Realism and Virtue in Art.......

Every so often am accused of pandering to 'convention' because my work is realistic - indeed, sometimes very realistic... 'if one wanted to see realism, take a photograph' is oft the comment... but this merely seeks to hide the real issue at hand - WHY the realism? for one, contrary to presumptions, realism is NOT imitating reality, a mistake which is why positing photography as a 'valid' replacement... there are several reasons why the error, some of which are innocent mistakes bourne of ignorance, others being deliberately crafted attempts to 'invalidate' realism in art... to begin with, until the invention of photography, art served at least a dual purpose, ONE OF WHICH WAS THAT OF A VISUAL RECORDER, something oft overlooked in art and realism discussions... it is an importance, moreover, which aids in seeing how art was served over the centuries, and why, after photography's invention, that serving no longer was of prime or even if of importance in terms of the nature of art...

the proper understanding of art is that it is a SELECTIVE RE-PRESENTATION of reality according to the artist's FUNDAMENTAL [or metaphysical, to be more precise] VALUE-JUDGMENTS... note - selective re-presentation, NOT imitation... further, to grasp at the issue of realism is to recognize that humans do NOT begin their viewing of the world thru mere sensations, but thru PERCEPTIONS, which are as automatic as sensations are in the lower animals - and it as such that seeing the world as percepts is the beginning of how humans see the world is why realism, which is based on perceptual concretes, is the basis for grasping whatever the artist intend to show [for that is the purpose, TO SHOW ]... to show - what? well, THAT is what the 'fundamental value-judgments' are all about - as those are what the artist considers as of PRIME IMPORTANCE... this ties back to the 'selective' re-presentation, since one cannot include all within the borders of the canvas 'universe', thus must decide what to include, AND WHAT TO EXCLUDE as NOT being of prime importance... further, such considerations of, say, colors or shapes, serve, as consequence, MEANS TO ENDS, of the perceptual concretes [the objects to be included within the work]...

note, too, that in dealing with the nature of art, one is utilizing one's conceptual faculty - the reasoning aspect of one's consciousness, which takes the perceptual concretes - those objects of reality - and make abstractions of them, so as to make sense of the world around us - and of the world within the canvas borders... this is why aspects of those objects, the colors or shapes, for instance, have no meaning aside from the objects, but serve only as means to particularizing those objects...

note further, that these objects themselves serve also as means to the end - of the THEMING, of which the work itself is the means - the what and why of the importance which is considered as so fundamental... in other words, there is no copying of the world about, but visualizing abstractions of that world to serve a theming end, abstractions that, because of the primal perceptual nature of our seeing the world cannot be reduce further and make objective sense [that is, sense applicable to any and all who would see the work]... which means that works claiming to be art, but which pertain only to the senses, avoiding the perceptual, are contradictions in terms - without the perceptual to show meaning, there is nothing to give meaning, and as such there is no art there [decoration, perhaps, but nothing more]...