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Hogarth Gone By

© Joe Jeskiewicz

I have struggled with this topic because I had a specific set of images in mind and I couldn't escape those predefined concepts (dangerous) that I had set for myself. I looked and looked for ideas that I had available to me that would fit Hogarth's ideas. My attempts have been the image you've already seen in the last article. A picture of a statue which I dubbed Poseidon. And a picture of 4 lions statues with a pair of lighthouse statues in the background which I called Menagerie.

Also I looked backwards through various photographs that I had stored from various projects and groups an odd collage of pictures together and called it Prisoner by Choice. I had a picture of my dog looking at a hamster in a ball, and called it showdown, you see that one below. And I had a picture of a baby rabbit in my hand. All of these images are an attempt to capture something that is either normal or somehow between Sublime and Grotesque. As I have phrased it before, 6 Shots and not one bullseye.

It is true that the artist is the most critical critic of his own work.

I suppose the purpose of this exercise and of Hogarth's words has a dual purpose. Now that you have thought about normal things and seen how beautiful some parts of our daily lives are, look at the artwork that perhaps you have done before. Or look at the artwork of people in other art galleries such as Renderosity trying to outdo one another in spectacularity, in perfection, in the terrific and terrifically horrible and grotesque. Is one more artistic than the next? Does it take more thought to focus on commonality and banality and find the beauty in that, or does it require more brainpower to come up with innovations and fantastic visions of things we've never seen?

I think the answer is neither takes precedence. It's just that we are so used to the latter way of thinking that we often forget about the beauty of our surroundings. I used to live in the mountains, and moved to the city in a relatively flat area. Whenever I go back to the mountains to visit family, I am always looking around at things I miss. Why do I miss them? They are familiar and because of that, beautiful and amazing.

Also, and although we didn't necessarily explore it here (perhaps in the future), take a look at all the perfect models in Poser, that appear so often, all the smooth faces found on television, the perfect complexions. The perfect proportions. While driving out to get dinner the other night, I looked over and saw an old Mexican man in a baseball cap in a beat up old car. I was amazed that if I had a camera and snapped the picture, it would have been perfect as a focus on the average man on the street. Deep lines cut in his neck and face, a flat look, and complexion imperfections. Hogarth wanted artists to work with our human imperfections so that we don't forget who we are, and so we don't forget the world we live in. So that we don't get lost in some created ideal.

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