Zed A. Shaw, Painter

This reminds me of painters I know from the Classical Realism world who rail against the use of photographs as being "too industrialized!" but then have no problem using Cadmium Yellow and tin tubes where were all invented about 20-40 years after the photograph.

Also guitarists who are notorious for talking about doing things "naturally" like, not using a little hair band on their guitar to stop strings from ringing when they play on a high gain amp...but then....they're using a fucking electric guitar and an insanely complex amp.

Any hatred of industrialization in design is now far too late. Design is a discipline born in a world of commercialization and entirely about selling people products, beliefs, and propaganda. The entire discipline has zero moral ground when talking about industrial capitalism.

Especially modern Design's root in Futurism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism  Which was the foundation of fascism and a major inspiration of industrialization, the brutality of the machine, and methods of fascis propaganda.

Paintings like this involved many many layers of oil paint, with each layer needing weeks to months to dry before the next layer. Flowers don't last that long, and many of these flowers don't bloom at the same time. Some of these paintings could also take 6 months, 2 seasons.

1. When the flowers are in bloom do small paintings of them from the same light direction. 2. When they'd get a commission they'd reuse these flowers as reference and basically copy them. 3. These were kept secret, with assistants being yelled at for not locking "the cabinet".

That, my friends, is systematization--or industrialization if you want to make people hate being good at making a product--so to say artists hate using systems is ludicrous. It's an entirely modern idea born out of the boomer's obsession with Freudian/Jungian psychology in art.

In fact, every time I see someone whine and complain about being forced to bow down to The Man and create a design system, I almost always catch them using a homegrown system to get their work done faster. Macros, templates, tricks, brushes, special software, everything.

So the idea that systematization of art is somehow anti-artistic is bullshit, and it's always been bullshit. Artists for millennia were professionals who made products and wanted quality, and to create that quality product they crafted systems & manufacturing operations.

Just go read about Rembrandt's workshop and others from that era and you see it's a manufacturing operation. The atelier system of education is based on this even, where students learn aspects of painting by doing them in an assembly line style.