Its an interesting debate when someone criticizes another artist's work with zero merit to his claims, and contradicts himself trying to explain his own art. He says Dan has no creativity or imagination since he works solely for commercial purposes, ignorantly say the artist just painted a photograph without even so much as researching the artist in question. This coming from a "professional" who certainly has many year of experience in the illustration world! He even goes so far as to mention several other artists who have revolutionized the visual world with their art and desecrates their names. Anyone can have an opinion, there's no doubt about that. I have many opinions of my own. But when you rant incessantly about a painting, offering no real criticism whatsoever, then i feel that opinion loses all merit. There's an irony in all this as well. The enlightened artist whose critique style i am discussing, has no personal style of his own. Anyone who knows Frank Frazetta knows that his art spawned a whole slew of artists who are merely his clones. Frazetta did something revolutionary in sci-fi and fantasy art and he is on my top three list of favorite artists in any field. Its really easy to copy that style and profit off of it as well as the man's philosophy on art making. So you paint from your head, good for you. Now why don't you paint from your head and not make it look exactly like someone else's work. Take freedoms, just like he says he has. But is copying another's style really freedom?
I may be ranting here myself. But it appalls me that some people, even a self-proclaimed professional artist who has "invented" many more styles of his own, *coughs* have the gall to completely attack someone they don't even know at all, basically calling that artist's work garbage. You can have one style or many styles, but they're only as good as you make them. If its just an imitation then where is your own voice? I've seen his work, most of it thanks to his website and the world wide web. I implore my friends and anyone who happens upon my blog to take a look at:
http://hoffmanmuse.blogspot.com/
Maybe I'm over thinking or over sensitive because I happen to respect Dan, but reading his other entries completely justified everything I just said.
