When is an artist not an artist?

I have loved art since I was a small child. I drew all the time, mainly horses and evening gowns, but even that predicted the path of my adult life. The first half of it was spent frequently wearing evening gowns as I went to charity balls; the second half of it was spent riding, showing and training horses and riders.

And now, in whatever is left of that life, the art part seems to be rising. To be fair, I did study art during the evening gowns phase of my adulthood, but never did much with it until recently.

And when I did, I got a shock. 

But to set the scene....

When I finally got over my terror of drawing in a group situation, and decided to study art, I wanted to properly learn my craft.  So, in the 1980s, I took anatomy and drawing classes with Robert Beverly Hale, arguably the best drawing teacher in the United States in the 20th century. Subsequently, I was invited to become a member of the Art Students League of New York, where I had studied with him; my rising to membership in that venerable body was accomplished by both study and election by other members so that they could be sure, I suppose, that one wouldn't embarrass the League by being a crappy artist. I'm still quite proud of that achievement. Although, like any artist, I'm never, ever sure the latest work isn't, in fact, crappy. Even when it is praised. Such is the temperament of an artist and perfectionist.

But despite being a perfectionist, I cannot--no really cannot--do "imitation of life" drawings and paintings, such as this one:

Unarguably, this picture could easily be a black and white photograph, but it isn't. It is a pencil drawing. It is quite astonishing in its realism, in its perfection of proportions. One might think there would be very few people who could produce work like that...and yet, the internet and the pages of art magazines for amateurs and professionals alike are littered with them. So many incredibly talented people with the time to spend both learning such perfection of craft and producing dozens of time-consuming, detailed works! It boggles the mind.

Or not.

It was only a few years ago that I learned about the camera obscura, a device known to Johannes Vermeer (see his famous painting The Girl with the Pearl Earring, 1665, below), and via which he produced the most stunningly accurate oil paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. 

The Girl with the Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer, 1665

I thought it was cheating, while admitting his paintings are stunning. But so what? Wait a couple hundred years, and voila! the Eastman Kodak Brownie camera, affordable for almost anyone, could produce similar works in a flash. But no one considered the products of the little brown boxes to be high art.

None of this really bothered me, though, until I began reading the magazine and sales circulars from the Society of All Artists (SAA) a few years ago, when I was ramping up my art production with intent to sell. The pages of both are filled with cunning devices--camera obscuras to be sure (so anyone with oil paints might conceivably be the next Vermeer), tracing paper, fixative to make tracing paper stick to photos one might want to copy...I mean might want to paint.

Yes, you see where it is. The Art Students League's intention is to serve and produce artists. Not copyists. League graduates are not expected to produce exact copies of a subject; they are expected to draw it, paint it, imbue it with some character of both the thing/person and the artist. In short, make ART, not a copy. It is no wonder I had never heard of the handy image transfer devices; the only one League students were exposed to was their own eyes and hands.

I have a problem with copying masquerading as art, with people who are using mainly mechanical means to produce what they are calling original art and I call cheap copies. But yet, they get consistent oohs and aahs when their works appear in print or on websites.  Quite disheartening. Indeed, you might as well cheer for the Xerox copier that probably fostered this unseemly confiscation of mechanical devices to the service of what was once a noble calling, if not very remunerative most of the time: producing art. (Analogy: If a musician turned on the CD player and then faked blowing the notes on his oboe, is that art?)

I've been chewing on this for a few years now, and the past couple of years also on the demand that artists posting their work--THEIR WORK, by their own hands--on social media provide not only information about the medium, but give credit if they used a reference photo they didn't shoot with their own hands. Why? It's not like they were going to pass off someone else's work as their own; it is art. Isn't it?

I have concluded that they are not, in fact, making original art, but copying an artwork made by another artist (or photographer, mainly) line for line, colour for colour, shape for shape. And, in many cases, the "art" could indeed be passed off as the photograph that was copied, which would be, in fact, illegal.

If they did that, passed off copies derived by mainly mechanical means, as their own work...what then? It is copyright infringement at its heart, its foundation. And they might rightly be sued.

Is art via mechanical means worthy of being called art? Are those who produce and sell worthy of being called artists? 

Or have they simply become human Xerox machines?

Copyright Laura Harrison McBride, 2020