Billy Pappas

Oddly enough... I was watching the Sundance channel yesterday and happened to catch the premiere of "Waiting for Hockney" a movie about an aspiring artist named Billy Pappas who spent the better part of a decade creating a singular drawing using pencil and paper; a bust of Marilyn Monroe.

What is remarkable about the drawing is the level of detail. He used loupes to magnify the area in which he was working and was able to achieve an amazing level of refinement, a level not surpassed even by photographic imagery. I was amazed when they were taking close-ups of the image and it is remarkable that he spent eight and a half years working on it, millimeter by millimeter, day after day, he must have put painstaking effort into it; maddening effort. I can only imagine.

But after thinking about it for a while I began to wonder, where is the art in it? Is it the piece itself? Is it the artist? Is it the journey? Is it the spectacle? At first glance the piece itself it looks like an engraving, much like a U.S. treasury note; fine lines and patterns fitting together to form an almost perfect image. It is startling to know that it was crafted by a human hand. While there is an astonishing level of detail in the composition at some point that level of detail seems to me to become too analytical, too repetitive, too mechanical. I'm not sure that I want my artwork analyzed and broken down by the equivalent of a human Large Hadron Collider, searching for the "Art Particle". It seems to me that at some point artwork of this nature ceases being artwork and becomes science. I am convinced that with a machine that is refined enough to produce a fifty thousand dots per inch rendering can create something equally interesting and evoke an equivalent response from an observer.

When I think of artwork that is great I look for experiences that make me question, that make me ponder, experiences that evoke emotion and give way to the essential aspects of what it means to be a human being. Van Gogh's "Starry Night" is so fantastic because it allows the observer to bear witness to something beyond that which is normally observed by the five senses. While I admire Pappas for his technical ability, and certainly the iron-man-like effort that is something indeed noteworthy, this piece, and its placement as artwork seems to have been something of a miscategorization.

Have a look
http://www.billypappas.com/index.html