RETVRN! RETVRN!

Of specific interest to me right now are one or more coherent groups of humans on this planet, mainly far too online, some of them Venture Capital Adjacent, which is to say they either have the attention of, or want to have attention of, the relative newcomers (idiots) in the Venture Capital Industry, by which I mean Marc Andreessen and people like him. These coherent groups of people want us to "return" to various traditional things they deem good. The idiom of choice here is RETVRN, adopting a pseudo-Roman spelling, to indicate an affection for the Roman ways. Let us set aside the fact that the Romans would be incomprehensible to these people, but only in the brief moments before the Romans ate them.

These people hate modern art and modern architecture, but they're basically just anti-woke and they're pretty sure they don't like pomo, although they have no idea what it is.

The point here is that these aren't just fat ignoramouses in the bar griping about Modern Art, they're a coherent group of fat ignoramouses who talk to one another and are mildly influential in the tech industry (although they appear to be mostly unemployed themselves.) These guys like Renaissance painting and Gothic cathedrals and neoclassical sculpture and.. well that's about it. They mostly dislike things. But they fucking love those things. Just ask them about that thing where the sculptor does wet/sheer fabric over skin in marble. You will immediately learn that they've never been to a museum. They don't know that shit is everywhere and apparently it's fairly straighforward to execute.

But let's drill into Renaissance painting and art a bit, since I'm clumsily doing a little painting these days. Stand by for clumsy paintings!

There's a guy, a painter, who's loosely associated with these groups of people on the twitters. He paints in the Renaissance style. Kinda. His methods are I think modern, but his results are Renaissance-ish. He does nudes and still lifes. Mainly, he seems to sell large nudes to collectors, sometimes (one suspects "mostly") nudes of young men to signifcantly older men. One might be forgiven for imagining that he's selling paintings of twinks to old fags. Now, to be quite direct: I approve of this. Old fags should be able to festoon their walls with young twinks, and I am pleased as anything that they can. Also, this is very very Renaissance. There might be nothing at all more Renaissance than legitimizing soft porn through expensive bespoke painting.

But none of this gossip is what I'm actually interested in.

What's interesting to me about this kind of "realistic" painting is how it works. The artistic point is carried in some meaningful way by the subject rather than the method. Michelangelo's figures look heroic because the figure they represent is holding themself in a heroic way. The model looks heroic, and thence the painting. The painting is as direct a translation as is reasonable of the model, whether the model was real or imagined. Despite the fervent desires of the RETVRN idiots, Michelangelo's genius does not lie in his mastery of the human form, but in his grasp of the expressive possibilities of the human form.

This style of painting, and the passion for it, led in a fairly straight line to the development of photography which imediately turned around and murdered the style of painting. Nobody paints this way any more, except for a few niche guys catering to niche audiences. When photography summarily executed this kind of painting, there came a swift and vigorous change in painting, and to my eye a good one.

In the Renaissance, painting was the best way we had to render a "real-looking" representation of whatever the thing was in 2 dimensions, suitable for a wall. And, in Europe, this was what people were interested in. So far so good. Along came photography, and was instantly better at that job. This is well-understood to have liberated painters to find something else to do.

The thing I am interested in is barely less obsolete than Renaissance style painting, namely a kind of half-assed Impressionism.

A Renaissance painting laboriously reproduced more or less exactly what the eye sees, optically, and then allows the viewer to re-generate a percept from that which, we hope, more or less resembles the percept they would have generated if they'd seen the thing itself. Impressionism seeks to more or less directly paint the percept that the painter's brain generated while looking at the thing itself. More broadly than strict Impressionism, the painter can build a heirarchy of what's important. They can paint the eyes in detail, because they are entranced by the eyes. The rest of the face might be just a sketch, and the trees in the background, fuck 'em entirely. Just a blob of green is fine. Look, trees, who gives a shit? Look at those eyes!

Cézanne and Rodin are two artists I currently admire greatly, and they both made a lot of work which gives the appearence of being made very very quickly. Whether it was or not, doesn't matter. They're Impressionists, and they appear to be hurrying to nail down the Impression. Berger said of Cézanne that he painted the moment that you saw whatever it was (well, he said something like that) and that seems as good a characterization as any.

Also, making things very very fast appeals to me, since I have the attention span of a goldfish. The idea of spending 100s of hours on a painting strikes me as utter madness. I simply haven't got it in me. I've developed an approach to goache which involves walking by the painting every now and then and dabbing at it for a few moments, and I do that for a day or two, and then I stop at which point the painting is done I guess. This is kinda like my wife. She's prettier. You might notice that her hair is barely gestured at, and honestly, I don't think it matters at all, her hair is not the point.

Here we have a painting I made of a sculpture, and the attentive viewer might note that the background is not exactly rendered in detail. I am in fact very very happy with the background, because it evokes exactly the feel I wanted, but it's basically a wash with a few scribbles on it.

And just to show you what someone who's actually good at painting does, here's a Millet:

Millet wasn't even an impressionist, he was Barbizon. This thing was painted after the advent of photography, but before Impressionism proper gets going. Notice that Millet doesn't do eyes. He doesn't give a single shit about eyes. He's interested in the set of the body here, and very little else. He's painting the exhaustion of the laborer, the mood. The perspective is pretty Renaissance as far as that goes, but the proportions are wonky and Millet simply doesn't care about a hell of a lot of the details.

Anyway, RETVRN is a bunch of dumb shit, and Renaissance painting isn't something we should be taking seriously these days. Paint it all you want! Buy it, sell it, go crazy! If it makes you happy, I absolutely endorse any and all of it. But in a meaningful way, it's not a serious thing. If you seriously want to do the thing that Renaissance Painting does, you should just use a camera.