated into the program. Luckily you can go there yourself; it’s where I learned to work with metal and make my own oil paint.
I spend all my free hours in the workshops and my interest in technical skills made teachers and fellow students question my creativity; why wasn’t I trying new, crazy things? Because we are all on the shoulders of those before us. I don’t have to invent the wheel. I can use the knowledge of people before me to create durable, contemporary and renewing art.
My point of view is that technical skills are absolutely necessary to create proper work, whether you want to paint figuratively or abstract. One needs to master a tradition to have the right to rebel against it (Chaim Potok, my name is Asjer Lev, 1972).
In a world which is all about efficiency we need to take a step back and look at what we are doing and which materials we are using. Are they durable? In what order do I apply paint or other materials? Do they affect the environment, and in what way? How can I make both my work and my way of working as durable as possible? These are all things I teach in courses and workshops, hoping to counterbalance deskilled figuration.
Because with a lost connection to the materials you work with, you lose a deeper connection with your artwork.
The dazzling phthalocyanine blue, the bluish ivory black, the brilliant quinacridone rose; I love them only more by understanding.