One Thousand Words

Throughout the art sections of this Patreon, I've been grouping them into broad categories: visual arts, performing arts, literary arts, and so forth. But what about the arts that are kinda of . . . none of the above?

It's a trick question, honestly, because just about everything can be classed under one of those categories. But I do want to take a moment to talk about a variety of arts that, while classifiable as painting or sculpture or what have you, don't normally get included under those headers, because of how they're used or what materials they involve. It's not an exhaustive list, but it will serve as a reminder that our species is as much Homo creatrix as it is Homo sapiens: if we can use it for art, we probably have.

Let's look at the "painting" side of things -- I don't know if there's a good technical term that covers painting, drawing, and anything else involving the creation of images or designs on a two-dimensional surface. Some variations here are about technique, as in the case of frescoes: there you execute your work upon wet plaster, making the pigment far more durable. And those are usually murals, though not always, which differentiates them from both the more portable sort of art and the scale on which the average painter operates; a mural doesn't have to be enormous, but it certainly lends itself to monumental work, far beyond what a canvas could reasonably support.

The question of what is being painted leads us toward some other interesting corners. Illumination, for example, is the art of decorating the pages of books, whether by fancifying the text itself (illuminated capital letters and the like) or by including images alongside. Other people have made art out of painting eggshells -- or carving them, if the shell is thick enough; ostrich eggs are good for this, and one can imagine dragon eggs being the same way -- or the insides of glass balls. Those also frequently involve working at a very tiny scale, and it's worth noting that miniature painting is a whole field of its own, making a virtuoso display out of executing your work at a level where someone might need a magnifying glass to fully appreciate it.

(Er, "miniature painting" in the sense of "very small," not "minis for Dungeons & Dragons or a similar game." Though that's its own popular art form, too!)

In other cases, it's the medium of the decoration itself that becomes unusual. I've mentioned mosaics before, tessellating colored stones, ceramic, or glass to make an image, but you can grind even smaller than that with sandpainting. This doesn't always involve actual sand -- sometimes it's crushed pigments instead -- and some versions are more like carving in that they involve drawing in a sandy surface, but most specifically this involves pouring out sand or powder to create your designs. As you can imagine, this tends to be an ephemeral art . . . but that's often the point, especially when it's used in a ritual, religious context.

Some of these arts start rising above the two-dimensional surface in interesting ways. Beading can, when done thickly enough, become almost sculptural; it's also massively labor-intensive, which is why it became popular for sartorial displays of wealth when industrialization made the production and dying of fabric much cheaper. Quillwork is a form of fabric decoration unique to Indigenous North America, using dyed and undyed porcupine quills to create designs; among the Cheyenne, joining the elite Quilling Society that crafted such things was itself a form of status. This is distinct, however, from quilling: a different art with a similar name that curls tiny slips of paper into coils, then glues them to a backing to create images from the coils.

Paper leads us onward toward more overtly sculptural uses of that medium. What is origami, after all, but a specific kind of paper-based sculpture? That one in its strict incarnation prohibits cutting or gluing the paper to create its forms, which puts it at the polar opposite end of the spectrum from papercutting: an art some of us may have tried in simple form as kids, but skilled practitioners can achieve astonishingly complex and beautiful pictures. One particular version of this, the silhouette, is traditionally done with black paper and used especially for portraiture.

Basketry maybe should have gone into the textiles essay, both because many of its techniques are close kin to weaving and sewing, and because it very much belongs among what I termed the "functional arts" -- those which serve a utilitarian purpose while also including an aesthetic dimension. Anything pliable can potentially be used for basketry: most often plant materials like straw, willow, grass, and vines, but also animal hides or modern materials like strips of plastic. The resulting vessels are vitally important as storage containers and can even be made waterproof, especially if they're coated in clay or bitumen, but by working patterns into their design, basket-makers can also make them beautiful.

Or perhaps you go in an entirely non-utilitarian direction. Flower arranging is about taking nature's beauty -- perhaps from a garden -- and displaying it in an artificial way, knowing full well that soon the flowers will wilt. But where most of us stop at just sticking a few blooms in a vase, some artists go on to create full-blown sculptures of flowers and greenery, sometimes with complex internal structures that continue supplying water to the blooms to extend their life. There was even a competitive TV show about this, The Big Flower Fight!

I could keep going, of course. Baking is a functional art insofar as it makes something for you to eat, but it definitely has its elaborate end where the artistic value of the decoration or shaping is as much the point as the taste of the final product -- if it's edible at all, which it may not be! Amaury Guichon has made an entire TikTok phenomenon out of showcasing his monumental chocolate sculptures. I'm sure someone out there has devoted their life to the art of meat sculpture, but I'm not going to go looking for evidence of that. The point is made: if we can turn it into art, we probably will.

Which is honestly kind of amazing. Art is, after all, about doing more than the minimum required for our survival. It is a mark of our success as a species, that we have freed enough of our time from the work of acquiring food and shelter that art is possible. And it says something about our inner state, that when we have a spare moment available, we often want to spend it making something beautiful -- out of whatever comes to hand.



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/ANFkiL)