It's not a religion, it's a way of life.

*Warning, this is a work of satire, any resemblance to actual, pretend representational art movements is purely a coincidence*

Welcome to a new way of life.

Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps. Le singe-peintre,
dit aussi interieur d'atelier

I would like to introduce you to my new creation, the dawn of a “neo-life” if you will. It’s called PoKoNovitsch.

You see the art scene is big and confusing, and art history is even bigger and more confusigner. I came onto the brilliance of a system of thought that is PoKoNovitsch after seeing the growing rise in a desire to start art movements. I noticed that I too held a brush and a pencil, and by taking part in that craft means that I am a part of its history, and by being a part of history this means that I have opinions that matter. The first and foremost tenet of PoKoNovitsch is that for an opinion to matter one need to be either fairly good at drawing and painting, have relatives who were good, or be friends with someone who has skill! With high skill in one thing, you can have high skill in all things related to it. This is the magic of PoKoNovitsch.

So what is PoKoNovitsch exactly? Let me tell you. “PoKoNitch” we’ll call it for short, is NOT an art movement, instead I hope for it to be a style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists in the immediate future, in other words it's a way of life. You see it’s like sex, you know how when it sometimes feels really good? PoKoNitch...or we’ll shorten it again to “Pokes,” is like that good feeling. When it happens do you question it? Do you deny yourself feeling that good? No, of course not, why would you?

When doing research on what Pokes really should mean, I realized that intuition needed to be my guide, that I shouldn’t clutter my mind with the confusing ways of Postmodern intellectualism, or historical “facts” as it were. It was the intellectuals of academia who started the need for a way of life like Pokes, in their destructive quest to rid the world of all representational art. They created a way of life that glorifies only destruction and chaos, and anything under that banner needs to be ruthlessly obliterated without question.

But enough history, I would like to introduce one of the many benefits of Pokes, and that is a new interpretation on aesthetics, I call it Intuitive Aesthetics, or, “Intu-Ase”. There once was a great need to read books and do research, to study history, philosophy, sociology and so on. Artists of the past needed to read these kinds of books before Modernism turned them all into lies by rewriting them. The representational artists of the future will never need to look at a book again. Through the beauty of Wikipedia, and most importantly intuition, I discovered that by simply having participated in the act of making art, you can make fairly true assessments about art history and aesthetics as a whole. Not only can you do this about representational art, but you can also do it about other kinds of art which consists of mostly non-art, and philosophy.

I realized that I had been carrying Pokes around with me all these years and not known it. Everything I had been doing was Pokes, from trying to seduce my models, to showing off my penis to everyone to prove the point that by painting myself doing it, I was making it art in the face of the irony that is me going against anyone else doing it in another medium.

Non-representational art is bad at its core, one of the reasons is because it goes against man’s instinct to procreate. You see by making something that looks like a thing, the other person can see how much or little of what you made, looks like the thing you’re trying to make. I apologize for being deep here, but this is called being “objective.” Before Modernism came around, it was easy to get the women to see how well you could draw something. It was much easier to not have to come up with reasons for why we were all drawing naked people.

But what are you to do if someone makes a thing that doesn't look like the other thing he’s trying to make!? Well that means that this person is saying that there is no truth, that anyone can create anything, and well science has long disproven the categorical imperative. It’s a man of evil who wishes to construct for himself a reason for doing something that just doesn't make sense. Do you want to see buildings and clothing, for instance, in our society that don’t make any sense? That is the world Postmodernism wants for us. Which is why we need to not only be post the post modernists, post the Popo Coco Contemporary...but we need to be Pokes. We need it now more than ever, not just to distinguish ourselves by excluding the people we don’t like, and including people under its name who we never asked permission to do so, but also we need it to create hype so buyers will jump on a new wave in making art. We all want to make money right? You need to in today’s age, unlike what it was for the old masters.

And so this is why I give you PoKoNovitsch.

You’re Welcome.

The art of the study.

The artist's study is one of those cherished entryways into the working methods and mental states of the craftsman doing them. Some seek them out from others they admire as one would a cipher to a code that could unlock secrets of lost technique. Studies also tend to have a charm to them in a way not always found in the finished works. The sketch has in its own right become an art form in itself, where once artists did them to gain a better understanding of the subject they were about to paint, artists now have taken away from the subject and turned the object of the studies into the primary focus.

I would argue that some of Ingres studies are better
than his finished paintings.

I don't see the point in this, but I do see the purpose of doing studies in preparation for a painting, there's really no end to the amount you can make before starting one. Here are a few key points I keep in mind when doing my studies:

Trying to get a feel for the likeness of the
main character, Edward Norton.

There's no place for worry; It's a study, you can't forget that. A study is for you, not your facebook friends, or a competition, or other painters perceptions on what something should be. I've never been able to paint well when there were worries on my mind. You have to freely attack the study, see what comes so you can build off of what you discover.

Experiment; Any inclination you might have, any chance of a 'what if,' or 'why not,' you should indulge. Try things in a study that you would never try in a more serious work because you simply never know what can come from it. Instead of copying someone else's technique, experimenting allows you to develop your own solutions to the problems you are about to face. Develop your own voice, just copying technique is trying to fit your message into another painters tune.

Stop and start and stop and start and...; It's a study, you have no obligation to it other than what it can do for you, but think about it like this, in every other art form, the artists tirelessly practice in order to get ready for the end performance, or final draft. Your final painting is the opening night of a play, would you dream of going into it cold? A dancer spends months preparing their bodies so that when the task comes to delivering the performance, they don't need to think about the specific movements, just the expression of the movements inside the harmony of the music. If you want your final painting to be as good as it can be, you must prepare. 

Portrait study of my beautiful girlfriend. Getting the
feel of flesh tone in the light I want, and the various
colors of  stone that will be in the painting.

Educate yourself; I'm sure I'm not the only painter who thinks back on their past pictures and wonders how much better it would be if I had to paint it again. I try to get into the mentality of the object, I ask myself why it feels a certain way when I look at it, what kind of impression gives it its substance. I try to gain that insight when doing my studies.

What is the purpose of this? This is the most important question I ask myself when painting. Everything you put into a picture can either add or take away from the narrative. Is what I'm adding helping or hurting the work? What is its relationship to everything else? A multitude of questions come to me from asking what the purpose is of the object I'm putting into the painting. This helps me stay critical of myself. There's a fine line in a work of art between having a good idea firmly developed, versus a number of good ideas all competing for attention, and never fully realized because one is competing with another. It's easy to lose harmony and cohesion by indulging every whim. 

The more I paint, the more I see the need to get as many of the obviously stupid mistakes out of the way, make room for the more clever, stupid mistakes. The things that end up giving me a hard time are never what I expect.