The schmear

It didn’t start with the impres­sion­ists. Paint­ing with expres­sive strokes in which the artist cre­ates the impres­sion of a lot more than what’s directly pre­sented goes back to at least the 16^th cen­tury. Velazquez, for exam­ple, did it bril­liantly. It has been one of the core skills of most of the great visual artists, in all cul­tures, since the time that the first cave paint­ings were made. We all rec­og­nize, and admire, the bravura stroke that some­how makes us see what the artist is not really show­ing us.

But the real­ity of those per­fect strokes cre­ates a hor­ri­ble temp­ta­tion for those who can’t reli­ably cre­ate them. I call it “the shmear.” When we don’t know how to paint some­thing right, we smear some paint around and call it a day. While the viewer may be able to tell what this schmear or that schmear is intended to rep­re­sent, it cre­ates no res­o­nance in the eye or the heart. It’s just a messy blob that tells you that the artist wasn’t really try­ing, at least not right there.

You can see it even in good paint­ings some­times. Monet, in my hum­ble opin­ion, relied on the schmear often when he tried to paint peo­ple. I remem­ber sit­ting in a wait­ing room one time, look­ing at a van Gogh repro­duc­tion, think­ing about which parts cre­ated a dead on sense of altered real­ity with­out any need to actu­ally ren­der what that part actu­ally looked like. A few other parts, not so much. They were just schmears, places where Vin­cent had not the skill, the time, or the san­ity to look, see, and do his magic.

I’m not talk­ing about messy pant­ing. There are artists who paint in noth­ing but loose smears that some­how pull together into a whole that just works bril­liantly. I’m tak­ing about the paint­ings, or parts of paint­ings, where the artist, so far as I can tell, got sloppy and just made a vague mess. Some artists, alas, seem to do noth­ing but schmear paint­ing. Some of them get hung on gallery walls and appear to sell for a lot of money. Per­haps it’s my own fail­ure to see the qual­ity of their work, but to me they are doing noth­ing but mess­ing around with paint. There work doesn’t con­vey any­thing. They seem to sell because peo­ple have become used to think­ing of impres­sion­is­tic paint­ing as a good thing, and they can’t really tell the dif­fer­ence. Or they can, but think that oth­ers can see what they can’t. Plenty of ama­teur artists have learned that they can play around with paint all day, mak­ing one awful schmear after another, and some­one will tell them it’s good, or at least OK.

I can’t define the dif­fer­ence between a loose, bravura pas­sage and a schmear. But it usu­ally seems fairly obvi­ous to me. I’m not try­ing to be supe­rior here or claim that I have some kind of extra­or­di­nary per­cep­tion. This is just what I see when I look at paint­ings and try to fig­ure out whether there is a res­o­nance or not.

_Update 22 July 2007:_I don’t want to give the impres­sion that I myself am immune from the schmear effect. I’ve done lots of paint­ings in which I real­ize mid­way through that I didn’t know what I was doing and had resorted to schmear paint­ing. I don’t show those here because they suck. Also, usu­ally I tend toward more detailed ren­der­ing than schmear paint­ing allows. That has its own pit­falls, of course, but in that style of paint­ing it’s harder to cover up when you don’t know what the heck you are doing.