No pictorial device in nineteenth-century French painting more clearly represented the free-ranging self than the loose brushstroke. From the romantics through the impressionists and post-impressionists, the brushstroke bespoke autonomous artistic individuality and freedom from convention. Yet the question of how much we can credit to the individual brushstroke is complicated--and in Brushstroke and Emergence, James D. Herbert uses that question as a starting point for an extended essay that draws on philosophy of mind, the science of emergence, and art history. Brushstrokes, he reminds us, are as much creatures of habit and embodied experience as they are of intent. When they gather in great numbers they take on a life of their own, out of which emerge complexity and meaning. Analyzing ten paintings by Courbet, Manet, C zanne, Monet, Seurat, and Picasso, Herbert exposes vital relationships between intention and habit, the singular and the complex. In doing so, he uncovers a space worthy of historical and aesthetic analysis between the brushstroke and the self.
My professor urged me to order this book to learn how to get better at making better brush strokes in my paintings. This book does not do a good job of explaining this. It is obviously written by your typical Northeastern United States phony academic. These people who have reduced art to nothing more than a polemic activity. This pompous book is laden with smug language and lame-brained opinions. This is not an instructional book - it's your typical art history essay where all the writer's favorite artists are like actors in the little play that put on in their brains. It's little more than celebrity worship and the telling of tall-tales. Anyway - don't waste your money. Fake intellectuals like this give academia the bad name it has today.
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