Skip to main content

I can paint cats... A Controversial Commentary on Abstract Expression Versus Subjective Art

The Dream Chaser Laptop Sleeve by TET. Available from RedBubble.
The Dream Chaser
Laptop Sleeve by TET.
Available from RedBubble.
The video, below, will no doubt be a bit controversial so let me say from the outset, I do like good abstract expressionist art. In fact I am in awe of artists who can create work in this genre that holds my attention.

Also, if you're not familiar with my art, you need to know that I have painted more pictures of stylized cats than any other animal.

What frustrates me to no end is abstract expressionist artists who compare my art to that of a skilled crafts person and imply that I am not a real artist. What they mean is that I have learnt how to draw and paint much like a craft person learns how to turn wood or knit a jumper. My work lacks true expression and does not reveal my inner being in the way abstract expressionist, non-representational artwork does.

In doing so they imply that their art is a higher art than mine. Total rubbish.

Abstract Expressionism is like every other art form. It can be learned. The more you practice the better you get. The more you learn to tap into your emotional self the more you'll be able to express yourself through non representational art. My point being, abstract expressionist artists are no different from me and no different from wood turners and knitters.

Great crafts people put a lot of emotion into their work. As do I put a lot of emotion into my work. I'm not trying to impress people by saying (in my case) look how well I can paint cats. Just like the expressionist, I'm hoping my work might provoke an emotional response such as a smile, empathy, sadness or any number of emotions depending on the juxta position of my characters and subject matter.

That said, the next time an abstract expressionist stares down their nose at what I do I'd just like to remind them that children, before they learn how to represent their world through art, are natural abstract expressionists. They paint using colours and marks based on what they feel like doing in the moment - and they didn't spend any time learning how to do that. They don't naturally paint cats that look anything like my cats and they can't knit jumpers or turn wood either!

TET Life Topics:

Comments

  1. AnonymousAugust 13, 2006 7:14 PM

    Love seeing your work in progress. Very nice.
    Lauren.

    ReplyDelete
  2. TET (David Arandle)August 14, 2006 12:25 PM

    Thanks Lauren. The work in progress shots are quite an old bit of footage (from 2002), nice to finally have a reason to dust them off and show them. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousAugust 14, 2006 9:19 PM

    I like the speeded up film of the painting, but don't know how you managed to put it all together! I suppose it is alot of different shots all played fast in sequence to each other? (Why am I getting a squeaky noise when you speak - it seems to be to do with the microphone?)

    ReplyDelete
  4. TET (David Arandle)August 14, 2006 10:41 PM

    I took about 1 photo every 30 seconds whilst I was painting (had my web cam set up to take the photos automatically). I then just put them all together like they animate cartoons - flipping through one picture at a time quickly.

    Squeaky noise could be because I sometimes 'whistle' my 's' sound. I try not to do it but don't always succeed. Not that used to speaking out loud.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Design for MoneyAugust 15, 2006 12:42 AM

    Cool cat,
    nice job :)

    Design For Money

    ReplyDelete
  6. TET (David Arandle)August 15, 2006 1:20 PM

    Thanks DFM :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated by an actual human (me, TET) and may not publish right away. I do read all comments and only reject those not directly related to the post or are spam/scams (I'm looking at you Illuminati recruiters... I mean scammers. Stop commenting on my Illuminati post!).

Buy Whimsical Cat Art Prints by TET (Redbubble Store)

Slide 1
Slide 2
Slide 3

Enjoy Your Favorite TET Art Up Close, Interactive, and so Relaxing!

Enjoy Your Favorite TET Art Up Close, Interactive, and so Relaxing!
Relax and Challenge Yourself with a Fun, Whimsical Cat Art Jigsaw - 30-1000 pieces. Click Image for More.

Popular posts from this blog

New Cat Art Collaboration: TET's Cats Paintings and OpenArt AI Model Workspace (Photobooth)

TET's Cats AI generated art trained on my own art style. Way back in the early 2000's I started painting stylized cat artworks to illustrate some cat themed poems I'd written, that I exhibited and sold online in an exhibition titled 'Sleeping Cats' in 2004. You can see all these early works in my Flickr Album . Many are also available to buy as prints in my RedBubble Store . Leading on from that I began selling my paintings on ebay where the cat themed works were almost guaranteed to sell over any other subject I painted. As a result I became some what known for my cat art to the point where people would commission me to create images of their own pet cats in my cartoony style. Flash forward a decade (almost two at this point) and I haven't painted any cat themed art in years. To be honest I haven't done any traditional painting at all in years. In the last couple of years AI image generators have really caught my attention. Specifically that they are able t...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

Movie Opinion: The Michael Keaton Batman Trilogy - Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992), The Flash (2023)

The Michael Keaton Batman Trilogy on DVD. Despite its questionable CGI, troubled star, and the turmoil surrounding the DCEU's future when it was released, 2023's, The Flash does give us a new, and probably final, installment in Michael Keaton's run as Bruce Wayne/Batman. With that in mind, this holiday season, I had a real itch to spend a day binge watching what is now The Michael Keaton, Batman Trilogy .  To give you some context, I own every Batman movie (except Pattinson's The Batman ) on DVD, and every DCEU movie up to The Flash. The ones I don't own are only missing because I haven't gotten around to buying them, and they're likely still available on a streaming service I'm subscribed to. I've had Keaton's first two Batman movies in my collection for the best part of two decades but I can count on one hand how many times I've watched each. The last time was more than a decade ago.  Before I watched them recently, if you'd have asked...
4 comments
Continue Reading »

Tesla Unveils Optimus Robot Prototype and Second Generation Prototype - Movie, iRobot, May Be a Documentary?

Tesla Optimus Prototype One, Development Platform. September 30th finally rolled around along with Tesla A.I. day and the unveiling of not one but two Tesla Optimus Robot prototypes. Which was quite a bonus since we hadn't heard anything much about these robots when I wrote about them in July of 2022. Before revealing the first prototype, Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, made a point of managing everyone's expectations, just in case anyone was thinking they were about to see anything close to the actual human concept 'robot' we saw last year. I honestly don't think anyone was expecting that. Prototype One - Development Platform The prototype that walked out on stage, for the very first time without ever being tethered to anything (apparently), was still incredibly impressive despite not being streamlined and highly refined in its capability. It walked quite well - eerily similar to the first generation robots in the 2004, Will Smith movie, iRobot , and even did a bit of a dan...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

"Ya Mum Reads it..."

You'l find my own Photography in this blog too. Quite a while back I did a survey that tells you what kind of audience credibility your blog has. I'm not sure what the score was but I do remember the commentary which boiled down to "Your mother reads your blog regularly but you probably don't have much wider appeal". Fuck you survey! (Hi Mum, sorry for cursing! I do appreciate you reading, really I do!) I don't know how many regular readers I have, if any, but I do know, on average this blog receives more than 4000 page hits per month, much of it coming from search engines like Google. Perhaps of some interest is my new current top search entry point of all time, people looking for Bert and Ernie,  who I wrote some commentary about when it was officially announced that the Sesame Street Characters were not gay . Which is quite a departure from Krippin Virus from a few years back when the movie I am Legend came out. The thing about this blog is t...
8 comments
Continue Reading »

TET Artwork Diary: Nansen The Cabin Boy's Cat of the Belgian Sailing Ship, RV Belgica, Trapped in an Antarctica Winter, 1897

Belgica in the ice. 1897. Photo: Adrien de Gerlache   Y ou wouldn't ordinarily think of cats and penguins together in the same image but that's what I found myself creating when thinking of an idea for my next painting. I have painted penguins before as part of my Australian Animals series from the early 2000's, and I have a couple of cartoon  penguins (that you can see in a very old post, Designing Formal Penguins ) I created for a Yeti skateboard graphic, so, I didn't just randomly think, 'penguins'. Recently I had a revelation about my art, in that I don't simply paint pictures of cats, I paint 'relationships'. Almost all of my paintings of cats feature two or more cats, or a cat with something, such as a butterfly, bird, fish, goat... and why not a penguin? However, I didn't want to just paint some random cat with some random penguin. I wondered if there was ever any real cats in history that may have a reason to meet a penguin? Turns out, on...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

Movie Review: Project Hail Mary (2026) *No Spoilers*

T his wasn't a movie I particularly wanted to see even though it's right in my wheelhouse, realistic Sci-fi. However, after Project Hail Mary did so well in theatres it became a movie I wanted to check out once it reached streaming. In this case I watched it on Amazon Prime Video. It wasn't really on my radar because, on the surface, it's not anything I haven't seen before, even quite recently. Lone astronaut goes on some kind of mission, mission fails, astronaut tries to salvage the mission and somehow finds a way home. However, in my opinion, what makes this film different is in the detail. There are a lot of often seen tropes here presented in new ways, that may capture your imagination. The movie opens with science teacher, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), waking up from deep sleep on a spaceship, far from Earth, with no memory of why he is there. Presumably a side effect of basically being put in storage while the spaceship travels across vast distances. From the...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

Review: ArtHelper - The All-In-One AI Writing + Marketing Assistant for Artists - 'ChatGPT for Artists'

ArtHelper prides itself on being all 'human-made' art. T he idea of an AI, trained specifically on art business marketing, that can not only offer advice on marketing your work, but also assist with creating all the content too, is certainly appealing. Especially to those of us who would rather spend more time creating our art than trying to sell it. ArtHelper does just that whilst attempting to be your 'home' on the internet. A destination for your profile and portfolio, a marketplace for your art, and a directory of artists as well, with one distinction - all the art must be human made. Which, for you AI artists, doesn't count the prompt for AI generated art - because the idea, according to ArtHelper's creators, isn't the art. Which is a fair point, in terms of promoting art 'made by a human', but can get kind of murky when you understand that not all AI art is generated from a single prompt... and 'found object art' isn't actually ...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »