- "It looks as if he couldn't make up his mind where to put things."
- "It's just a mishmash of bits with no regard for compositional design."
- "He could have portrayed his feelings about this room with his pieces in a much more pleasing fashion and maybe wouldn't have had to explain it."
- "The pieces aren’t even painted well."
Comments such as these (made on the Painting Forum) raise the question: "What do you define as 'well painted'?" Do you need it to be with realistic, fine detail? Do you mean painterly where you can clearly see what it is but there's also a sense of the paint/brush strokes used to create the image? Can it convey a sense of a thing without fine detail? Is some degree of abstraction acceptable?
It ultimately comes down to personal preference, and we’re fortunate to live in an era in which so many styles exist. However, only ever painting objects so they look like realistic representations of themselves very much limits the potential of paint, in my opinion. Realism is just one style of painting. It feels "right" to many people because of the influence of photography, that is the image looks exactly like the thing it represents. But that so limits the potential of the medium (and photography for that matter).
Knowing what you like and don’t like is part of developing your own style. But rejecting an artist’s work without figuring out why you don’t like it or knowing why it’s considered a Big Deal is to shut off a potential avenue of discovery. Part of being a painter is being open to possibilities, to experiment simply to see where it may take you. Unexpected things can come from unexpected sources. Time and again I get emails from people who’ve tackled various Painting Projects saying they’d never done anything like it before and were pleasantly surprised by the results. For example: The Worrier and Pinpointing the Problem!.
