Cultural Crossings

After this passage about cultural crossings in art I was immediately reminded of a story told by my friend Andrew, after he returned from a semester in New Zealand. He explained how he met an artist selling his wares on the South Island. His art was aboriginal, he was not. He was saying that he didn't mind utilizing Maori symbolism in his art because there is no Maori or Pakeha (white people), there is only Kiwi. He claimed the unique relationship was because Maori women were so beautiful the Europeans interbred quickly and that's why everyone loves/is related to everyone else. I think that this is a really nice way to look at the unity of our world and the art world. I do not believe that art should stay within nationalities because the beauty it can make should be shared with everyone.

Chapter 2 Criticizing Art

As I have making a large amount of art lately as well as reading this book I have began to question the quality of my own work. As in the previous chapters the author has tried to give the reader a format for analyzing various forms of art in an objective, or at the very least, well supported manner. So now I come to the conclusion of looking at my own work like the book has spelled out for me. This has been an interesting process that has brought up many questions to me. I generally feel satisfied with about 1 in every 4 pieces of art that I do, which I think is pretty good odds. I think that it is important to not like everything that you do in order to promote change and growth. I have always tried to not over analyze my art, and to let it speak for itself. After reading this book I have began to give interpreting a chance, seeing what can be gained from looking deeper into the images i make.

Blood And Beauty

1.)Poetry, Painting, and Art
2.) Kant meant to describe that beauty is meant for beauty's sake alone, and that beauty (in art) cannot do anything else but purely exist alone. The book uses an example of a person looking at a strawberry. Kant would argue that a strawberry may only be beautiful for its visual aesthetic value alone. When a person starts thinking about the taste or physical feeling of a strawberry, it starts to have a purpose, and therefore is no longer art. Art must be looked at from a "disinterested" point of view.
3.) Andy Warhol's Work

Langdon Quinn Art Talk

Langdon Quinn's Artist Lecture was an interesting look at representational painting. He explained how his painting process goes from the "perceptional to the conceptual," through abstracting imaginary representational figure paintings from the world around him. I enjoyed the part of his lecture when he spoke about juxtapositions in his paintings. He described how, as a teacher at UNH, he would often assign his students to make paintings that were representational of two words.

Chapter 6: Writing and Talking About Art

The final chapter of the book summed up the last three chapters nicely and then went on to describe effective methods of talking and writing about art in both academic and professional circumstances. Many of the suggestions about writing were seemed to be words of second nature to me, as I have been a student for the past 15 years. I know to turn my work in on time, not to wait until the last possible moment to get started on it etc. However, there were some helpful writing tips that I could always be reminded of and haven't been reminded of since I took an english class freshman year. Using these small technicalities improve overall writing quality significantly, and help to make the piece of writing sound well thought out and professional.
I also thought that the part of this chapter that explained how to write about group art exhibits was particularly effective. I imagine it would be quite difficult to name all of the artists in a 50 person show, and the idea of talking about a theme or the amount of variety in a show sounds like a much more manageable prospect.

Kate Gartrell Art Talk

Yesterday I attended the lecture that Prof. Gartrell gave discussing her work in recent years. On the flier that advertised the event there was an image shown that depicted the a pair of lower legs in cowboy boots. I was immediately drawn to this image because of its almost mischievous subject matter and the unusual composition that focused on purely the lower legs of the figure. The images shown in the lecture primarily focused on Gartrell's work produced in her recent years in graduate school at Brandies University. Among her work I particularly enjoyed seeing the large scale portraits of her friends. She described her process of working on them for several hours, and then at the end of her day doing a quick color study portrait. I thought that this was an interesting way of working that I had never experimented with my own work. I had always assumed that quick color studies were meant to be at the beginning of a painting session in order to warm up. Doing this at the end of a session had never occurred to me and reminded me of the fast sprint at the end of a race. I was also interested in Prof. Gartrell's artistic shift to focus on observational painting rather than to work from photographs. I think that this was interesting decision to make, and ultimately a positive one. I especially liked "Self Portrait in Pink Skirt." In that painting there is terrific brush work displayed in the forms created in the pink cloth of her skirt, which is juxtaposed nicely with figure's cowboy boots.