art teachers

The other day I was look­ing through an issue of Amer­i­can Art Col­lec­tor and saw a brief arti­cle on an upcom­ing artist. It showed some styl­ized paint­ings of peo­ple, mostly women. So I quickly scanned through the text and imme­di­ately found the sen­tence I thought I would find. It said that the artist had really found his style after tak­ing a work­shop with Milt Kobayashi.

My imme­di­ate thought was, “Dude, you didn’t find your style. You found his style.” The paint­ings all had the same sort of pretty car­i­ca­tur­iza­tion that is the hall­mark of Kobayashi’s style. It’s attrac­tive, but rather cloying.

I’ve had this expe­ri­ence before. I’ll see a few paint­ings by an “emerg­ing” artist and think, “clone of David Lef­fel.” Then I’ll look and see that Lef­fel is cited as a teacher. Or once I was at an open stu­dio event and saw a bunch of expres­sion­ist paint­ings. “Oskar Kokoschka,” I thought. And darned if her bio didn’t state that she had stud­ied with Kokoschka.

I’m not sure how I feel about this phe­nom­e­non. Once upon a time, it was pretty nor­mal for a stu­dent to develop a style sim­i­lar to a master’s: c.f. Van Dyck and Rubens, for exam­ple. These days, how­ever, it seems a bit of a shame when a painter is pre­sented as some sort of great tal­ent when that tal­ent really amounts to repli­cat­ing another painter’s sig­na­ture style.

That doesn’t mean that you should have no influ­ences, but bla­tant copy­ing of a style seems rather much, I think. Beyond that, I tend to be a bit dis­ap­pointed when all of the stu­dents of a famous teacher such as Lef­fel seem to turn out paint­ings just like the teacher’s. It seems as if the job of a paint­ing teacher is to help each stu­dent paint their own paint­ings, not more of the teacher’s work.