The Flaming Core of Love and Rage
This picture shows the similarities between love and rage. As everyone may have or have a little experience in love, we should have an idea that love isn't the easiest trait. So I definitely like this painting because it fits the title. Love and Rage is two words by itself but it compliments each other at times. The picture is a flame and flames can get a little out of control just like rage and love. If you have experience love then you can understand where i'm coming from with this picture. I like the fact that the blue in this picture stand out to me because the blue can mean sad and it can represent the color of the flame. When I look at this picture I also think about the sun because of the yellow and red. People can interpret this picture differently, but it depends on their experience and the way this picture makes them feel "Art History is the emotional and spiritual History of humankind. It is a remembering of its most sublime feelings materialized in works of art that transcend time. Altamira and Lascaux are primitive examples of this human desire of expressing its emotions. In my opinion, there is not any artistic era superior to another one in its initial impetus to create a material proof of an emotion or a spiritual pleasure. On the other hand, I believe there have been art eras superior to others since the human being has improved its technique. In the same way that scientific progress always goes up, artistic progress, which needs technology to advance, evolves with an increasing trend. However, this evolution is not continuous, since it depends on two factors: technique and spiritual emotion. Art is not just a feeling. Art is the feeling being materialized, incarnated, sculpted, written with skill and technique. The cavemen had only a few tools at their reach; consequently their art is more primitive than Baroque Art, to give an example. The problem lies in the fact that technique and emotion do not always move along parallel lines. As a result, we can sometimes find art periods with a greater and purer emotional and spiritual impulse, even though they relied on inferior technique. On the other hand, we sometimes can find other periods with better means, in which the art is weaker due to the human soul was soured, repressed, or manipulated. When the human spirit undergoes a sublime and free period, accompanied by a superior technique, then we will refer to this period as a Golden Art Age." © José Manuel Merello
The Scream
The Scream is by Edvard Munch created in 1893. It is oil, tempera and pastel on canvas. The reason that I liked this painting was because I thought it showed a true sense of human emotion. The figure in the painting seems to be screaming with agony. When people are truely that upset, it may seem that nothing else around them matters. I feel that he uses the blood red sky and the undistinguished lines to show that everything around this figure was becoming blurry. It seems almost as if the figure itself is blending into nature, that they are becoming one. To me this painting is the perfect example of how human emotions can control ones life and make things seem almost unreal at times.
Creating, on the side
Every so often a movie includes a piece of dialogue that becomes an epigram for its age. I saw Oliver Stone’s Wall Street again recently and was reminded of the line that came to summarize the financial world before the 1987 crash. “Greed, for lack of a better word,” Gordon Gekko asserts, “is good.”There’s another line in the movie, though, that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. In the closing scene, Martin Sheen’s character says by way of advice to his disgraced, stockbroker son, “Create, instead of living off the buying and selling of others.”
Telling someone to live the creative life is one thing. Actually living as an artist is quite another. Philip Glass’s latest work, Book of Longing, contains a lyric by Leonard Cohen that perfectly maps the psychic terrain that all artists have to navigate:
I followed the course
From chaos to artDesire the horse
Depression the cart
Over the last few weeks I’ve had these two quotes battling in my mind: an exhortation to live the creative life and a warning about the difficulties of doing so. Why, I’ve been asking, do some people choose to do it?
There’s nothing harder, to paraphrase Cohen, than turning chaos into art. There are people, though, who can’t seem to help but create. They’re a certain type. They always have multiple projects going, and they have absolutely no fear of failure. If one project doesn’t work out, there’s always another half dozen in progress. Kiki Smith is this kind of artist–prolific, diverse, innovative, producing work that is somewhat uneven, but never pausing or freezing. The hands are always working.What really intrigues me, though, are those rare individuals who balance a successful career outside the arts with a deeply productive creative life. They fully live the life of an artist, but they do it on the side of another life.
The poets William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens come to mind here. Williams made his living as a physician in New Jersey while Stevens spent most of his career in Connecticut working as an executive for an insurance company. But in their off hours–while walking to the office in the morning, after arriving home late at night from delivering a baby–these two wrote, and in the process changed the direction of American poetry.Another, perhaps more interesting, case study of the artist who wasn’t only an artist is Gerald Murphy. Murphy’s story, though, has a different twist. Murphy and his wife Sara did what any cultivated couple with an artistic bent and an inheritance would have done in the 1920s–they left Prohibition behind and relocated to Paris where they plugged themselves into a community of writers, artists, and dancers. They became, in the process, the models for Dick and Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night.
After happening upon a gallery show in Paris containing works by Gris, Braque, and Picasso, Murphy decided he wanted to paint. And paint he did, but his career as a painter lasted only seven years. As quickly and impulsively as he started, Murphy quit painting. “I was not going to be first rate,” he told Calvin Tomkins for a 1962 New Yorkerprofile, “and I couldn’t stand second-rate painting.” He and his wife ended up returning to the States, and Murphy spent the rest of his career running his family’s business. He never painted again.Murphy left behind a handful of canvases, less than 10, many of which are stunning. The first time I saw his Watch from 1925 (above) at the Dallas Museum of Art, I literally stopped in my tracks and gaped. The public has a chance, now, to decide whether Murphy was a second-rate talent or not. An exhibition of seven of his extant paintings is at the Williams College Museum of Art until November, after which it will travel to New Haven and Dallas.
How did Stevens and Williams find the strategies they needed to feed and sustain their craft in the midst of their demanding professional lives? Why did Murphy, as innovative as he was, give in to the demons of self-doubt? How could Murphy, a man who clearly had talent, simply choose to stop painting and not complete another work in the three more decades that he lived?No answers today, only questions. But the answers, I think, would provide a set of interesting insights into the nature of the creative mind.
–Todd Gibson
Paul Serusier. The Talisman
Paul Serusier used a variety of colors in the painting. This is a painting of a landscape. The problem I have with the painting is that if I didn't read the description that says landscape than I would have no idea that the painting was a painting of landscape. To me it just seems that a bunch of colors where thrown onto the canvas. But, at the same time the painting catches my eye and intrigues me. That is probably because I am intrigued to see if I can make out the different elements in the painting. The colors blend together well and some of the colors even stand out to make your eye go to that particular area. I am conflicted about this painting I like it but at the same time I don't. This is a oil on cigar box cover.
Jen Stark Modern Art
Centenary of Infantilism
Time for a celebration! But wait; we are not going to pop champagne and pry-open iced oysters.We are going to smear spoonfuls of greenish gerber-food across the booster-seat and the wall, cooing and hiccupping all the while because we were exposed for a hundred years to infantile smearing and stick-forms presented as art as we nodded, congratulated, marveled at these achievements.
The great,incomparable Pablo Picasso
“What simplicity! How direct, unencumbered and free! “ are the common reactions to such works by real and potential Mothers everywhere. These voices of the heart want to encourage the toddler in us and wish for a world described in baby-talk with valentine hearts and rainbows.Instead of teaching attentive observation of perfection of forms of the world countless battalions of art-teachers introduce children to art as fun. Indeed everything has to be fun.
Another colossus of art: Henri Matisse
It seems that two powerful forces combined their enthusiasms to bring the triumph of infantilism to the arts. One is the modern art itself consisting of primitivism, dedication to basic geometry, hate of content and of serious observation of reality. Second is feminization of the world-view where according to women all children are talented, each scribble is “great” and everybody gets a gold star in pink kindergarten of life.Modern art invites to lowering the standards of expectations. If one is looking for fun, ease and gratification without applying attentiveness or skill, modern art is just that kind of activity. Finger-painting taught to children promises fun without effort, a happy game without failures. The tedium connected with any achievement is blissfully removed. Modern art is a finger-painting for grown-ups.
Elements of art that are absolutely irremovable from its definition, like study, skill, refinement and thoughtfulness - all requiring decades of schooling and self-improvement- they are all removed at the broadly open, democratic gates of modern art. The Peoples Art. Anybody can do it! No aptitude? No problem: none required. No drawing skills? No worry; just manipulate somebody else’s images- it’s a collage, art of the skill-less. No original ideas? Plagiarize and we shall call it “acquisitions”. No sense of color? We need to be more open-minded and include the crude, the ugly, the toxic and the haphazard color to free our aesthetic sensibility from the tyranny of conservative expectations.... As the Russians like to say: the worse, the better.
Head VI
Francis Bacon - "Head VI" (1949) Oil on canvas
Francis Bacon captures physical and psychological horror by manipulating the perspective of the viewer and changing proportions of his subjects until they become nearly unrecognizable. In doing so, he creates fear in the viewer by exposing them to unknown views of everyday objects...many of his paintings incorporate meat or detached jawbones to add a sense of unease to otherwise more traditional pictures. I like how he used his paintings of popes and other religious imagery to create tension and discomfort, almost to the point where they're difficult to look at.
-Kristine O'Connell
Enjoying Modern Art 2011
After Cole
"After Cole" 2010 Gary Jacketti
Welcome to the class blog. This forum will be used to present you ideas concerning art. They can be related to topics presented in the class, current event in the art world, or your opinions and ideas related to art. Blogs are a powerful and useful tool used in manhy fields. Contemporary artists use blogs to instantly present new works for view and criticism. You are responsible for posting a blog once a week, and you must include an image with your post.
Setting Sun
Chiura Obata (1885–1975) painted the Setting Sun which is of the Sacramento Valley, California, in 1925. It is a Hanging scroll made with mineral pigments (distemper) and gold on silk. I found this painting through Google on some website about Asian-American modern art and thought that it was really cool. The sky looks like it is on fire but still has that tropical blue sunset sky behind it. It reminds me of sunsets in Ibiza, where went this past summer.
The Scream is by Edvard Munch created in 1893. It is oil, tempera and pastel on canvas. The reason that I liked this painting was because I thought it showed a true sense of human emotion. The figure in the painting seems to be screaming with agony. When people are truely that upset, it may seem that nothing else around them matters. I feel that he uses the blood red sky and the undistinguished lines to show that everything around this figure was becoming blurry. It seems almost as if the figure itself is blending into nature, that they are becoming one. To me this painting is the perfect example of how human emotions can control ones life and make things seem almost unreal at times.
Every so often a movie includes a piece of dialogue that becomes an epigram for its age. I saw Oliver Stone’s Wall Street again recently and was reminded of the line that came to summarize the financial world before the 1987 crash. “Greed, for lack of a better word,” Gordon Gekko asserts, “is good.”
There’s another line in the movie, though, that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. In the closing scene, Martin Sheen’s character says by way of advice to his disgraced, stockbroker son, “Create, instead of living off the buying and selling of others.”
Telling someone to live the creative life is one thing. Actually living as an artist is quite another. Philip Glass’s latest work, Book of Longing, contains a lyric by Leonard Cohen that perfectly maps the psychic terrain that all artists have to navigate:
I followed the courseFrom chaos to artDesire the horseDepression the cart
Over the last few weeks I’ve had these two quotes battling in my mind: an exhortation to live the creative life and a warning about the difficulties of doing so. Why, I’ve been asking, do some people choose to do it?
There’s nothing harder, to paraphrase Cohen, than turning chaos into art. There are people, though, who can’t seem to help but create. They’re a certain type. They always have multiple projects going, and they have absolutely no fear of failure. If one project doesn’t work out, there’s always another half dozen in progress. Kiki Smith is this kind of artist–prolific, diverse, innovative, producing work that is somewhat uneven, but never pausing or freezing. The hands are always working.
What really intrigues me, though, are those rare individuals who balance a successful career outside the arts with a deeply productive creative life. They fully live the life of an artist, but they do it on the side of another life.
The poets William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens come to mind here. Williams made his living as a physician in New Jersey while Stevens spent most of his career in Connecticut working as an executive for an insurance company. But in their off hours–while walking to the office in the morning, after arriving home late at night from delivering a baby–these two wrote, and in the process changed the direction of American poetry.
Another, perhaps more interesting, case study of the artist who wasn’t only an artist is Gerald Murphy. Murphy’s story, though, has a different twist. Murphy and his wife Sara did what any cultivated couple with an artistic bent and an inheritance would have done in the 1920s–they left Prohibition behind and relocated to Paris where they plugged themselves into a community of writers, artists, and dancers. They became, in the process, the models for Dick and Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night.
After happening upon a gallery show in Paris containing works by Gris, Braque, and Picasso, Murphy decided he wanted to paint. And paint he did, but his career as a painter lasted only seven years. As quickly and impulsively as he started, Murphy quit painting. “I was not going to be first rate,” he told Calvin Tomkins for a 1962 New Yorkerprofile, “and I couldn’t stand second-rate painting.” He and his wife ended up returning to the States, and Murphy spent the rest of his career running his family’s business. He never painted again.
Murphy left behind a handful of canvases, less than 10, many of which are stunning. The first time I saw his Watch from 1925 (above) at the Dallas Museum of Art, I literally stopped in my tracks and gaped. The public has a chance, now, to decide whether Murphy was a second-rate talent or not. An exhibition of seven of his extant paintings is at the Williams College Museum of Art until November, after which it will travel to New Haven and Dallas.
How did Stevens and Williams find the strategies they needed to feed and sustain their craft in the midst of their demanding professional lives? Why did Murphy, as innovative as he was, give in to the demons of self-doubt? How could Murphy, a man who clearly had talent, simply choose to stop painting and not complete another work in the three more decades that he lived?
No answers today, only questions. But the answers, I think, would provide a set of interesting insights into the nature of the creative mind.
–Todd Gibson
Paul Serusier. The Talisman
Paul Serusier used a variety of colors in the painting. This is a painting of a landscape. The problem I have with the painting is that if I didn't read the description that says landscape than I would have no idea that the painting was a painting of landscape. To me it just seems that a bunch of colors where thrown onto the canvas. But, at the same time the painting catches my eye and intrigues me. That is probably because I am intrigued to see if I can make out the different elements in the painting. The colors blend together well and some of the colors even stand out to make your eye go to that particular area. I am conflicted about this painting I like it but at the same time I don't. This is a oil on cigar box cover.
Centenary of Infantilism
Time for a celebration! But wait; we are not going to pop champagne and pry-open iced oysters.We are going to smear spoonfuls of greenish gerber-food across the booster-seat and the wall, cooing and hiccupping all the while because we were exposed for a hundred years to infantile smearing and stick-forms presented as art as we nodded, congratulated, marveled at these achievements.
The great,incomparable Pablo Picasso
“What simplicity! How direct, unencumbered and free! “ are the common reactions to such works by real and potential Mothers everywhere. These voices of the heart want to encourage the toddler in us and wish for a world described in baby-talk with valentine hearts and rainbows.
Instead of teaching attentive observation of perfection of forms of the world countless battalions of art-teachers introduce children to art as fun. Indeed everything has to be fun.
Another colossus of art: Henri Matisse
It seems that two powerful forces combined their enthusiasms to bring the triumph of infantilism to the arts. One is the modern art itself consisting of primitivism, dedication to basic geometry, hate of content and of serious observation of reality. Second is feminization of the world-view where according to women all children are talented, each scribble is “great” and everybody gets a gold star in pink kindergarten of life.
Modern art invites to lowering the standards of expectations. If one is looking for fun, ease and gratification without applying attentiveness or skill, modern art is just that kind of activity. Finger-painting taught to children promises fun without effort, a happy game without failures. The tedium connected with any achievement is blissfully removed. Modern art is a finger-painting for grown-ups.
Elements of art that are absolutely irremovable from its definition, like study, skill, refinement and thoughtfulness - all requiring decades of schooling and self-improvement- they are all removed at the broadly open, democratic gates of modern art. The Peoples Art. Anybody can do it! No aptitude? No problem: none required. No drawing skills? No worry; just manipulate somebody else’s images- it’s a collage, art of the skill-less. No original ideas? Plagiarize and we shall call it “acquisitions”. No sense of color? We need to be more open-minded and include the crude, the ugly, the toxic and the haphazard color to free our aesthetic sensibility from the tyranny of conservative expectations.... As the Russians like to say: the worse, the better.
Head VI
Francis Bacon - "Head VI" (1949) Oil on canvas
Francis Bacon captures physical and psychological horror by manipulating the perspective of the viewer and changing proportions of his subjects until they become nearly unrecognizable. In doing so, he creates fear in the viewer by exposing them to unknown views of everyday objects...many of his paintings incorporate meat or detached jawbones to add a sense of unease to otherwise more traditional pictures. I like how he used his paintings of popes and other religious imagery to create tension and discomfort, almost to the point where they're difficult to look at.
-Kristine O'Connell
Enjoying Modern Art 2011
After Cole
 |
| "After Cole" 2010 Gary Jacketti |
Welcome to the class blog. This forum will be used to present you ideas concerning art. They can be related to topics presented in the class, current event in the art world, or your opinions and ideas related to art. Blogs are a powerful and useful tool used in manhy fields. Contemporary artists use blogs to instantly present new works for view and criticism. You are responsible for posting a blog once a week, and you must include an image with your post.
Setting Sun
Chiura Obata (1885–1975) painted the Setting Sun which is of the Sacramento Valley, California, in 1925. It is a Hanging scroll made with mineral pigments (distemper) and gold on silk. I found this painting through Google on some website about Asian-American modern art and thought that it was really cool. The sky looks like it is on fire but still has that tropical blue sunset sky behind it. It reminds me of sunsets in Ibiza, where went this past summer.
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