NOTES ABOUT REALISM; 6.1.24
... So why shade and blur everything? What we see today in hyper-realistic drawings is an attempt to simulate a photo, in other words, to achieve photogenic "realism". Now, why would a draftsman want to compete with photographs, if their material plasticity (the effects of realism promoted by the very material of the pencil) is something rarer and more superior than the mere photographic record? If there's one thing that photography will never capture, it's the identity of a stroke.
When Michelangelo sculpted his Moses, he was looking for something more than the smooth forms of the finish, and even though his achievement in making the hard marble bend to the smoothness and naturalness of the cut form was something close to divine, Michelangelo still didn't have them as his end, his end is contained in the legendary exclamation when he saw his Moses realized: "Pharla-te!"
Michelangelo was therefore looking for life, and life is always expressed full of realism, the latter being like a sensibility that demonstrates what is alive.
Wel, Rodin's vigorous forms, made not in marble but in clay so that his hand would leave the marks of the sculptor's gesture on the clay, are just as vivid as Michelangelo's, just as realistic, even if the smoothness of one was in the other an inverse power to the glory of the gesture.
But today I see designers seeking the smoothness of the image as an end, suffocating the very end of life under the obsessive addiction to smudging.
Methodical constructions of a geometric canon that is more like an engineering drawing, imprisoning visions of reality under the reins of rationalism.
When it comes to drawing, the eye will always be a better mathematician than the formula of geometry. The eye, in turn, emancipates what the formula imprisons.
Drawing begins with the eye, because the eye directs the gesture of the hand. The geometrizing formulas of this architectural way of drawing end up imprisoning the full vision of forms under the rule of reason, so they geometrize everything, start drawing with squares, cubes, lines and diagonals, and then try to "polish" a form that will emerge on the surface of the support already emptied of its life, since it hasn't been seen in its full realism. Then they finish making up the corpse with obsessive shading, turning the hands not into life-giving objects, but into printing machines.
... So why shade and blur everything?
What we see today in hyper-realistic drawings is an attempt to simulate a photo, in other words, to achieve photogenic "realism".
Now, why would a draftsman want to compete with photographs, if their material plasticity (the effects of realism promoted by the very material of the pencil) is something rarer and more superior than the mere photographic record? If there is one thing that photography will never capture, it is the identity of a line. Drawings aimed at achieving realism, whether in studies or in a finished work, have never had to compete with the freezing light of photographs; everything in the drawing is alive, because the matter of graphite, charcoal and crayons is there breathing, vibrating, telling us about the hand that made them.
The realism per ipsum is not necessarily achieved through photorealism or so-called "hyper-realism", but through the combination of elements of plastic material on a support with the aim of creating an aesthetic nature that evokes reality, but without merely replicating it, as this would be the creation of simulacra, not works; therefore, when strokes, dashes, smudges, tones upon tones aimed at the work of the pencil to build realism, come together on paper, plasticizing a reality typical of its nature, this nature inherent in the drawing will be inspired by nature itself, deepening its perception. When the elements of the drawing are harmonized, when we blur certain details, outline others, deepen shadows in certain areas to simply suggest the presence of matter through a light trace in others, we are building a rich, expressive and therefore realistic drawing. If we blur everything, in an attempt to make everything "homogeneous" to simulate what we see in a photo, we are making the elements of the drawing perish and therefore its richness, its strength, its realism.
If you look at Leonardo da Vinci's drawings, you'll see how much he smudged them to convey the perception of mass, weight and volume. In other words, the master of the smudging technique didn't smudge everything. But you could say: "They were just studies".
As far as the characteristic of a study as a finished work is concerned, I won't go into it here, since I have probed this concept in another text *, so let's take another artist, famous for his great realism inspiring other realists, the neoclassicist painter Dominique Ingres, the Raphaelite line (or simply classicist) of his drawings make them seem not only realistic, but harmonious, since the line used by Ingres was used for this purpose, that of conveying the sensation of beauty through the harmony of the line; the bodies of his subjects, in turn, are "unfinished" and suggested by the line and soft strokes, which immediately makes us notice a kind of "charm" or even style as a kind of fad of the time to be cultivated by a bourgeois taste, however, if we think about the overall composition of the drawing, looking at them more closely, the feeling of realism is already there (in the drawing with the finished face and the "suggested" body), since the line that delimits the mass of the body, even if it is devoid of elements of density (such as the hatches), still gives us some sense of volume because of the way the line is used, and a body suggested only by lines and crowned by a face well shaded by strokes and smudges makes our eyes linger better on the portrait's countenance.
Drawing of a young woman's head by Leonardo Da Vinci.
Next to it, a portrait of Madame Baltrad, from 1836, by Dominique Ingres. Below is a drawing by Ingres from 1816.
So Ingres offers us his utopian realism, that is, the beauty of his harmoniously realistic portraits. Coarse realism, in other words, radical naturalism, arose at a time when the concepts of utopian beauty - but still realistic - were being distanced due to the ideas of realist and naturalist literature, which were laden with materialist thinking (and a good deal of anti-romanticism). However, what would differentiate the utopia of beauty from dystopian beauty would be less the treatment given to the techniques of drawing and painting than the intellectual heritage of the artists.
Munch considered himself a realist, his influences were those of realist painters, heir to the school of Christian Krohg, admirer of the work of Toulouse Lautrec: both naturalist painters, although the latter had an even more heterogeneous approach than the former, since he was driven by the avant-garde movement of the 19th century. But his thinking touched his work in such a dramatic way that he became an inspiration for the expressionism of future avant-gardes. Corot and Coubert, in fact, were heirs to the romanticist treatment of painting, but sought to portray the realities of concrete life, which did not prevent Delacroix's idealistic nuances from permeating his works with a playful aura. The origin of Courbet's world tries to be impure, it tries to be realistic in the radical sense of the term, but it is still beautiful: it is the crowns of realism, bequeathed to us by Da Vinci, that refuse to leave us when we search for beauty, whether through realist or romanticist thematic thinking.
What Gustave Courbet thought was impudent in his painting "The Origin of the World", stripping away the title's concept of a divine origin for a human one, as well as bringing the focus not to a human countenance but to an "Ione", thus demonstrating his "realist" intention (realist, here, in the sense of what conceptualized the realism movement of which Gustave Courbet was a living symbol) nevertheless made it apparent, through the graceful contours - despite the relaxed pose - the Renaissance idealism that crossed the centuries to nuance Courbet's realistic sense of the beautiful and ideal form, in such a way that we don't exactly notice an erotic or sloppy thought when we contemplate his painting, but we are taken back to the elevated sense of the mother of men and the providers of life on earth. In other words, the naturalness with which the female flesh is represented to us reinforces the sense of what is pure because it is natural, and elevates us, through naturalism, to the contemplation of what is beautiful through the ideal of the feminine as a receptacle and source of creation, the latter being a beautiful act of nature, and therefore of God.
Delacroix, for his part, looked at Ingres inside out, but his search for life in the work through the expression of the image is an affirmation of Ingres: the deepening of reality and therefore of beauty.
The elements of drawing, their material loads, just like those of painting, therefore shape the work, adding weight to some points, lightness to others, defined lines to some parts, smudging where it is necessary to attenuate - or "blur" - the rigid matter in others, giving harmony or drama, according to the pretension of the perception of reality aimed at, for the realization of the work, that is, its realism, its life.
Therefore, it is not a question of photogenicity, or the simulacrum of photography, blurring and blurring for a dead image, but of realism full of life, of life full of reality, achieved by the material loads of the work, and by the condensed work of substantiality.
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