DAVID MAYERNIK
LTD.
I practice the range of work that the Old Masters did: in the field, in the studio, in situ. And I work in the major media of the Old Masters: buon fresco, oil, watercolor & ink, sanguine pencil & trois crayons
Sacred Art
Practicing a variety of arts is mutually reinforcing: design informs my drawing and drawing my design, the human figure shapes my understanding of architecture and my architecture is designed to incorporate the human figure. Renaissance artists believed the same, and practiced it. The adventurous spirit of the Renaissance tradition, especially as it manifested itself in the Baroque, orients my constant study and practice.
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An essential companion to that formal aspect is the role of poetics or rhetoric, the idea that art is meant to speak—to convey stories and ideas that have occupied the human imagination for millennia. Making art speak—through gesture, composition, symbols and devices, idealization, even brushstroke—is what sponsors the energy in my forms.
The value of creating resemblance is passing; it's the brushwork which causes us first to marvel, and then makes the work eternal.
—Denis Diderot, "Salon de 1763"
(Le merite de ressembler est passager; c'est celui du pinceau qui emerveille dans le moment et qui eternise l'ouvrage.)
All of what I do is informed by what the seventeenth-century writer Pietro Bellori called "l'Idea del Bello," or the Idea of the Beautiful. That beauty, for the classical artist, resides in the ideal, a more perfect version of the real, clarified by long study of the ancients and Old Masters. Discerning what, within a tradition, is worth emulating is what artistic judgment is all about. Not all Old Masters painted alike, and a judicious integration of rigorous disegno and bravura painterly technique are what distinguish my work.
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