Polly Guo

“Pretty Art” and superficial appeal

Okay prepare yourself for a long post anon ahahahah! Sorry!

I have this term that I’ve been throwing around for a few years to refer to a very specific tendency in art- I call it “Pretty Art”.

Pretty Art in its most simplest explanation is when an artist spends SO much effort on making the subject of their art “pretty” that the quality and progress of their work actually suffers.

There’s no way to cite examples of what I mean without insulting a whooole lot of young artists that you probably know and love, but it’s not like I’m exempting myself from this tendency. I think many of us, if not ALL of us, are guilty of this tendency so long as we’ve been exposed to the false idea that superficial beauty regimens determine the value of a person and have at some point in our lives transposed this horrible idea onto our art without realizing it.

Any time you see a drawing where the face was given more time and careful rendering than the rest of the figure. Any time there is a conscious effort to “apply makeup”, add big beautiful eyelashes, add blushing cheeks, plumpen up the lips of a character in a drawing. Any time that conscious effort to “apply makeup” is so excessive that it actually makes the drawing CREEPY and uncomfortable to look at. Any time you see an original character with anime hair and a bajillion scars and piercings all the way down their body with a scarf and earmuffs with shorts and a t-shirt. Any time you see a fantastic painter that seems only capable of painting gorgeous headshots of their favorite anime characters in a “realistic style”. Any time an artist uses the same “rainbow” or “warm” palette in every one of their pictures, but it doesn’t end up actually looking good in most of them. Any time you see so much effort put into shines and fancy hair that the image ends up looking HIDEOUS. Any time you draw a character just STANDING there looking PRETTY. That is tending towards Pretty Art.

And I think people will bristle at the idea that somehow drawing something that fits into your idea of beauty is bad. Because why should it be a crime to draw what the artist perceives as beautiful? Surely that’s the aim of art, to make something beautiful. But Pretty Art isn’t beautiful or even pretty.

“Beauty is possible- and is good. This [kitsch] I’m afraid is the worst thing because it thinks it’s beautiful. It doesn’t understand where beauty really lies.”

Stephen Fry said this about kitschy commemorative plates but I think it applies here because Pretty Art is kitsch. It’s art that thinks it’s beautiful but only saturates itself with an IDEA of beauty that ultimately makes it hideous to its viewer.

Making pretty pictures is about more than how attractive you can make the subject in the image or how well you can render or paint- a picture is a sum of its parts. I think the definition of what makes art beautiful can be debated by any of us- it’s a combination of parts working towards the greater narrative and meaning of the picture.

There are all kinds of Pretty Art and people that draw it. I think many people get into drawing because they’ve seen some truly gorgeous and beautiful art and want to be able to recreate that beauty. I think anyone that cites Alphonse Mucha, J.C. Leyendecker, or John Singer Sargent in their influences should be careful of this tendency. Because these are all artists that produce truly beautiful work that can’t be easily imitated through copying their technique alone. You see em everywhere- Alphonse Mucha ripoffs that have only seen his advertising work, only copy his solid outlines, his soft colors, and you think ‘this is appealing to me because it reminds me of Alphonse Mucha, but it’s just not as good for some reason’. It’s just a cheap imitation.

Even if you’re that kid that really loved Neon Genesis Evangelion or Sailor Moon and want to be able to draw like that- by nature if you don’t analyze and break down what TRULY makes these things appealing to you, you can only ever create a cheap imitation.

The pretty OC with bishounen hair and a million piercings is a cheap imitation of beauty. It’s a hodgepodge of things the artist saw at one point in their lives on some hot guy and thought “hey, that appeals to me”. But they only saw the superficial most layer of that appeal. They didn’t see the whole picture and think, for a random example, “hey, I didn’t expect that conventionally dressed guy to have so many piercings- it was unexpected and challenged my idea of what kind of person wears piercings or how piercings affect the body- the surprise and contrast of that really appeal to me.”

I mean, I don’t know your specific reason for liking piercings if you’re into that, but I can tell you, it’s not as simple as “piercings are cool.”

The problem with Pretty Art is that it wants to skip the process of actually learning and thinking about what makes something beautiful. People often complain that high fashion models never smile while they’re modeling, and wouldn’t it be so much more appealing if they just smiled while they walked? But then there is the argument that THAT is what makes it beautiful. You see it all the time in high fashion. Something beautiful put next to something horrific. The contrast between the beauty of the clothes and the lack of expression is what makes the clothes even more beautiful, and if you had the models smiling, it would no longer be beautiful- just kitschy photos in a K-Mart catalog.

I’m not saying we should draw all our people frowning in pretty clothes, but I’m saying it’s important to try and understand what’s REALLY going on when we look at a pretty picture, because it’s never as simple as we first perceive. The things we need to learn from the artists we admire are infinite, and it should be a constructive process.

I know how it feels to draw Pretty Art. I’ve had my periods of extreme Pretty Art, and I wonder now if I’m not still a Pretty Artist with little to no real substance to my work. When I’m drawing Pretty Art, I notice the face is a little asymmetrical, I notice the expression of this character looks a little goofy when I want it to look ‘cool’, I notice the hair doesn’t look flowy enough, I tweak and fix and correct. I worry my character looks too ugly, and when I draw someone that isn’t just a pretty young teenager, I spend too much time defining what makes them NOT that, adding in wrinkles, layers of flab, etc, instead of actually taking time to research what an old person looks like and drawing them in an appealing way. I end up spending more time “fixing” the picture than actually drawing it.

Pretty Art is a trap. It’s a destructive way to draw rather than a constructive one. There are only ever things to “fix”. You start to think of your work only in terms of how many “imperfections” it has. Finishing an image is comparatively unsatisfying because you will NEVER be able to reach “perfect”. THERE IS NO PERFECT.

If you can get over this urge to make things “pretty”, then you can get started on understanding what makes something truly appealing. You can learn how to draw ugly people in an appealing way, you can have fun learning how to draw nonfigurative work, you can make your work narrative and interesting, and you can go from a technically skilled artist to a GREAT artist.

From Robert Fawcett’s On the Art of Drawing (I love this book I’m sorry)-

“Sir Joshua Reynolds in his address to the Royal Academy students in 1769, told them this, ‘The error… is that the students never draw exactly from the living models which they have before them. It is not indeed their intention; nor are they directed to do it. Their drawings resemble the model only in the attitude. They change the form according to their vague and uncertain ideas of beauty and make a drawing rather of what they think the figure ought to be than of what it appears… I very much doubt whether a habit of drawing what we see will not give a proportionable power of drawing correctly what we imagine.’”