My last Art 100 class posting

I may continue, but for now, this is my last posting for this class.
I can say without doubt that I enjoyed this classes text and in class lectures.
I enjoyed almost every single artist presentation, with just one or two exceptions.
I am grateful to Glenn for putting his students interests first, taking heat with the establishment to try and open minds and hearts and allow for free expression and unity. I will truly miss Glenn's movie clips, fresh ideals and ideas, and his suggestions, rather than strong opinions that condemn.

I loved the inspiration here that led me to finding art and doing art.

What is art? For me, it is anything that challenges and introduces a new way of looking at the world and at myself. Whether it is balanced, beautiful, ugly or varied...it is all good and worthy of taking at least one look, one minute of my time.
Art makes me wonder what will be around the next corner, and that makes life more worthwhile and exciting.

Thanks Glenn and my fellow, soon-to-be ex-classmates, for your hard work and effort.

Timeline Project

This may sound and look lame, but I could not think of any type of original timeline project, so I took a walk to think about it. As I was walking, I noticed a tree that was definitely growing up crooked. My image of a tree has always been straight up and down, but as I walked further, one tree after another in a one block radius were growing up crooked, or at least one stump of two was growing up crooked while the other was straight. Anyway, I took the following photos in one walk composed of maybe 15 minutes, or approx. a picture per minute.

Museum Project

I visited the Long Beach Museum of Art this past Saturday, and I did not expect to see the entire museum full of video installations. Unfortunately, I only had my camera phone video which really doesn't do all that well with video, so I can not show you the amazing things that I experienced. I sat in dark rooms and walked past walls full of video screens and enjoyed some very bizarre stuff, but some moving stuff as well. The one that most got to me was a 25 min. video (probably the longest one currently being exhibited) in a small dark room entitled "Kiyoke's Situation". Kiyoke is shown to be struggling with wanting to be an artist and dealing with the voices and faces in her mind of her overly conservative parents who are so steeped in their old fashioned culture and opinions of what 'should' Kiyoke be doing as a traditional Japanese wife and mother, and how she should live her life. A lot of emotional abuse from both parents and husband and how critical they all are of her. She is shown trying to speak her mind and just getting more and more depressed and going crazy until at the end, the viewer see's a bottle explode, and Kiyoke taking her own life. It is a very emotional video, and not for minors. Like all art, video is a very powerful art form when used in creative ways, and out of all that I had seen at the museum, Kiyoke's Situation, 1989, is by far the most moving one there. The whole museum and everything now there can be seen in one to one half hour. It was a beautiful day, and it really is a great location to take in some art and see the ocean and all the activity that goes on there on the weekend. I highly recommend you take your student I.D. and for six dollars, enjoy the scenery. Thursday nights are free.

Tues 11/29/2011 Lecture on Pattern and Variation

Pattern, Pattern, Variation, Pattern,…

I suppose this in class look at our preferences at life, music, classes, friendships and partnerships helps us students think about what we like in art as well. I think variety is the spice of life, and although I prefer pattern over variation, I would choose differently after giving it more thought…I would probably choose variation more often with classes, now that I have experienced this class. Glenn keeps it varied and throws out a lot of different things to think about. My experiences have been very varied since starting this class, being exposed to different artists and types of art. I have seen a lot of art in galleries and plan to see a museum today. Life has a lot to offer, and I appreciate the open mindedness that evolves in Glenn’s classroom. I guess I would now want more variation in my classes than I previously thought, and I don’t think I will probably experience anything like Glenn again, unless I return to one of his classes. Thank you Glenn!

New Earth Art Project

"Seaing" (Bark, Leaves and Blue sheet).

"Seaing in Dim Light"

"Seaing in the dark"



This is my Earth Art. I was out in the windy and rainy weather recently, and found an area that had some bark, leaves and stems from the trees scattered on the ground. I saw these two pieces of bark and immediately thought of whales, or some kind of sea creature, but did not plan to do an aquarium scene until I got all the stuff in the house and sat down to check out all my treasures I found on the ground.
I started with just colored paper as a background once I did decide, but then remembered I had an old blue sheet that would enable me to go bigger.
Experimenting with the phone camera in different lighting, I came up with these three different but similar photo's of the artwork I named Seaing. I haven't thought of a better name, and don't plan to, since it was seeing a sea idea in the bits of nature that signifies the name. I really enjoyed playing around with the different ways of arranging the leaves and bark on the blue sheet, and then trying different views, angles and lighting until I arrived at this angle, and these three different light backgrounds. I think the lack of resolution with my camera is a doing a disservice to the natural colors of the leaves and bark, but that is what I did before dismantling the whole thing, and I want to move on now. I hope you can get the feeling of motion when you look at this, because that is part of what I hoped the viewer would see. The time it took was consuming, I don't do this stuff very fast at all, but I enjoyed the process, have no cares about what others think about it, and feel good about this first Earth Art I personally have ever done.

11/22/2011 Lecture

11/22/2011

In response to this weeks lecture on beauty vs. sublime, realism vs. romanticism, I would have to say I like Glenn’s last comments in regards to balance. Romantic art or other pleasures that offer hope and motivation to achieve more in life is very important. I think the romantic and beauty in life are critical to making it through the sublime, mundane and ordinary everyday life stuff…But the Sublime and ordinary practical things in life are also necessary…the real stuff keeps my head out of the clouds so I can see where I am going and keeps me from falling down. There is a reason the romantic people tend to marry the down to earth types and vice versa. It’s easy for poets like Keats to recite “Beauty is all you need” or the Beatles to sing “Love is all you need”, but the real world is not giving out a lot of jobs for being romantic. So I agree with the idea of balance of both realism and romantic.
I, like most of us have seen Beauty become ugly, and Ugly become Beauty, and not just in the movies. I have been blessed to see ugly redeem itself and transform many times over with people.

I think Beauty can be all things, moral and good and lead to higher things, and I think it can be negative and drop to lower levels. In art, I have seen no unbeautiful things, if done sincerely and with effort.
Even Goya’s Saturn is beautiful in its own way.

It’s raw beauty at least.

If an art work depicts something in life I don’t like, but still has attractive colors, and is organized and thoughtful, then I personally don’t call it ugly. If an art work is both unorganized, too bland and also is not thoughtful and unattractive to many, I believe the artist can still find the beauty within it from their own perspective. That is the beautiful thing about art: It is subjective at its core. The art I like is the art that artists MUST do, whether or not critics rant or rave (Banksy the graffiti artist presented by Courtney comes to mind). Whether or not, art is beautiful or romantic or ugly and sublime, makes no bit of difference to me as long as it makes me stop and think, smile, gasp or causes me to be inspired. Those are the qualities in art that keeps me searching both within and around me for more of the same.

Chapter 14. Last text chapter blog of Living with Art: 7th edition

I hated having to end my text blogs with this chapter, as it was one of my least favorites…The Egyptian stuff pretty much bores me to sleep…the flat paintings.…but knowing a little bit of history to go along with the art always adds some caffeine to the sleeping pill. I chose to compare and contrast these two first:

14.14 Fragment of tomb of Nabamun, Thebes c. 1450 B.C.E.

and

14.19 Toreador Fresco from Palace at Knossos c. 1500 B.C.E.

I like more, not less usually in my favorite artworks, and 14.14. has a lot to offer. I like the details and the color, as well as the variety. 14.19 has much less variety and not much in the way of details or color.
I still dig its simplicity and graceful curves of the bull and acrobat, the abstract quality of the simple drawings and the way the color is used. Just the way the bull dominates and choice of shape and size compared to its meaning and importance to the culture is kind of cool.
The painting from the tomb of Nabamun is extra cool in meaning and adds a lot of extra to get this guy to eternity off right. The artist took care and time to do the details of the fish, the birds and placement of hierarchy of items painted in to this. The color of the reeds and plants / flowers to the left is repetitiously artistic and the fragment like quality makes this even more awesome. Not my favorite, just my favorite painting in this chapter.

Here again is another type of wow! and huh?:
Huh? first:



14.28 Aphrodite of Melos (AKA Venus de Milo) c. 150 B.C.E.

14.29 Laocoon Group 1st Century C.E.

I get that Aphrodite / Venus is missing arms and mirror and just staring at self beauty, so I shouldn’t judge its blasé pose doing nothing but staring. I just get bored looking at it, even though I can appreciate all those details in the robe and hair and such…The hair should be long in my opinion, and the face sculpted more perfect like it has makeup on, not so plain. Nice Body, okay, and the clothing slipping down is sexy. But not to much to hold interest.
On the other hand, I like the action and tension in the Laocoon group. Maybe its cause I’m a guy. But the rippling muscles of dad and the scared look on the sons holds interest. Not to mention mad crushing snakes.
I don’t like violence and tragedy, but this is a more interesting statue and story, so it’s worth spending time and effort on for an artist and it’s viewer.