Art Gallery Visit #1

The artwork that left the strongest impression on me was Bridget Riley’s Drift No. 2 (acrylic on canvas, 1966).  

What I was particularly impressed with was how the lines were drawn not just so that they implied movement, but really felt like they did move.  Drift felt exactly like being in water to me, and looking at the painting straight on gave the feeling and illusion of ripples and waves.  Depending on how I moved my head, the painting seemed to really move.  

There were a lot of works that left an impression on me.  One of the other favorites was James Ensor’s Le feu d’artifice (Fireworks) (oil/encaustic on canvas, 1887).  

The bold splash of warm colors right in the middle is evocative of a volcano erupting, until you see all the people painted in at the bottom.  This painting really does evoke watching fireworks erupt in the sky.  You can almost hear the boom!

To be honest, the first artwork I sought out was Monet’s.  Currently, the Albright-Knox has his Chemin de halage a Argenteuil (Townpath at Argenteuil, Winter) (oil on canvas, 1875-76) on display.  

While not my favorite Monet, I feel a great connection with him as a painter and with Impressionism in general (and to some extent Post-Impressionism).  I love the style, the way they work with color – this painting in particular is a good example of this.  Winter is a dull & grey time of year, but those are not the colors most evident in Monet’s painting.  You can see all the greens and purples, all the ways he added color which did not detract from the season he was depicting yet still gives us the same gloomy cold feeling.  

The other artwork I felt a big connection with was Frank M. Moore’s Niagara (oil on canvas, 1994-95).  

Firstly, because this is my home, and I just visited the Falls for my birthday so this painting is a stunningly beautiful tribute to that.  I really enjoyed too how he got very into the water theme – the copper pipe frame with faucet handles was poignant and the chemical strings of dihydrogen monoxide buried all in the water was fascinating to look at.

The first artwork I wanted to learn more about was a sculpture (plaster, paint & wood) by Alexander Archipenko called Walking Soldier (1917).  

Like, I got the image of a walking soldier looking at it but I need to know more.  Who is this soldier?  Was this artist a witness to the horrors of WWI?  I thought most of the fighting for that was done in like Germany and France.  Was the artist in one of those cities at the time?  Was he a soldier in the war? 

The second artwork I wanted to know more about was Frantisek Kupka’s Traits, Plans, Profonduer (oil on canvas, 1920-22). 

It’s a very blue piece, almost like someone emerging from a constricting garment (there’s what seems like a boot in the lower right of the painting) – actually I more thought of someone’s sadness emerging from themselves after a long day of holding it together.  Yet the title (the artist was Czechian) evokes the old movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and in some ways the looping, snake-like blue lines could be a train of some sort.  So yeah, I want to know about this painting – what it was supposed to be/about, the style it was done in, and more.  

Values & the Color Wheel

My images can be found at the Photobucket album below:

http://s350.photobucket.com/user/amynewt87/library/Values%20and%20the%20Color%20Wheel

1.  The color wheel was relatively easy to make.  But the value scale was really, really hard.  I found it quite difficult to control how hard I pressed with the pencil and things like that.  It took much longer to do my scale then my color wheel, but I found the color wheel more fun.

2. I enjoyed working with the paints far more.  It's much easier to apply and to mix then trying to get the pencil to grade.  Painting is relaxing!

3. Well I suppose the most important "discovery" was just how hard it was to make a grey gradient with just one pencil.  It looks relatively easy, and I suppose if you use different/multiple pencils then it is easier.  But with just one pencil it was very, very difficult for me.

4. I suppose the most important information I got from the videos was that the primary colors for painting were "wrong."  Like, I knew about yellow/magenta/cyan for printer primary colors, but I didn't know it had transferred to painting. Or that the secondary colors were now green/red/blue, instead of green/orange/purple.  I want purple/violet to be a secondary color again.

Elements & Principles of Design - Subway Series

The link below is my Photobucket album submission for the elements & principles of design project:

Elements & Principles of Design - Subway Series

I decided that I was going to have conceptual unity in my work by doing all of the photos at the Subway sandwich shop I work with.  This came because of a pun - they do call me a "sandwich artist" after all.

"Space" is the lobby of my restaurant.  The most important part of a restaurant, and the part that requires the most space, is the lobby.  I figured it would be an appropriate picture.

"Unity" was not just a conceptual concept.  To literally represent it, I took a photo of a complete sub - all the ingredients unified into a coherent whole.

"Pattern" was constructed using sandwich materials.  Many of my subs require patterning of some sort so I thought using the food to create a pattern would be clever.

"Proportion" was a little difficult, but I finally decided I was going to show proportion via a salad.  I over-portioned part of it to make the theme of the picture more obvious.

"Value" is shown by a bread gradient.  There are various shades of lightness & darkness that can be found in Subway bread, and I illustrated it by putting them side by side and allowing optical mixing to show a gradient.

"Texture" is a close-up photo - in this case of green peppers, but lettuce and tuna were thought about.  A close-up of this nature allows you to see the different textures present in the vegetable, and also makes the composition seem like texture in and of itself.

"Shapes" is the employee bulletin board, cobbled together entirely of squares.  While it is not very varied in shape, it is a good example of flat, 2-dimensional shape.

"Contrast" is supposed to be showing one full and one empty sauce bottle, with the contrast being between full and empty.  The more I think about it, the better I could have done with this one; it is probably the one photo I could retake, because I could add contrasting color as well and show what I wanted even more.

"Forms" is a set-up of the recyclable boxes right before they went to the dumpster.  Again, there isn't much variety in form where I work, but I thought that the set up showed 3-dimensional form very well.

"Balance" is another sort of a pun.  I set up the food scale - a balance of itself - on the central axis and symmetrically balanced the rest of the objects around it.

"Emphasis" was a picture of one of my chip racks.  In particular, it is supposed to show the big thing we get for promotional chips.  Promotion is a kind of emphasis of itself - another pun on my part - and the holder we get for those chips certainly helped to emphasize them in the photo.

"Movement" was originally going to be of a busy stream of customers, but my shop was rather quiet over the weekend (also why there were no people in my lobby picture).  So instead, to represent movement, I took a photo of my mop bucket being filled.  I could photograph both the water flowing out of the faucet, but also the movement of the water in the bucket.

"Line" my be my favorite, as it was one of the thoughts that set up my theme.  The photo is one of my "line" - what we call the area we work out of when making subs.  It really contains all the essential elements of "line" - it's called a line, it's set up in a way that a work will move down it in a straight line, it's made up almost entirely of lines... I took the photo at somewhat of an angle because diagonal lines are dynamic and make one think of movement.

"Color" was one of the easiest.  The picture is of my large chip rack, because when I think of color in a Subway, nothing pops like the myriad of colors present in a chip rack.

Color & Emotion

1.  Color impacts our emotions personally, sometimes in a very intense way.  Some colors are even associated with certain emotions, like how we associate blue with both water and sadness.  Some of these associations are universal, but a large number of them are culturally/socially conditioned.  Blue is a good example: its association with water is also an association with freedom, and while sadness is also an emotion connected with blue, in India it is a color associated with the gods Vishnu & Kali.  Emotions are influenced by the value and intensity of the color, with darker/more intense colors eliciting stronger emotions.  Color combinations can create and influence emotions.  Contrasting colors, like those found in Van Gogh’s café The Night Café, can serve to create tension for us.  Complimentary colors can serve to increase the intensity of the colors used and therefore deepen/strengthen the emotions the painting elicits in us. 

2.  The most intriguing color theories are the ones surrounding the optical tricks colors can play on us.  I particularly enjoy the afterimage trick – tiring out the color receptors in the eye/brain and imprinting images in them is kind of cool to me.  I am a very big fan of the Impressionists – and Monet is my favorite visual artist – so I found it intriguing the way they used this visual trick to create shadows.  I particularly think of Monet’s Haystacks series because he painted haystacks at different seasons of the year and the winter painting is almost the afterimage of the summer painting. 

3.  The biggest impact on the connection between emotion and art in the Color video came from watching the painter – Rebecca – create her piece near the end.  I was struck by how she worked so hard to adjust the color so that it would invoke the emotion she was keeping in her mind of the place she was painting.  She could tell by looking at it that the emotions weren’t matching up right, so the audience wouldn’t get it either, but when it clicked she was so positive that it was the right emotion and that other people would get it. 

4.  The Feelings video didn’t really talk about color per se; it was mostly about how art is tied into the events of history, the related emotions, and how those emotions have been manifested in art since Medieval times.  However, you can see in some of the paintings the narrator points out how color was used to invoke emotion.  I’m thinking particularly about one of the works of Jacques-Louis David – Oath of the Horatii.  I could see how the use of red in the robes of the main personage, along with the long & straight lines used to make him, could evoke strong feelings about his masculinity.  The color would be important because it makes the figure appear larger and advancing, which would help to focus us and imply the emotional message the artist intended.  

A Scientific Look at Aesthetics

1.  Key concept of the CNN Article:  how our brain recognizes art.  The whole article is an exploration in the way the brain processes art as coherent concepts.  For instance, lines don’t exist in the real world, but lines alone in artwork can still be recognized by our brains as coherent forms - shapes, faces, etc.  Our brains do this because of light and shadow in the real world that the lines mimic enough for us to get the idea.  It talks about the different ways our brain recognizes faces and how art can mimic that with just color differences.  The last part of the article talks about why we like art and it comes down to the same reasons we like anything as humans - it makes the pleasure center in our brains fire off.  So even abstract art - art that is not necessarily a coherent idea or form - can still cause a pleasurable reaction in the brain that allows us to draw meaning from the piece.  

Key concept of the Philosophy video: the history and evolution of aesthetics as a branch of philosophy.  The video went through different philosophers throughout history, starting with the Ancient Greeks & Plato.  It explored aesthetic theory through different lenses: not just philosophers but novelists and other artists.  

Key concept of the Neurobiology video: same as the CNN article - how our brain recognizes art.  This video goes a bit deeper than the CNN article, starting from the beginnings of art history - cave paintings and making tools.  It attempts to use what we know in the fields of neurobiology and neurology to explain how humans were able to create in the first place, and why we recognize certain themes as universal despite time context.  

2.  I really like Kant’s aesthetic theory.  Kant was the philosopher in the 18th century who first proposed a perception of human experience that tried to reconcile the reason-oriented rationalists and the sensory-oriented empiricists, creating aesthetics as a comprehensive philosophical system.  

I think Kant’s theory of aesthetics is important firstly because he tied aesthetics to his theories of reason and human experience. He made connections not just to our emotional reactivity - a sensory reaction studied by the empiricists - but to our judgement and reasoning.  Aesthetics are a subjective response to how the artwork pleases our imaginations.  We feel as if our judgements on aesthetics are logical and we appear to use reason when justifying beauty, however.  This paradox is because aesthetics invokes a disinterested pleasure in us and this pleasure has universal validity - this is a concept of common sense, a reasoning concept used in conjunction with our emotional reactivity upon seeing art in the first place.  

Secondly, he makes a distinction between different elements of the aesthetic.  Kant made a distinction between beauty, which we can point to, and the sublime, which we can appreciate aesthetically - that is, emotionally/subjectively - but that isn’t as easily defined; it’s a fuzzy relationship between our reasoning faculties (engaged when studying art) and our imagination that the sublime draws on.

3.  The scientific views of aesthetics and art as shown in the Neurobiology video are quite interesting to me as they explore evidence that our psychological processes have a physical basis and that those physical traits influence psychological processes.  

The most interesting fact from the first speaker’s lecture (Changeux?) was about how art evokes emotion in us, making us aware of certain things.  He showed brain scans that were lit up in the sections related to empathy when viewing art with tragic themes and it was cool to see that art can actually make the brain react like that - these themes aren’t just abstract concepts; they have a real physical basis.

The second speaker (Ramachandram) was more engaging and I was more interested in what he said.  I particularly liked how he connected certain art styles and themes across cultures and times.  He was talking about how Picasso chose to exaggerate certain things in his paintings and to take away the realism and how it was similar to Indian painters and sculptors and how they exaggerated reality and why they would do that aesthetically.  I also enjoyed how he talked about visual aesthetics instead of art because the word “art” has all these connotations to money and mass production and things that don’t really have anything to do with what we’re talking about.  

4.  The videos and article didn’t do much for me except connect the text to my chosen major.  For instance, I’ve studied Immanuel Kant in a couple of different courses by now, though never quite his aesthetic philosophy.  So I have a basis in which to understand Kant to begin with, the same with Plato.  The article especially was fun, because I’ve studied perception since PSY 101 - every psychology student has to understand the basics of perception (and the basics of the brain in general) before being able to understand anything else.  Now, connecting the text back to the subject I’ve been studying the most/hardest does make some of the concepts easier to understand.  It’s almost as if you have to psycholanalyze the works of art that you look at because it plays into the work almost as much as technical art theory does.  

5.  My opinion of the article is a pretty positive one.  I thought it was a very well-written work that connected art back to neuropsychology in a simple, yet interesting way.  My prior coursework allowed me to understand the connections the article was making easily and the text gave me enough background on the art side to allow the article to make some concepts clearer.

The philosophy of the arts video was almost as bad as listening to Karuza teaching History and Systems.  Don’t get me wrong, I love Karuza as a teacher, but he drones in his lectures and they can be a little dry and boring.  I literally felt like I was sitting in that class again, since although the philosophy is different (aesthetic philosophy), the method of delivery for the video was nearly exactly the same.  That was painful; not interesting or fun and it didn’t really expand my understanding of aesthetics any better.  

The CARTA video was a little more interesting, or at least the material was.  It was difficult to listen to the first speaker; he was heavily accented in a way that made his speech difficult to follow.  However, it was interesting to go back in history and to use neurobiology to explain our creation of art, what we are drawn to when we create and why we recognize certain themes universally.  The second speaker was more engaging.  He was funnier, though he spoke quite quickly and I almost found it difficult to keep up after struggling to decipher the first speaker.  He related the science back to real life in a way that was easily understood and engaging to listen to.  

Introducing...Me!

The process for setting this blog up was fairly easy, but that might be due to the fact that I spend a majority of my time online.  I have a couple different gmail accounts to begin with - one for school, one for my phone, and one I got when YouTube became Google+.  I'm also no stranger to blogging.  Aside from my social media accounts (two I use regularly),  I have three actual blogs that I frequently post to, though I prefer using WordPress as a blogging platform to this one.

This blog is for an art course, so I expect to maybe learn a little art theory in this course, because I'm not well-versed on things like "principles of composition."  However, I actively review the media I read/watch/play as a writing exercise in my downtime, and I have a 16 page document filled with titles to review.  I've written about 10 or so that I haven't posted, and I think I've done at least 20 different movie reviews alone!  In that respect, I have a critical framework for examining art and am well-versed in judging and discussion, not to mention that critical thinking is essential for psychology majors.  Every paper I write for a course has me critically examining scientific research.  It's become hard to read watered-down reports in the news because I have too many questions and the media tends to skew research.  Much of my expectation for this course is to stretch my creativity and have a little fun - it is art after all, and the projects excite me a little bit.  For me, though, this course doesn't rank as important as some of my others so I'm not really expecting a lot to begin with.

Online courses are great.  They're very flexible to a busy college student working and taking class full-time.  Every other online course I've been in has been easy and relatively enjoyable.  I find that online courses can be more diverse in how they present information, and that sometimes that makes learning the information easier or more fun.  I also find that online courses take some of the social anxiety and pressure out of the classroom setting and furthering discussion more naturally.  This works so long as there are no stupid rules about the amount of posting you do.  I had a professor once who wanted so many responses (like, 15-20 each week) that many responses lacked any quality because students were struggling to meet the high quota - it seemed like he didn't care about what you actually thought and was more concerned that you were coming online every single day.  Most professors, however, seem to judge quality over quantity and I've had fantastic discussions with people on various topics because of the Discussion Board option an online course gives.  I think with the slight anonymity that comes with an online course, people are more likely to really truly express what they think/how they feel and it enhances the discussion.

But to be honest, those "Growth Mindset" videos are actually really soul-crushing to me.  They were super, super hard to listen to.
I found that there's not much here that applies to me, as I am a senior working on her last semester as an undergraduate, while the videos seem very much directed to first-semester freshmen.
They talk about skills that I needed to develop earlier than this - as a Psych major, there are several required courses that would have been even more difficult to pass if I didn't have certain study skills - time management, taking courses seriously, etc.
Also, as a Psychology major all I do is study the brain.  I want to go into counseling, using Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy.  Essentially, that's all these videos are discussing; the whole concept of CBT is "change your thinking, change your life."  For laypeople, CBT is the therapy Dr. Phil uses.

I did relate to the money issue though - I didn't start college until the age of 25 because financial aid would not cover me before then and I don't want student loan debt (on that note, I have made it all this way without taking out one single loan!)  In order to save money, I've gotten 90% of my books as digital copies - I've maybe bought 2 actual physical textbooks in the past 4/5 years.
In fact, starting college at the age of 25 made a lot of stuff easier, as age made me less self-conscious about how people think about me.  I was also more serious going back at that age - I cared less about "making friends" or "fitting in" because I live close and have friends already.  Those things ceased to be a priority, and my coursework became my sole focus.  I fully believe this is what allowed me to make it through my entire college undergraduate work with no less than a 3.0 GPA overall, and a 3.5 major GPA - which got me invited to join Psy Chi, the honor society of psych majors.