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I'm sure I understand your takes on this terminology, and it is as I had interpreted it, but only from context -- the only definition I've found -- and I wrote simply because I'm sure there are others who wondered what folks meant by the term. "Painterly" seems just to have begun to appear -- seemingly in differentiation from some other style -- and depending on who said or wrote it, meant anything from a loose, brush-stroke style to a "polished" finish. As a viewer, I happen to favour the more impressionistic interpretation, as I've long since said here, but alas, as a novice painter I'm not sufficiently adept at judging and mixing the correct colours in the correct values on the first effort, and so I must work toward what I'm trying to portray. I have to do a values study, and correct my drawing, and try all kinds of colour mixes before I'm satisfied. That's the best I can do right now. My only training is in the "toward" methodology, which is both frustrating at times, and forgiving, because I don't have to be "right" every time I put a brush stroke down, and I don't have to be "wrong" every time I correct an error in perception, rather than just accept it because it was my first emotional impulse.
I began this thread very late at night in, admittedly, a bit of a pique, because I've scrounged around in other forums, including a major archive of classical work, where there was a "with us or against us" mentality, and where if you don't work in their style, you're at the very least not worth viewing. I've now recently begun to hear elsewhere that highly refined work isn't as artistically worthy as "painterly" work.
Sometimes when I visit the websites of proponents of "painterly" style, I see incredibly detailed and exact renderings that could not possibly have been done without lots of pre-planning, sketches, initial lay-ins, and serial returns to the piece to refine it. I don't think any less of those works because of that attention or because of the commensurate delay in capturing the essence of the subject.
If we were all working in the same medium and by the same methodology, this would become pretty boring pretty fast, wouldn't it?
My purpose was just to wonder out loud what people meant by a term I'm seeing fairly often without confidently understanding what is being held up as a standard.
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