Hubris critiqued

Can you tell me if my art is really good or just good?

Absolutely — but I need to see your art to give you an honest answer. 😄

And I won’t just tell you it’s “really good” to be nice. I can look at it like an art critic and tell you:

• Technical skill — composition, perspective, color, proportion, detail

• Originality/voice — whether it feels distinctly yours

• Emotional impact — whether it makes the viewer feel something

• Craftsmanship — how polished and intentional it is

• Where it sits overall — “good,” “really good,” or genuinely exceptional, with reasons

Send me a few pieces — including one you’re particularly proud of and one you’re unsure about.

I’ll give you the straight answer. No participation trophies. 😂

Okay. You asked me to be honest, so I’m going to be. 😄

Look at Hubris…

This is really good. Not “good for someone who paints as a hobby.” I mean there are several things happening here that tell me you have a developed artistic eye, particularly for atmosphere and visual storytelling.

What immediately stands out

1. You have a very strong sense of atmosphere.

The sky, pyramid, earth and water all have this hazy, almost ancient/dreamlike quality. You aren’t simply painting objects—you’ve created a world. That’s harder than it looks.

2. Your color sense is excellent.

The ochres, golds, muted turquoise/blue and reddish earth work together beautifully. And the blue-green water becomes the visual counterpoint to all those warm colors. That’s a sophisticated choice.

3. The composition actually makes me look around the painting.

My eye goes:

pyramid → falling/escaping pieces → winding stream → pool → figure → back into the landscape.

That pathway is not accidental-looking. You’ve created movement.

4. The pyramid is much more interesting than a realistically painted pyramid would have been.

Those little pieces coming away from it are particularly effective. They make the pyramid feel like it’s doing something rather than simply sitting there. There’s a story implied without you spelling it out.

5. The figure is an excellent decision.

The solitary figure facing the scene gives the whole thing emotional scale. Without that person, it would be an interesting landscape. With the person, it becomes a story.

And that’s one of the things that makes me put this in the “really good” category.

Now, the honest criticism

There are areas where the painting isn’t equally strong.

The foreground landscape is somewhat less resolved than the pyramid and middle ground. Some of the strokes become more generalized, and the spatial relationships aren’t always completely convincing.

The figure is also more symbolic than anatomically convincing—which isn’t necessarily a problem, because I think the painting benefits from that—but if your intention was realism, that’s an area I’d critique.

And the watermark across the middle is unfortunately covering one of the most interesting areas of the painting. 😆

But here’s the thing I find most interesting

This doesn’t look like someone who is primarily trying to demonstrate, “Look how accurately I can paint.”

It looks like someone trying to communicate an idea.

That’s a considerably more interesting artistic instinct.

So if you make me choose between:

“good” and “really good” I’m putting this one firmly in really good.

And I’m actually curious now: show me another one. I’d like to see whether this is a particularly successful painting of yours or whether this is simply what your work looks like. That distinction would tell me a lot.

I dreamed this 40 years ago and the dream stayed vivid till I finally painted a couple of years ago

Ohhh. That changes how I look at this painting.

Forty years between the dream and the painting—and you still remembered it vividly enough to reconstruct the feeling of it—is remarkable.

And looking at it again with that in mind, I think the most interesting thing is that it doesn’t feel like a conventional landscape. It feels like a remembered place that doesn’t quite belong to ordinary reality. The strange geometry, the pyramid shedding those little pieces, the water appearing almost impossibly in the middle of the dry landscape, and especially the lone figure looking toward it all make sense as a dream image.

You also didn’t paint it like someone working from a photograph. There are deliberately ambiguous things in it. That’s probably part of why it survived in your memory for 40 years.

And I want to correct something from my first response: I called the little pieces around the pyramid “falling/escaping pieces,” but now I’m wondering whether you knew exactly what those were in the dream. If so, I’d love to hear what was happening in the dream—because that could change my interpretation of the painting considerably.

Also, that signature/date—“Denise Dahlheimer 2023”—means you finally got the image out of your head after roughly four decades.

That’s pretty damn cool. ❤️

It “feels” like we are at the age of the end of the Pharoahs

Yes—and knowing that, I think the painting makes even more sense.

It doesn’t feel like “ancient Egypt” in the tourist/postcard sense. It feels like a civilization at the end of an era. There’s grandeur, but also something strangely quiet and final about it.

The pyramid dominates, but it doesn’t feel triumphant. The little golden pieces coming away from it almost suggest something breaking apart or being released. The fields are still productive, the water is still there, but the world feels like it’s in transition.

And that lone figure is what really sells it for me. They’re not standing there celebrating the pyramid. They’re watching.

That’s a very different emotional statement.

Interestingly, your instinct about the end of the pharaohs has a historical resonance: ancient Egypt’s pharaonic civilization went through repeated periods of decline and political transformation, and the final native Egyptian pharaohs were followed by Persian, Macedonian/Ptolemaic, and eventually Roman rule. But your painting doesn’t seem to be illustrating a particular historical event so much as your remembered dream’s feeling of an ending.

And that may be why I think it’s more than merely “good.”

You didn’t start with “I’m going to paint a pyramid.” You carried an image for forty years and eventually found a way to put the memory on canvas.

That’s the kind of thing I would want to ask an artist about before I ever asked whether the technique was perfect.

Now I’m really curious about one thing: what were those little golden pieces coming off the pyramid in the dream?

The pyramid itself.

Ah! The pyramid itself is coming apart.

That makes the image considerably more powerful to me.

The pyramid isn’t just an ancient structure sitting in the landscape—it appears to be disintegrating from the bottom upward, while the massive upper form remains intact. And because you painted those pieces individually rather than simply showing cracks or rubble, it creates the strange feeling that the pyramid is actively shedding its own substance.

That fits your “end of the Pharaohs” feeling beautifully: the monument is still enormous and imposing, but its permanence is no longer guaranteed.

And there’s something particularly interesting about the water. It seems to emerge from the direction of the collapsing pyramid and then continues into the foreground. So visually, you’ve got:

pyramid → dissolution → water → landscape → observer

Whether you consciously intended that symbolism when you painted it or not, it’s a remarkably coherent visual story.

And now I understand why you remembered the dream for 40 years. It isn’t a picture of a pyramid. It’s a picture of something enormous and ancient beginning to disappear.

That’s a much more unusual image.