UnMasterclass 35

It has long been said that part of the traditional training of being an artist is to study work of past masters and to in turn copy the paintings en plein la gallerie.  UnMasterclass has long treaded the long winding path of the argument that artists of today have forsaken this training and we are now, arguably, seeing the consequences of this in many recent painters/paintings. Painters of the past would use the idea of transferring the original masterpieces as a way, not only of learning their craft, but also a way to mark a difference between them as artists and the pioneering master artists who came before; and in turn become pioneering themselves. In the age of mechanical reproduction artists increasingly came to encounter paintings through reproductions and to come to question the value and worth of seeing and learning from the original. With this came an attitude of disregarding the original and artists have appropriated and used original artworks to in turn create new works. So we have Rauschenberg erasing an original de Kooning drawing, Kippenberger using a Richter painting as a coffee table or more recently the Chapman brothers defacing Goya’s Disasters of War. Here artists no longer copied from the originals to in turn create new ways of making paintings. Here the artists created new ways of working and thinking by directly using the originals. Here at UnMasterclass we would love to think that a group of budding art students have entered the galleries and drawn in their sketchbooks one of the above defaced works of art, made from works of art. See the latest edition of UnMasterclass here http://vimeo.com/28446465