I came into the studio this morning and immediately sat down to read my emails. Among them was the most recent post from American Folk Art@ Cooperstown titled Ralph’s Take On Rembrandt. It concerned the late and great American folk artist Ralph Fasanella and his reaction to criticism and unsolicited advice. I finished reading and burst out laughing. Boy, did it hit close to home!
Over the years, I have been approached by several people who think they are doing me a great service by telling me that I should change the way I paint in some way or that I should try to paint more like some other artist. Early on, when I was first exhibiting my work, I had another more established artist tell me that I should change the way I paint my figures, that they should look the way other artists paint them. I responded to this artist and the others who offered me their advice with a smile and an “I’ll look into that.” But that one time, I also mistakenly heeded the older painter’s words, being inexperienced and seeking a way as I was, and stopped painting figures for a while before realizing that this was not good advice at all.
Here’s the post about Fasanella and his response to such advice.
Ralph Fasanella had trouble painting hands. A lot of trained artists do too, so it is not surprising that a union organizer who turned to drawing suddenly at the age of 40 would struggle with hands early in his career. But he did have something that proved better than years of formal training: he believed that he was an artist and that what he was doing – painting the lives of working people – was a calling that deserved his complete attention and all-consuming passion.
And that made him react when anyone suggested that his paintings weren’t up to snuff. He said that he was painting “felt space,” not real space. His people and the urban settings he placed them in were not realistic in the purest sense of the word, but they sang with spirit and emotion. As Ralph said, “I may paint flat, but I don’t think flat.”
Rembrandt Hands
His most memorable quote, and the one that says the most about him, occurred very early in his artistic career, when someone told him that his hands looked like sticks. He ought to study Rembrandt’s hands, they said, in order to get it right.
His response is priceless: “Fuck you and Rembrandt! My name is Ralph!”
I may not really adopt Ralph’s approach but you can bet his words will be echoing in my head the next time someone says “You should paint like…”
Redtree Times 
Oh, my! And don’t forget that old gem, “What you really need to do is…”
Surely you’ve read Georgia O’Keeffe’s response to the same sort of critique. From Joan Didion’s essay on her from The White Album:
“I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see — and I don’t.”
I think she and Ralph would have gotten along just fine.
That’s really well put and is very close to what I’ve been thinking since I posted that yesterday, that the person offering the critique is basing eveything on the assumption that the artist’s aim in creating the work coincides with their own perceptions and associations. It might be true if the artist was simply trying to capture absolute realism in their representations but many artists, myself included, are more concerned with conveying emotion through “felt space” as Ralph so aptly put it, not real space.
And yes, I think her and Ralph might have gotten along just swimmingly.
Well, yeah…you see, I think you should paint like this fella whose work I stumbled across several months ago, which I really like. His name is GC Myers. Look him up, you’ll see what I mean. Fantastic artist!
I might just do that.