Maciej Ceglowski, who is posting in this thread but evidently too modest to blow his own trumpet, wrote what seems like the definitive response to Paul Graham On Painting back in 2005: http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm .
I never bothered to refute that at the time, but as a matter of fact practically everything he says there is mistaken. E.g. that no one painted alla prima till recent times, when arguably the most famous exponent of this style is Franz Hals, who worked in the early 1600s.
It's a strange situation. If someone writes an essay attacking you, you either have to respond, in which case you're letting someone else pick your topics, or you have to ignore it, in which case people who don't know any better may be convinced by it.
Though I'm not willing to use up an essay to refute someone, I will in a comment thread:
One thing I still wonder about is whether this guy actually believes what's he's saying, or whether he's deliberately trolling. He seems reasonably smart. How could he not have heard of Franz Hals? On the other hand, who would try to keep a troll going for 4 years?
Frans Hals is actually my favorite painter, so if people take nothing else away from this thread, I would urge them to go check that shit out.
The exact quote I was responding to in my essay:
"When oil paint replaced tempera in the fifteenth century, it helped painters to deal with difficult subjects like the human figure because, unlike tempera, oil can be blended and overpainted."
In support of which you now cite... Frans Hals, a sui generis painter who worked two hundred years later. I'm surprised you chose him over El Greco, who at least is within two centuries of the time period under discussion.
It's been entertaining watching you try to walk your various misstatements about art history back in this thread, but I am somewhat surprised by this habit of calling people who poke holes in your writing "trolls", given that you are the author of a celebrated taxonomy of online argument that places name-callers among the lowest of the low.
Actually Franz Hals was my counterexample to your statement that no one painted alla prima till the 19th century. There are lots of others I could have picked (Fragonard for example) but I figured the most famous example of the style would do.
My support for the statement that oil paint allowed painters to blend and overpaint is the example I gave earlier:
Van Eyck, who was such an early user of oil paint that for much of history he was considered the inventor of oil painting, is also one of the standard examples of overpainting to correct mistakes. How much more conclusive evidence could one want?
In your essay, you implied that people were painting alla prima during the Renaissance, that Renaissance painters would start from a rough sketch directly from the canvas, and that they could repeatedly rework parts of the picture.
You can link every Dutch master you want without making your argument any less bogus.
Here's what I actually wrote:
"The allusion a sketchy, iterative style of painting that used to be called "alla prima", where you block shapes in in oil paint and then swoosh them around the composition as the painting progresses, perhaps repainting entire sections of the picture. This is the way Graham and I were taught to paint, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with painting in the fifteenth century."
If you want to refute me, show me the Renaissance master who painted directly onto a blank canvas, starting with a "blurry sketch" and iteratively refining it into a finished work, like Hals, or Manet, or Rubens, or Bob Ross, rather than working with underdrawings and thin glazes of color.
You can't, because no one painted like that then. But talking about painstaking preliminary design and a sequential, pretty rigid method would have been inconvenient for the purposes of your essay.
In your essay, you implied that people were painting alla prima during the Renaissance, that Renaissance painters would start from a rough sketch directly from the canvas, and that they could repeatedly rework parts of the picture.
Let's check. These two paragraphs are everything I've written about the use of oil paint in the fifteenth century:
It helps to have a medium that makes change easy.
When oil paint replaced tempera in the fifteenth
century, it helped painters to deal with difficult
subjects like the human figure because, unlike tempera,
oil can be blended and overpainted. (Taste for Makers)
What made oil paint so exciting, when it first
became popular in the fifteenth century, was that
you could actually make the finished work from the
prototype. You could make a preliminary drawing if
you wanted to, but you weren't held to it; you could
work out all the details, and even make major changes,
as you finished the painting. (Design and Research)
These are pretty uncontroversial statements.
Neither implies that artists started painting whole paintings alla prima from day 1. They say oil allowed artists to work out details and make changes after they'd started. And here is van Eyck doing that ca. 1430:
I didn't (obviously) use Franz Hals to support my statements about the use of oil paint in the fifteenth century, since he worked in the seventeenth. I gave Hals as a counterexample to this claim by you:
This is not how people painted with oil until the
19th century.
Which ideas does it not address? The core idea of the original (hey, it's in the title) is that hackers are like painters. The argument of Ceglowski's response, whether you agree with it or not, is that they aren't.
"The core idea of the original is that hackers are like painters."
No it's not. This is wrong for the same reason that idlewords is wrong when he says that the thesis of H&P is:
"Of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike. What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers."
This isn't a thesis that pg is trying to prove. Rather, it's a source of ideas. That is,
"Because hackers are makers rather than scientists, the right place to look for metaphors is not in the sciences, but among other kinds of makers. What else can painting teach us about hacking?"
The essay doesn't even identify what those ideas are, let alone try to disprove them. All he's attacking is the source of the ideas. That's like saying Newton's theory of gravity is wrong because sitting under apple trees is gay.
Yes it is. Because that's what it says, as opposed to what you'd like to believe it said. In fact you quoted its fundamental point right there -
"Of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike. What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers."
How is this not equating hackers and painters? How is the rest of the verbiage not 'a thesis he is trying to prove' but rather 'a source of ideas'. The writing directly contradicts what you are saying.
"X and Y are both instances of Z, so let's use Y and Z as a source of ideas about X."
This pattern is basically repeated in every single paragraph, e.g.
* The reputations of hackers probably have a large random component introduced by fashion, as happens with artists.
* In hacking as with painting, it’s best to start by sketching
* Both software and paintings are intended for a human audience, so both hackers must have empathy to do good work.
The essay was written for the benefit of hackers, so if you want to attack the ideas in the essay, a 'good' argument might be that hacking does not require empathy. As opposed to saying that the idea that the best paintings were done between 1430 and 1500 is just some guy's opinion, which adds nothing.
Now if you wanted to challenge the ideas about art as a way of challenging the ideas about hacking then that would at least be interesting, but just nitpicking about art history is lame.
I'd like to challenge it in the way the essay challenged it, that is that the comparison is fatuous wanking. A 'good' argument to the contrary might involve, well, a good argument to the contrary. Rather than fatuous wanking.
