Dennis Hollingsworth

Yup.

Jerry's right about this one:

In defense of the staggeringly radical act of really looking, the wildness of the imagination, and the limitlessness of pictorial invention, I propose a 48-month moratorium on the reproduction of photographs via overhead, opaque, or slide projectors in paintings (this means tracing too). Call this the Richter Resolution, the Polke Principle or the Tuymans Rule. Whatever you call it, it means that photographs, film stills, snapshots or whatever may be used as starting points, references or inspiration, but for the next four years let's pretend there's a ban against the use of mechanical devices to replicate these images in paintings.

This is not a geezer rant about loss of skills, bad drawing, laziness or cheating. I'm not trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Like brushes and rulers, projectors are tools. This is about how these tools are used, which lately has become unadventurous. I address this mainly to students and do so provisionally, not prescriptively or prohibitively. Basically, this is a celebration of artists who find original ways to use these devices and an indictment of those who have turned this type of depiction into a tedious tic.