Practical Aesthetics for the Art Photographer: Meta-Texture

Version 1.0, Page 4, ©2003 by Dale Cotton, all rights reserved

Finally, in the mid-1800s the Impressionists rebelled, returning to a certain primitivism and essentially tiling the plane of their paintings with brush strokes.

Fig 6. The Seine at Argenteuil, Claude Monet (image courtesy of The Web Museum)

There are many forces which must have driven painters to abandon literalism, but the one I want to focus on here is the desire to regain the aesthetic tools of pattern and disruption. Which I've discussed in my Composition Tutorial under the labels of unity vs. fragmentation as well as rhyme and repetition. Like post-Renaissance artists, the mainstream of art photography since the f/64 Manifesto has been almost obsessively enamoured with its strength in literal representation. Yet from the vantage of pure design, this very strength is it's greatest weakness. Picasso once said that to work from nature is to draw toenails. However graceful the overall elements of a natural scene may be, at the level of fine detail it is often chaotic.

Fig 7. Nature ungroomed - small section of large photo

The orthodox approach to handling this in photography is to find scenes with as few elements as possible - to create icons rather than vistas.

Fig 8. 69-13, Dale Cotton

Yet one can tire of always eating sweets.