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Painting makes a comeback

But can contemporary artists brush up their skills?

By Barry Neild for CNN

Painters like Cynthia Westwood say their work is still relevant.

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LONDON, England (CNN) -- Before his death in 1947, French painter Pierre Bonnard toiled for four years on a single painting of his wife, laboring over every detail as he tried to maintain a style he had spent a lifetime perfecting.

Fast-forward to today's modern art scene, where young British artist Damien Hirst can knock out "spin paintings" -- haphazard blurs of color scattered from a stepladder -- in a matter of hours, and then sell them for $18,000.

While he has at least put paint to canvas, Hirst's most famous pieces are light years away from the brushwork of the old masters, including such startling creations as a pickled shark, and a bisected cow and calf.

He isn't alone. The Turner prize, which annually professes to recognize the cream of British art, has consistently focused on conceptual creations, often shunning the traditional crafts of painting and sculpture.

Last year the $43,000 award was scooped by Simon Starling for a piece of "mobile architecture" entitled Shedboatshed. This was in fact a wooden hut that he transformed into a boat, sailed down a river, then reassembled as a hut.

In the United States performance artist Matthew Barney has enjoyed similar success with his seemingly impenetrable Cremaster Cycle, for which New York's Guggenheim Museum allowed him to bounce off its whitewashed walls dressed in a kilt and carrying a bloodied rag in his teeth.

Such developments have divided the art world, with critics either declaring the death of paint or decrying a scene in which even a random pile of garbage can be touted as cutting-edge creativity.

"Society today is obsessed with things like junk food, offering quick gratification. This is junk art which matches that," says Charles Thomson, a founding member of the Stuckists, a worldwide movement of figurative painters deeply opposed to "pretentious" conceptual art.

U.S. artist Matthew Barney takes a more unconventional approach.

Thomson, whose movement once counted celebrated Brit artist Tracey Emin among its ranks, argues that wealthy arbiters of taste, whose priorities of fashion or finance rather than talent, are driving the contemporary art scene.

"A lot of people have been talking things up for a long time," he told CNN. "And if enough people say things and throw money at it, then it becomes important."

Thomson lambastes artists such as Hirst for what he says are brazenly cynical attempts to make easy money, despite their claims to be serious craftsmen.

"I don't know if it's just sad, appalling or outrageous that activity of that kind gets the status it is given. Most people think they are idiots and I think history will confirm that."

Happily for the Stuckists, and perhaps as a result of their fervent campaigning, more traditional art mediums appear to be enjoying resurgence.

Advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, whose patronage of the 1990s Young British Artists movement propelled Hirst and his contemporaries to pop star status, recently offloaded many of his conceptual works and declared painting as "the most relevant and vital way that artists choose to communicate."

Further recognition was made in the shortlist of last year's Turner Prize (named after 19th century English painter Joseph Turner), which, though it was won by shed man Starling, did include oil-on-canvas artist Gillian Carnegie.

Hirst himself has also released a book of drawings, clearly keen to display his old school artistic skills.

Simon Starling scooped Britain's top art award for his Shedboatshed.

"People don't think contemporary artists can draw, do they?"he said in a recent interview. "But how else was I supposed to work out that an elephant in formaldehyde wouldn't have worked? They don't realize you start with monkeys, and go to gerbils before you get to sheep."

For emerging painters, the art scene is far removed from the modernists whose blurry, surreal and distorted worlds were a necessary reaction to the advent of photography.

Contemporary canvasses, such as those created by American Eric Fischl, British newcomer Fiona Rae and even pop art survivor David Hockney, actually draw inspiration from photography, but strive for a more vivid portrayal of the captured moment.

For Rae, and the "manga" comic-influenced Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, computer manipulation of photo-realistic images is also a major influence.

And, says U.S. painter Cynthia Westwood, brush and easel will always be able to hold their own against cameras and computers.

"A painting is a series of choices: a painter decides what goes in and what doesn't. It is a painter's own vision, which can be determined by the artist's state of mind. The end result is very particular to the painter," she told CNN.

"Photographs often have an out-of-focus background -- the camera has made that decision. With a painting, the artist makes all the decisions.

She added: "Painting has been around forever and despite technological developments and trends in the art world, I suspect painting will maintain a universal appeal long into the future."

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