Reddit reviews The Grammar of Ornament

>I am sure you have already taught beginners to reach an intermediate level but have you already helped advanced painter to reach a 'master' level? (if yes, I'd like to see some of their/your works)

There's really not that much to learn, it's just that it has to be learned well, which is where practice comes to play. To get from beginner to intermediate, you need to learn some things. To get beyond that, you need a pile of work so high it would literally hurt you to jump from it.

>Because that's the whole point of my argumentation: I'm not talking about the difficulty of learning to be just 'good' [...]

We're in agreement here. That it sounds like I feel it's trivial is because the amount of learning involved is - the amount of practice and work is not, and while you can be taught everything you need to know (which is what I'm really saying), you cannot be taught to practice.

>And my last question: if you agree that beauty can be a powerful statement and an abstact concept as worthy of exploring than other themes, why are modern art museum/critics/curators totally ignoring those aesthetic driven representational work?

Simply put, I don't feel that they are. But, there's more to it than that, and I'll try to elaborate:

1. Art has changed a lot in the past century. We are in an era, where media is a conceptual choice. If you make a painting, the very fact that it is a painting is now an artistic statement, whereas 100 years ago, you made a painting because "that's how art gets done." Before Rembrandt, drawing was something you did to make a painting or a sculpture - now it is a self-standing tradition. Someone who draws can be an artist.
   
   
2. Our understanding of beauty, and what that really is, has expanded. I can, in the contemporary world, make work about beauty by referencing "beautiful" work of past masters - without making any representational work at all. Imagine, if you will, a body of work that samples only the best lines from a Tchelichew drawing, only the best color arrangements of a Titian painting, and uses only the best compositions from Gentileschi. This work would be about beauty in representational art, but would not need to be itself representational.
   
   2.1 Also to be considered, is the fact that with the modern era of art, a simple composition could be considered beautiful. The arrangement of color and shape and nothing more. This was influenced heavily by the loosening of ethnocentric values of western "artistic beauty," as more artists became aware of trends in African, Middle-Eastern and Far-Eastern (Oriental) art. Islamic art is never representational, for example. But the Moores (European Islamists) get the longest and best treatment in the mid 19th century account of 2-D design by
   Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament. In fact, if you look at the titles of modern art pieces, the title Composition X is not uncommon. Hell, I think I just named 90% of Kandinsky's catalog right there. So, color and shape no longer pull second-fiddle to pure representation.
   
   
3. Representational art is not as rare a skill as it used to be. Long ago, being able to make things that look like other things was a rare and valuable skill. Now, I can go on imgur and find a dozen people a day who can do this in 2-dimensions. We have thousands of academies worldwide that do nothing but produce human render-beasts. So now, with all this history behind us, with photography, video, and digital imaging being commonplace, just being able to render is no longer enough.
   
   
4. Which brings me to a restatement of my first sentence - that I don't feel representational art is underrepresented in the contemporary scene. We have the realists, we have the hyperrealists (whose works are just mind-boggling in person)... and numerous artists that don't really fit in with either group, but still make representational art. It is just that because of the other points I made above, there is so much more going on in the art world than one or two centuries ago, when people like Sargent were the only show in town.