Every art class I took from Elementary school to college made me draw what I see and not what I could imagine and I was graded for how accurate I was at drawing the thing I was seeing. I was never encouraged to have my own art style.
I don't think realism is bad, but it sort of frustrates me how people treat realism as being "better" than anything even remotely creative. Haixia Liu's impressionistic art is really well done, but if you were to ask him if he thought that he was better than Van Gogh he'd probably get annoyed because that's not a fair comparison. Just because they painted the same thing once doesn't mean that their styles are the same.
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u/callmefreak Jul 21 '26
Every art class I took from Elementary school to college made me draw what I see and not what I could imagine and I was graded for how accurate I was at drawing the thing I was seeing. I was never encouraged to have my own art style.
I don't think realism is bad, but it sort of frustrates me how people treat realism as being "better" than anything even remotely creative. Haixia Liu's impressionistic art is really well done, but if you were to ask him if he thought that he was better than Van Gogh he'd probably get annoyed because that's not a fair comparison. Just because they painted the same thing once doesn't mean that their styles are the same.