I am really not sure what to make of the “celebrity painting challenge” I’ve just been watching on TV. A new series has just been launched with a format somewhat different from previous ones, so I thought it would be interesting to check it out.
On the one hand the comments of the judges can be interesting and instructive, and it is always worth observing the very different approaches to painting tasks taken by the various competitors. On the down side, however, the viewer is left with some very fragmentary observations, whereas it could be more useful to viewers if the kind of comments made on the work were limited each week to a specific problem. For example, in this week’s task, to paint the human figure, nearly all of the participants had problems with perspective-foreshortening. This issue featured very little in the judges’ comments. I reckon that the problem lies in the editing. No doubt the actual criticisms of every person’s work would have yielded something systematic. The people doing the editing, however, are bringing quite a different set of criteria to the task. They want variety rather than coherence.