If you have questions, just comment and ask!

In an effort to try to constantly reflect on my writing, I have reflected on my second blog post and I've realized that an outsider looking in might have questions about it. The foremost question you might have reading this is "Who the heck is Sol Lewitt?"

I often take for granted my four and a half years of art school. I know that there are some household names (like Picasso or Van Gogh, for instance) that are known to most people, but most modern artists are unknown to the general public. Lewitt is pretty "famous" in my mind, but he might be on the outskirts of common knowledge. I'm going to link to the wikipedia page for Sol Lewitt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_LeWitt.

I'd say the really important point I wanted to highlight about Lewitt was that he took conceptual art to extremes. Wikipedia says "Sol LeWitt was one of the main figures of his time; he transformed the idea and practice of drawing and changed the relationship between an idea and the art it produces. LeWitt’s art is not about the singular hand of the artist; it is the ideas behind the works that surpass each work itself."

If you click on the third reference on the Wikipedia page it brings you to an artinfo.com page: www.artinfo.com/news/story/21215/the-writing-on-the-walls-sol-lewitt-at-diabeacon.

This page describes Lewitt's drawings as paint-by-numbers, and this is a good way to understand it. Lewitt wrote instructions for drawings, he didn't actually do the drawings himself. If you go see a drawing of Lewitt's in a museum, it wasn't him who actually drew it; he wrote the rules for the drawing. The page quotes a couple of Lewitt's drawing instructions (1,200 in total): "Wall Drawing #97... Ten thousand straight and ten thousand not straight lines" and "Wall Drawing #118... Fifty randomly placed points all connected by straight lines". These drawings are applied directly to the wall, eliminating the boundaries created by surface or frame.

It is crucial to understand that when Lewitt was writing about art, he was writing about conceptual art, specifically. Conceptual art is exactly what it sounds like: art that is based on a concept or idea. One could argue that all art is conceptual because all artists have an idea they are trying to portray. But what is important about Lewitt's conceptual art is that to him (and to conceptual artists) the idea is the most important element of a work of art, even more important than the form it takes.