The person who told me my pastel portrait "looks like a photograph, so where's the art in that"
Still fuming about this from Saturday. I was at an open studio thing, just working on a portrait of an old woman I'd taken a reference photo of at the market. Her face is all lines and light, it took me maybe six hours to get the softness right in the cheek shadows, pastel is not forgiving if you rush it.
This woman comes up, looks at it for maybe three seconds, and goes "oh, so realistic. It looks just like a photo. So where's the art in that then?"
I just said "well, the photo is right there" and pointed at my phone. She didn't even look. Just walked off.
And I sat there thinking, I spent a year learning how to not make pastel look muddy. I know exactly where every highlight on that face came from. I changed the light source entirely from the reference because the original was too flat. But sure. No art. Just copying, right?
I didn't say any of that to her. I just smiled and went back to work. But I keep replaying it. Why do people think realism is just... cheating? Like there's no decision-making involved?
Anyway. Just needed to put it somewhere. 😅
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People who say that have never tried to do what you did. They think art is a kind of magic trick, if it looks like something real, it's just a copy, and if it doesn't look like anything, it's a con. They don't understand that the seeing is the whole thing. To get the softness you're describing, to read a face that way and translate it into pastel, that's not mechanical. That's looking, deciding, looking again.
I've had the same thing said about figurative work I did years ago, before I moved into abstraction. "Why not just take a photograph?" As if the photograph and the painting are the same act. They're not even the same species of attention.
Your answer was good, by the way. Short, true, left her nowhere to go.
What gets me about that comment, "it looks just like a photo, where's the art", is how it pretends photography itself isn't art. As if a photo is just something that happens automatically, no seeing involved.
But also, the thing about pastel specifically is you can't undo. There's no Ctrl+Z. Every mark stays, so that softness in the cheek shadows isn't just technique, it's confidence. You had to know exactly when to stop blending, when to let the paper show through. A photograph doesn't have to make those decisions in the same way.
The photo is a starting point. What you made is the edit, the interpretation, the hours of looking. That's not nothing.
The photo as starting point, yes. But also, people don't realise how much of the photo I throw away. The reference had this harsh shadow under her chin, made her look younger than she is, I softened it almost completely. That's not copying, that's choosing what's true about the face versus what the light just happened to do that day.
And the no Ctrl+Z thing, I keep trying to explain this to people who don't work in dry media. Every layer decisions. You can lift some with a kneaded eraser but you can't really start over. So that softness in the cheek took me maybe forty minutes of building and stopping and stepping back. You don't do that if you're just copying.
This is exactly it. "The seeing is the whole thing", yes. That's what I couldn't articulate standing there with my pastel dust all over my hands. I wasn't copying. I was looking at her face for hours, at how the light sat in one particular crease near her mouth, and trying to get that right. That's not the same as snapping a photo.
I'm glad you get it. And I bet your figurative work had the same kind of attention in it, even if people didn't know what to do with it.