“Where are they going?? What are they doing?”

Yesterday I was doing an art search for a guy on Gab (couldn’t find the piece), and did a search for “frontier art“. Gold mine! Regrettably this genre doesn’t generally have the artist’s name attached to it, but I think it’s worth celebrating regardless. I’ll try and put down a list of names as representatives of the style at the bottom of the post.

I said I struck gold with the search because it is the style I love: Lots of cats, dogs, people, cows, wolves and sunsets and bold colors! A ton of arrows and gunshots and knife attacks! Good stuff. Art that tells a story. Gets you involved in it. I look at a picture like that and wonder what’s going on? What’s their story? Sometimes I refer to it as ‘puzzle art’. The type you see when you go searching for jigsaw puzzles.

Here’s the official description of the type of art that bores me: “A still life (plural: still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter”. Do you see the contradiction? ‘Still life’ depicting mostly inanimate subject matter? How can it be “life” and “inanimate” at the same time? Makes no sense. Landscape artists that paint mountain after mountain, forest after forest, with absolutely no sign of life in their pictures make no sense to me.