> If your assumption was that the point of a painting is to accurately capture a landscape or person I know this is way off-topic, but this oft-repeated disinf

> If your assumption was that the point of a painting is to accurately capture a landscape or person I know this is way off-topic, but this oft-repeated disinformation should be quashed wherever it appears. "Accuracy" was never the goal. Look at Hokusai [1], at John Bauer [2], at Jeffrey Catherine Jones [3]. Even at so "realistic" painters as Beksiński [4], or Caspar David Friedrich [5] - even if you were at the site of such a ruined abbey, and it was late evening, and you had the camera of your choice, the resulting photo would look nothing like that - painted in 1810. Look at The Swing by Fragonard [6], from 1768. Trees don't actually grow like that. Light doesn't work like that! You could visit every tree in the world with a camera, and you couldn't even approximate the feeling of that painting. These were not accidents, it was not that they tried to be photorealistic, and came up short. They were deliberate stylizations. And modern artists, and abstract artists, well educated in the history of art, know this well, but they deliberately spread the lie that accuracy was the goal, that photography made beautiful art redundant, to justify their abominations. Because the sketching and composing and painting techniques were only half about capturing life, while the other half, the more important half (or in the case of composing, the whole), was about evoking a feeling. Something at which they were infinitely better than their modern art successors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokusai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokusai [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bauer_(illustrator) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bauer_(illustrator) [3] https://darklongbox.com/2024/08/17/jeffrey-catherine-jones-an-appreciation/ https://darklongbox.com/2024/08/17/jeffrey-catherine-jones-a... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zdzis%C5%82aw_Beksi%C5%84ski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zdzis%C5%82aw_Beksi%C5%84ski [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abbey_in_the_Oakwood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abbey_in_the_Oakwood [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swing_(Fragonard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swing_(Fragonard)