reasons for perspective

June 18, 2007 8:28 AM

How do living conditions affect an artist's perspective and art?

I'm looking for articles (or opinions) dealing with how artists' living conditions affect their perspective and their art. While I've found plenty of information about how growing up poor or living in a poor neighborhood influences one's art, I'm looking for more random or less-conventional examples, like living in a slanted house, or living with rational/logical thinkers (::cough::engineers::cough::).
This might be the beginning of a thesis paper, so cite-able sources are a plus.

Thanks!

posted by azriel2257 to media & arts (4 answers total)

An interesting blog about this situation: Here

I'm a writer/artist, and I live with an engineer.

My boys, especially, motivate me to continue my sketching, as they are deeply in awe of what, to them, is as alien as another language. My husband encourages me, in a very pragmatic way, to try to market my skills.

I frequently feel as if my family doesn't "get" me, but I imagine every Mom with boys feels that, as she is the only woman in the house. As a defense mechanism, I have become more immersed in left-brain activities. I'm the one who fixes the game console or computer when something goes wrong with it, for example.

I tend to down-play my own creative skills as I see the science/math skills they inherited from their father as more beneficial to my sons' future economic security.

Over the years, my work has gone from paper and pencil sketches to computer-colorized, smoother imaging, but my subjects have stayed the same, as I always value "people over things." I still find inspiration in the old Frazetta and Boris Vallejo fantasy work, though I also aim for realism in my portraiture work.

Sorry for the long comment. Hope some of this helped you!
posted by misha at 10:44 AM on June 18, 2007

It's going to be difficult if not impossible to get past the anecdotal in your question. Perhaps it would be better reframed as the influence of the non-artistic on artists, but then you're going to have to draw a line between artistic and nonartistic since there can be an art to everything and there has been plenty of rational/logical art through the years.
posted by rhizome at 1:12 PM on June 18, 2007

how about any influences; the ones i named were just examples

to 'reframe'; how do outside influences on an artist affect said artists artwork. include examples, citations if possible.
posted by azriel2257 at 1:52 PM on June 18, 2007

All art is influenced by the lives of its creators. I think it would be tough to find any artists that are unaffected by "outside influences".

Many artists of various types have written about what has influenced their work. Artist biographies and autobiographies may be what you are looking for. If you are looking for specific examples of artists affected by outside influences, well, that's pretty much all of them.
posted by yohko at 9:25 PM on June 18, 2007