If you say, nice photo, I’ll say, thanks. The afternoon sun does this refraction performance through my front door. I can remember how I looked up from reading at my dining room table. I gasped and reached for my camera. These light effects don’t last long.
If you say, ohmygod that is awesome I want to make a painting of this, then…well, then, I’ll have to say, errmm, we need to talk.
The photo gives our attention a little jolt because it reminds us that in life there are these moments that we hardly notice because we’re preoccupied with our chores and plans.
But a painting duplicating the photo would be overdoing it. It would be superimposing grandeur onto something subtle.
I sympathize with this impulse to paint a scene that moves you and makes you sigh, oh how beautiful. You want to celebrate that, to dwell on it by translating every nuance and detail into paint on canvas.
But this experience of beauty does not translate. What a shocking thing to say. (We’ll talk about this some more, two or three posts hence, with the help of W.S. Merwin.)
Oscar Wilde said, “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.”
That’s also true of painting. People who want to paint their deep, genuine feeling about beauty, will produce–brace yourself!–things like this:
…and, of course, cats.
The word for this is Kitsch.
Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900
W.S. Merwin, 1927-2019
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 
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