When we attend an art exhibition we tend to be heartbreakingly brutal. If a painting does not imediately catch our attention, we spend less than a second before we move on. Thus pieces of art art obviously needs to have a certain stop factor, something that attract us, and invite us to make a second  and more thorough look.  If you do not even enter a painting, you will never see what may be there.

It is easy to think that superb technique and detailed rendereing of nature is what it takes to attract the viewer and to make great art. I do not think so. In front of such paintings, it may happen that we stop for a brief moment to admire the technical skills of the artist, but I doubt if this admiration of technical skills will last long. Photographically detailed rendering of nature is not automatically art. There has got to be more, some artistic value-added provided by the artist.

The appreciation of art is definitely in part subjective, but there is also an element of objectivity.  I strongly believe it is possible to generalize, analyse and identify the elements that contribute to make a painting function estetitically for the majority of viewers.

I have reached the conclusion that in contemporary art, there are three factors, dimensions, or perspectives, that contribute to quality and need to be present for a piece of art to be good, if not great.

1. 1.The painting needs to have something that make it interesting.
   

2. 2.The painting needs to be beautiful, or at least visually attractive.
   

3. 3.The painting needs to have a clear artistic content - or artistic value added.
   

My example above, of a technically perfect strictly realistic rendering of nature, will normally fail to meet the criterea numbers 1 and 3.

We experience art through a combination of our eyes and our brain. This fantastic interplay is the same as what we learned to use as kids to be able experience the world around us in general. For instance, if we enter a room, our eyes and brain grasp everything of immediate importance in a fraction of a second. Combined with earlier experience we translate this visual information to comprehensive information regarding the layout and content of the room, who is present etc. This allows us to move around without colliding with chairs, tables, walls or doors. However, if we see something extraordinary, something wrong, something that does not match what we expect, we look a second time trying to sort it out.

Artists may exploite this same mechanism to build interest into their work. As an example, Henri Matisse often changed the perspective in his paintings i.e. by letting a tabletop tilt towards the viewer. Picasso painted figures and faces that were heavily distorted. When we look at their paintings we imediately see that something seems wrong. The spontanious automatic sorting out process is disturbed and we stop for a moment. We automatically look twice. Such disturbance of the expected may be exploited by an artist, to make the motive engaginging for the viewer.

For these reasons I strongly believe that paintings should never tell the whole story. Nor should they aim to render nature as it actually is. Paintings should suggest. Paintings may distort. The visual world consists of colours, values, perspectives, lines and forms. The world around us is three dimensional, while the canvas is two dimensional. For the artist there exists nearly unlimited ways to alter reality to catch and engage the eyes and brain of the viewer. In a painting human skin may be rendered blue. Perspectives  may be distorted.  The forms in the painting may differ form the forms of the actual motive. If one half of a face is clearly displayed whereas the other half is hidden in shaddow, the brain of the viewer automatically extrapolates how the rest of the face looks, maybe even without the viewer noticing the process. Parts of a painting can be rendered in three dimensions whereas other parts clearly are two dimensional. Contour lines may be combined with value shading. Objects and fiures may be more or less transparent. Surprising use of written text in a painting may attract the attention of the viewer, and provide a two dimensional element in a three dimensional motive . There are endless ways to pull a viewer into a painting, consciously or unconsciously.

Humans have an extraordinary ability to distinguish detailed nuances in human faces. We likely have develloped this skill as part of our evolution to be able to distinguish friend from foe, or to be able to predict the emotinal status of another human being. This phenomenon make human faces a particullary rich and interesting motive for artists. Human eyes, faces and figures are some of the most exciting motives- Little else provide the same possibilities for alterations to create interest.

Paintings need to be visually attractive. In most cases this means that they need to be beatiful or decorative. The beauty may come from the motive itself, but often and more importantly from the painting as such. The composition may be beautiful or harmonic. In particular the abstract value (dark/light) composition often functions as the backbone of the picture. The eyes of the viewer may be natuarly guided around the composisiton by edges, lines and colour contrasts.  Colours or forms may be perceived as beautiful by themselves. For the artist, knowledge of how colours may affect each other may be used to set up particullary beatiful colour combinations. A dominatingly cool colour expression may be enhanced by some warm colours. Likewise, a dominatingly cool colour expression may be enhanced by adding some areas of warm colours. The use of complementary colours or complementary grey tones may enhance a particuloar colour and make it sing like a gemstone set up in a ring. If a colour is used one place in a painting, it adds to the overall harmony if the same colour in smaller amounts can be found also as an echo somewhere else in the picture.

A painting needs to have artistic content. A key goal for most artists is to develop a personal style where they render their motives with clear and characteristic artistic value added. Artistic value added may be said to be the difference between what is actually presented and a photographically correct copy of the motive.

Artistic value can be the personal and recognizsble style of an artist. Many, if not most, famous artists have a personal and easily recognizable style. This may be the characteristic brush strokes of van Gogh or Renoir, the lines of Edvard Munch or Giachometti, or Picasso´s way of distorted drawing of his female faces and figures. A contemporary Norwegian artist like Bjarne Melgaard may challenge with his choice of motives, but the characteristic line drawing in his paintings are easily recognizable and personal, providing his paintings with lots of artistic value added.       

I find that a useful “acid test” for a painting is to regard it from these three perspectives; 1)interest; 2)visual attractivity; and 3)artistic value added. A technically perfect  photographic rendition of nature may be decorative and beautiful, maybe also impressive, but it is likely to quickly loose its interest. A painting that is interesting, but disgusting, will likely never be hung in peoples homes. A painting that is uninteresting and ugly, but with lots of characteristic artisic value added, may be fine for a limited group of collectors.

The best paintings combine the three, and score high on all three perspecives. Such paintings catch your interest and fascination by allowing you to interpret and participate. They are attractive, decorative, maybe even beatiful, and you would love to have them in your living room. They are filled with the personal, characteristic style of the artist. Such paintings are what you look for, and also what we artist strive to give you. Sadly, not only for me, it easier said than done.