What is ART?

There are many flowery descriptions and thoughts on ART and what art is. Some say it's in the medium-- oil paint on canvas, bronze, marble; those are the choices of museums and galleries. Before I go to actual definitions and thoughts, I refer only to visual art here, not music or theater or "art of" things like language or cooking or wine or ___ fill in the blank. Briefly, in the Oxford dictionary, pocket version, ART is defined: 1 the expression of creative skill in a visual form such as painting or sculpture. 2 paintings, drawings and sculpture as a whole. Now that description seems simple and straight forward to me.

I've been working with leather for many years, created, taught and published my own unique ways of manipulating the medium and introduced easier ways of working with color on leather. I've sculpted, designed, shaped, stitched, manipulated, assembled, cut, pounded, boiled, stretched, you get the idea...I know a lot about working with leather. Leather is drawn on to transfer a design or pattern, sculpted to create relief and painted or not (it's quite lovely without color and with time develops a patina) to finish the work. Those words and acts are all used in the definition of "ART" but the finished sculpted paintings are not commonly seen in galleries-- well, there are a whole lot more people who can paint on canvas with oil and that is true. It is also part of what makes really good works of ART on leather so much more special. There is focused dedication in a leather artist to become a master of design, sculpting and painting because the time required to learn these techniques is long. The medium is also unforgiving. One serious mistake with the swivel knife can ruin a beautiful piece--like a diamond being cut with one wrong tap. The price of my leather art, the value, is in the 2 steps required--tooling and then painting and the time needed not just for a singular work but for the life time of developed skill.  Silva Fox


This Fawn & Wild Rose leather picture is photographed to show the depth of the carving by the shadow that was cast.


Enjoy! visit silvafoxartistry.com and see my work on Linked-In, Facebook, Instagram






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