Attached Link: Resting

> Quote - professional critics and galleryholders usually don't have an academic degree on arts, or perhaps they are artschool dropouts, but they have an excellent eye how to promote or sell art.

 

Does an art degree mean much when applying for an artist position? I'd tend to think that the portfolio is all that counts and that the degree is somewhat meaningless. It would be cheaper to hire somebody, without a degree, who has roughly equivalent talent. In fact, I'd lean to hiring the person, without the degree, because that person has demonstrated more initiative and innate talent by being as good as a graduate with four years of advanced artistic training.

 

It would probably be fairly safe to say that most Poser users aren't major fans of what passes for art in the last half century. I don’t care how hard somebody tries to tell me that a couple geometric shapes represents something profound about man's role in the universe--I'm still not seeing the emperor's clothes. Nobody will ever convince me that dripping paint from a bucket onto canvas is art. Unfortunately, the art world is full of people that have glib tongues and the ability to make crap seem like gold and people with lots of money are silly enough to spend millions of dollars on stuff that those, without the benefits of a fine arts education, consider garbage. I create the art I want to see and thankfully don't have to rely on that artwork to earn a living. I doubt I'd ever have the stomach to spin the kind of BS necessary to be considered a critical art fave.

 

R_Hatch has done a good job of summarizing the common faults of a lot of Poser artwork. The only thing that I would disagree with is equating time with quality. Creating a great Poser image takes a lot of time, from concept to refining poses, to the time consuming render-adjust lights-render process to fine tune the differences between what lights are doing in the draft mode and with final shaded renders, and final postwork tweaking. The best Poser artists produce better work than the worst because they are better artists in all senses of the word. Who knows how much time an uninspiring piece of Poser art took? It could have been ten minutes. It could have been ten hours. It's hard to say.

 

It's probably fair to say that there isn't a single artist showing a gallery to the public that didn't think they were showcasing something worthwhile. Who would take the time to upload an image that they thought was junk? It's the reason that, if I leave a comment, I say something about what was right with the image. I figure, over time, as they continue doing more and more work, they'll improve and see what was wrong with the older effort.

 

A nice thread, a while back, asked artists to show their first and latest works to see how much they've grown using Poser and give some encouragement to starting artists the humble beginnings of many others.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2641035

In some cases, the differences were relatively minor and mostly showed the limitations of earlier models and rendering features. In other instances, the differences were much starker. One of the artists that showed the most improvement was Jenay.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?user_id=10631

The two images being contrasted, at that time were the first and "Girl in an Abandoned Rusty Corridor". The thing that hit me most about viewing those two images was how much Jenay improved as an artist. Poses were more realistic. Camera angles were more dynamic. The newer figure had some expression and not just a blank stare. Jenay's artistic skills dramatically improved over the years.

 

For chuckles, I decided to give myself a challenge to create an image wholly out of freely available products (except for Victoria2), using existing poses, and not tweaking anything (other than hiding some body parts to avoid poke-through). I don't consider "Resting" a great image or anything, but it's not horrible. Even by trying to do something as fast as possible, it still took three hours to create. There was about an hour finding all the props and items to put into the image and adding them to Poser, another hour composing the scene and adjusting camera angles and lighting, and another hour playing with renders and lighting, and then a quick color adjustment in Photoshop. The textures in the grass didn't hold up to being magnified and that's not surprising because Traveler probably never figured anybody would try to magnify the grass to that extent. Overall, it's not an awful image even though it's the quickest I've done. For anybody interested, I provided links to all the free items in my comments (all links were good a year ago, but I haven't checked to see whether they're still good).

 

Here's the link that made me question the value of criticisms from artists who aren't as good as the artist that they're critiquing.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=219323&page=1&pp=15

Although an artist doesn't have to be DaVinci to critique a work, it means a lot more when the critic has demonstrated considerable expertise with their own work. When an artist, like ernyoka--who's a bit better than me, leaves advice on something I've done, I take it more seriously than somebody whose work is a few years behind what I'm currently doing. It doesn't mean that the other criticism isn't valid. It's like a lot of unsolicited advice we get in our lives. Generally, the last thing I need in life is somebody, whose life is a walking trainwreck, telling me how to improve mine when I'm not unhappy. All I want to tell them is to get their life in order and worry less about mine because that person is obviously not spending enough time cleaning their own house. That's how I feel about a lot of critics. Spend more time improving your artwork and less trying to improve what others are doing.

 

An artistic skill is like any other. It improves with practice. When I said that a person, who, gave up art when they stopped coloring, probably doesn't have as good an artistic eye as somebody who never stopped drawing, I wasn't denigrating what can be created with a crayon. I was talking about the distinction between the practiced skills of one person versus another who gave up too soon. That latter, person, inspired by picking up Poser and getting back into art, has catching up to do and has to make a lot of artistic mistakes before they can get better. The last thing I ever want to do is chase them away by telling them how much is wrong with what they dared to post in their gallery.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon