About imitation and aesthetic choices

In a column every Thursday, Santanu Borah will share varied perspectives on art and the art world. Here is the first piece of the series!

When I was a child, art was about reproduction. “Can you draw this Gandhi photo exactly like it is?” And I always wondered why people wanted “exactly like it is”. Maybe, it was reproduction that made people make this aesthetic choice. Sons look like their fathers, daughters look like their mothers and so on, and vice versa. We like likeness.

As a young artist, I encountered a problem in pursuing likeness. When you want to paint ‘likeness’, you have to repeat the ugliness as often as the beauty. It’s a tightrope walk. While I did not understand the situation like I do today, it dawned on me that skill was important because even to make a bad painting, one needed some level of skill. And this honing of this skill was crucial because the greatest artists went to the greatest lengths to figure out smarter ways of pursuing their craft that evoked a sense of the impossible. One has to look at a Rembrandt piece to feel the grandeur of light (and if you are a reasonably envious artist, a deafening beam of jealousy). The lengths Rembrandt went to perfect this skill tells you why obsessive behaviour can be good thing, no matter what Aristotle thought of being extreme.

For instance, lace was everywhere in 17th century European paintings because it signified status and style. But how Rembrandt handled lace and depicted it in his work showed sheer genius, powered by a poetic simplicity. Other artists laboured away and painted intricate designs in white on a jacket, while Rembrandt did the opposite. He executed the jacket first and then coloured the collar white. Then he used black to create negative spaces in the collar. His patterns in the lacework were random. However, when you looked at his paintings from a distance, this free weaving of white and black made his lacework more lush. He was obsessed with style and skill because he sought to spiritualise them into something indefinable.