"No One Style Is Better Than Any Other", Assess This Statement With Examples From At Least Two Different Types Of Art.

Laura Gentry

“No One Style Is Better Than Any Other”, Assess This Statement With Examples From At Least Two Different Types Of Art.

The definition “Art”, taken from Encarta Dictionary, is:

1 a human creative skill or its application. b work exhibiting this.

2 a (in pl.; prec. by the) the various branches of creative activity concerned with the production of imaginative designs, sounds, or ideas, e.g. painting, music, writing, considered collectively. b any one of these branches.

3 creative activity, esp. painting and drawing, resulting in visual representation (interested in music but not art).

4 human skill or workmanship as opposed to the work of nature (art and nature had combined to make her a great beauty).

5 (often foll. by of) a skill, aptitude, or knack (the art of writing clearly; keeping people happy is quite an art).

This states how art is the creativity of the artist himself. It can be used as a way of expressing their thoughts and emotions, or as a way to show the world as beautiful as they see it.

One artist who used art to express his feelings was Salvador Dalí. Dalí referred to his work as “hand-painted dream photographs” and claiming that the majority of his imagery came directly from his own dreams. This proves he just painted his feelings and dreams, not trying to show the actual world in any way. Although he did like to promote his work, by taking part in many of the Major Surrealist Group Shows, including the International Surrealist exhibition in London in 1936 (where he performed his most well known stunt of giving a lecture in a divers suit, but the helmet got stuck and he nearly suffocated).

Salvador Dalí was altogether a surrealist, although he did experiment painting in a cubist style. He also made a film with Luis Buñuel, who was a very famous film director at the time. The double images in his paintings, and the different interpretations that could be drawn from a single set of shapes, which he called his “paranoiac-critical method”, were his greatest contributions to Surrealism. Dalí also did a lot of design work that was used in a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, which was a huge success.

Salvador Dalí’s most famous painting is the Persistence of Memory, which ...

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Salvador Dalí’s most famous painting is the Persistence of Memory, which is shown below:

Dalí once said that one of his main influences for this painting was warm Camembert cheese that had liquefied which can clearly be shown with the clocks. However, it has been said that the main focus point in this painting in the centre is based on an image from Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, which is also shown below:

John Constable is known as a Landscape Painter, and his work heavily influenced the Impressionists.

One of his most famous paintings was of the Salisbury Cathedral. Obviously this is a real life object, which he viewed, thought about for a long period of time and then painted as he saw it in its full beauty. This is shown below:

This is considered a very beautiful picture and many people can just stare at it taking in its beauty and great attention to detail – how realistic it is – how much it looks like a photograph, how talented the artist must be to paint so clearly, how each brushstroke can still be seen on the original and how much difference each one makes. However, Salvador Dalí’s pictures are just considered to be strange but powerful as they are from his deepest thoughts, they give an insight into Dalí’s strange and in some ways twisted mind.

It can be argued that although Constable’s picture is painted with much more attention to detail and is a much more attractive picture, Dalí’s picture took thought and shows imagination and creativity, whereas Constables does not.

Another of Constables most famous paintings was Flatford Mill on the River Stour, shown on the next page:

This painting shows life – Constable was also fascinated with reflections on water, so rivers, ponds and lakes frequently feature in his paintings. He found these landscapes beautiful and spent many days painting them.

Constable took great care in his paintings, he wanted the viewer to see not only the beauty but the life of the picture. Dali’s paintings more explore the connection between fantasy and reality – he allows the viewer to make their own assumptions and just paints from his heart – which in some ways could be better than Constable just painting what he sees. Constable usually spent the summer and early autumn in East Anglia (where he grew up), making oil sketches and drawings in the open air, and the rest of the year in London, developing his sketches into finished paintings. In his paintings he attempted to keep the freshness of his feelings in front of nature, to convey a sense of “light, dews, breezes, bloom” (as he wrote in a letter to his friend and biographer C. R. Leslie). To do this, he used much bolder, rougher brushwork than was customary, and to many of his contemporaries, who were used to a smooth, painstaking, glossy paint surface, his work looked crude and unfinished. However, this gave Constables work a difference, and so we can actually see each brushstroke, giving it almost a 3D effect. He also used patches of pure colour to render the effect of light on water, trees, and pastureland, and the atmosphere of cloud and sky. A very different artist is Andy Warhol, a Pop Artist, completely different from both Surrealism and Landscape Painting. He used prints for most of his paintings, so they are usually very bright colours. These bright colours will appeal to different people than the strong but dull colours usually used in Dali’s and Constables paintings.

Some pop artists duplicated beer bottles, soup cans, comic strips, road signs, and similar objects in paintings, collages, and sculptures. Others incorporated the objects into their paintings or sculptures, sometimes in startlingly modified form. Materials such as plastic, urethane foam, and acrylic paint, were frequently used. Pop Art not only influenced the work of subsequent artists but also had an impact on commercial, graphic, and fashion design. They are much like cartoon drawings or animations and Pop art is thought to be very American-based, the majority of the artists being from America.

Andy Warhol is like a mixture between Dalí and Constable – he paints what is there – like Constable, but does not do it for its beauty, and he does use his imagination like Dalí, as shown in the colours used.

Paintings by pop artists are not generally well known for their attention to detail, as they are simply prints, but are known for their sharp lines and bright colours and ability to light up any room they are placed in.

His most famous of paintings is the Campbell Soup can, which is shown below:

This campbells soup can print is very famous – along with the Marilyn Monroe print as shown below, of which many different copies in slightly different colours were made:

Warhol did not spend as much time and effort doing each separate painting as Dali and Constable did – so some may say that for this reason his pictures are not as good, but they have a wonderful amount of detail, and sum up life as it was in the days of these paintings (1960’s).

The type of paint the artists used also affects the overall appearance of the paintings. Warhol usually used silk-screened enamel for his paintings and prints, as using this allowed endless repetition of the paintings. Dali and constable, however, used Oils as they gave the depth and mood that they wanted their paintings to show.

Overall I think that no one style is better than any other, as everyone’s style is unique, they do not always fit into a set style. Artists usually paint for themselves – they do not paint to approve to the public, therefore in a way we do not have the right to judge them – they are only trying to appeal to themselves, therefore us judging them would be inaccurate – they would need to judge themselves, which is inappropriate and then there would be biased opinions.

Also, they have very different techniques, and very different aims. This makes it hard to judge whether one painting is better than another, as they have different aims to start with, for example if they were both aimed to show a specific countryside scene as realistically as possible, it could be judged to see who’s was better, but as they are aimed to show different things in different ways it makes his more difficult.