The Landscape of Painting

The Perfect Painting

In 2000-01 I did a series of watercolor paintings that I called “camp roads”. In Maine a camp road is a windy dirt road through the woods that leads to your cabin or house by the lake. These roads are usually a very pale tan, and in these paintings I wanted to show the beauty of the dappled light and shadows.

Camp Road No.6 | Stephen Springer Davis | 2000

At this show there were about 40 small watercolor and pastel landscapes, maybe ten of which were from the camp roads series. I’ll mention in passing that the show opened about ten days after 9/11, so as might be expected, attendance was minimal for the opening. But the good side of such a small number was that I had the opportunity to chat with all six of the people who came. I really wanted to know what they liked and what they didn’t like about my artwork. Among other things, the most surprising criticism from some was that they didn’t like the camp roads paintings. When I asked why, they all said because there was no sky or water. Bummer.

One reason that I was curious to know what the guests at the opening thought was that several years earlier I read a funny and fascinating article by Richard B. Woodward in The New York Times called The Perfect Painting from February 1994. Two Russian artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, wanted to find out if it were possible to make paintings that reflect the tastes of Americans. They studied other parts of the world too. To find out what Americans liked, they carried out a nationwide survey on people’s attitudes toward the visual arts. Do people like art? Do they think it’s necessary? If so, what do they like and not like?

In the survey they asked respondents what color they liked best. Did they prefer religious paintings? What kind of scene appeals to them most? What season do they like to see? Certain people or animals? And so on. Once they tabulated their results, Komar and Melamid, being artists, set out to paint the Perfect Painting. Here it is:

The Perfect Painting for the USA | Melamid and Komar

Note, along with George Washington, the presence of plenty of water and sky. See? My guests at the 2001 opening were right in sync with what the rest of the USA want to see in a painting. I took their suggestions/criticism to heart. I don’t really see the point of doing paintings that people don’t like. I don’t have an envelope or agenda to push. I just want to do paintings that I like and other people do too. And I hope they’ll want to buy them too. Since that opening I’ve never done a painting that didn’t have a least a piece of sky in it.  Having a studio full of paintings is of little value to me.

Tags: landscape painting, Maine, the perfect painting

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Musings on my earlier work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.