This movie seemed to have been made by people who have never actually been to an art class, and don't know how they operate - surprising, as Daniel Clowes is co-author. Maybe he wasn't paying attention.
First, the art itself: I do art classes at night at a big downtown technical school. A number of my classmates and a great many of the day-school students produce better work than Clowes/Zwigoff's hero does. I'm talking Grade 12 here, at most. Minghella's character, Jerome, is supposed to be a devotee of Picasso, but his art shows no evidence that he knows Picasso ever lived: it's careful, literal likeness, with no expressive power, like a sidewalk-artist's ten-minute portrait. There is a scene where three chicks get together to puff the self-portrait one of them produced. They obviously have their own agenda, but in fact the picture in question (which suggests eyes seen through a veil of hair) actually has a certain amount of expressive power, and when Jerome objects, you expect him to say, 'My five-year-old nephew could do better stuff than that!' For the audience to care about a character, there has to be something to him - more at least than just a wish to be famous and get chicks. From the quality of work shown (which is Clowes' work, by the way) that is all there is to him. It looks like the example pages from every 'Easy Way to Draw and Paint' book ever written.
First, the art itself: I do art classes at night at a big downtown technical school. A number of my classmates and a great many of the day-school students produce better work than Clowes/Zwigoff's hero does. I'm talking Grade 12 here, at most. Minghella's character, Jerome, is supposed to be a devotee of Picasso, but his art shows no evidence that he knows Picasso ever lived: it's careful, literal likeness, with no expressive power, like a sidewalk-artist's ten-minute portrait. There is a scene where three chicks get together to puff the self-portrait one of them produced. They obviously have their own agenda, but in fact the picture in question (which suggests eyes seen through a veil of hair) actually has a certain amount of expressive power, and when Jerome objects, you expect him to say, 'My five-year-old nephew could do better stuff than that!' For the audience to care about a character, there has to be something to him - more at least than just a wish to be famous and get chicks. From the quality of work shown (which is Clowes' work, by the way) that is all there is to him. It looks like the example pages from every 'Easy Way to Draw and Paint' book ever written.