I recently read a wonderful essay by Maggie Siner. The essay touched on many different issues of painting, and is well worth reading (and re-reading!). The concluding paragraph addressed one of my favorite topics--copying the Masters. Maggie wrote that a painter does not copy the Masters in order to "paint like Cezanne" or "paint like Monet", but rather "to learn how different perceptual minds work by re-living the visual experience and world of that painter." I love the idea of re-living the visual experience of Degas, or Manet. What a way to learn!
Maggie wrote that the practice of studying and copying the Masters lets a painter learn which of many approaches to painting truly resonate with him or her. By "copying", I believe that she did not mean actually reproducing the Masters' paintings, but rather mimicking their styles. Learning to see the world as they saw it.
The practice of mimicking the Masters is not limited to painters. The novelist Raymond Chandler admired Ernest Hemingway as the greatest American novelist of his time. So he wrote imitations of Hemingway's prose, in order to absorb what he liked about it. Likewise, Proust wrote a series of articles imitating the styles of the great literary figures Balzac and Flaubert.
Twyla Tharp, one of the greatest ballet dancers and choreographers of the 20th century, used a similar approach. As a young dancer, she would stand behind every great dancer then in New York and literally mimic him or her. She said that this imprinted their movements into her own creative DNA.
Yes--we all have our own "creative DNA", which leads to our individual painting styles. Maggie makes a persuasive argument that studying the Masters, far from making one a copycat, helps one harness his own unique predispositions. Here's to learning from the Greats!
The practice of mimicking the Masters is not limited to painters. The novelist Raymond Chandler admired Ernest Hemingway as the greatest American novelist of his time. So he wrote imitations of Hemingway's prose, in order to absorb what he liked about it. Likewise, Proust wrote a series of articles imitating the styles of the great literary figures Balzac and Flaubert.
Twyla Tharp, one of the greatest ballet dancers and choreographers of the 20th century, used a similar approach. As a young dancer, she would stand behind every great dancer then in New York and literally mimic him or her. She said that this imprinted their movements into her own creative DNA.
Yes--we all have our own "creative DNA", which leads to our individual painting styles. Maggie makes a persuasive argument that studying the Masters, far from making one a copycat, helps one harness his own unique predispositions. Here's to learning from the Greats!
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