Museum Visit

A.) Which artworks make an impact or impression on me? Why?

1. James Rosenquist – Gift Wrapped Doll – This painting made an impact on me because it was a huge, much larger than life-size, painting with striking red colors and creepy doll eyes that made me feel upset.

2. Mark di Suvero – Heimholtz – This giant red 10-ton abstract sculpture has always been a part of the landscape of my formative years. It was hit by a drunk driver a few months ago and is still being reassembled. 

B.) Which artworks do I feel a connection with? Why?

1 Edward Percy Moran "Gen. Anthony Wayne" 1923 – It’s a painting of ‘Mad’ Anthony Wayne, the person the town I grew up in is named after. It reminds me of what a horrible history the town has in regards to the treatment of native Americans. 

2 John Matos – Kablam – I feel a connection with this painting because I love the comic book style when it is done by a fine artist. It’s very kinetic and I love the colors.

C.) Which artworks would I like to know more about? Why?

1 Jasper Johns – Flags – I would like to know more because it was vaguely interesting looking, but it was also a complete mess with what seemed to be sloppy haphazard lines.

2 Jackson Pollock Drawing – Much like the previous piece, it seemed to be exquisitely sloppy and haphazard, though there were some figures hidden in the piece. I’ve only ever seen Pollock’s splatter paintings, so I’d like to know more about his drawing works.

Module 4 Project

1. Discuss what you thought about creating the Value Scale and Color Wheel.

I had a very hard time (which is obvious in the finished products) creating both the value scale and the color wheel. I am, as the optometrist told me, 'color confused' meaning I'm not totally color blind but my color vision is pretty terrible. The black and the white in the value scale were easy, but trying to go from black to white in such small steps was hard for me. I bought the acrylics in the syllabus, phthalo blue, magenta, and yellow, and was not able to create a reasonable red or black with them. I tried  for about an hour to somehow make them darker using only the colors I had and it didn't work at all. I bought a more cyanish color from the art store (could not find one called cyan in any of the 8 brands they had stocked) but that ended up looking even worse. It was an interesting assignment but I think I failed in my attempts. My magenta was much brighter than the one in the video, which probably didn't help either.

2. Which media did you enjoy working with the best and why?

Working with the paint was much more viscerally satisfying to me. Putting the brush into the paint on the palette and onto the paper felt very nice. The charcoal, on the other hand, was very messy and hard to control.

3. What was the most important discovery in the creation of these studies?

Creating a true black from paint is very difficult though the act of painting is very fun and enjoyable. Charcoal is messy and very hard to work with and I have no idea how people are able to create such nice works of art with such varied levels of greyscale and nice lines, like Yvonne Jacquette's Three Mile Island, Night 1 (1982), using only charcoal.

4. What is the most important information you learned from watching the videos for this project? What is your opinion of the videos?

The value scale video was not helpful at all. He started with the black, started the next box, and was then finished. A better instruction set for that project probably would have made it a lot easier to accomplish. The color video was informative, but my attempts didn't really gel with what they showed in the video. I did enjoy how much shorter and to the point the videos were this week though!

Module 3 - Color Theory and Emotional Effects

1. Describe Color and it's effects on emotions. Use the appropriate vocabulary of color in your posting.

Color’s effects on emotions are mostly culturally biased reactions based on how the colors have been used in our environments and how we see other people react to them. The colors of holidays are big in the American psyche, with red & green for Christmas and orange & black for Halloween eliciting strong emotions in most people. Warm colors, like red and orange, are reminiscent of fire and the sun, while cool colors, like blue and green, remind us of water and the sky. 

2. What is a theoretical aspect of color that most intrigues/fascinates you? Why?

I enjoy the optical effects that can be created with color, specifically the art of pointillism. Made famous by Georges Seurat in the late 19^th century, the artist places thousands of tiny dots of color instead of mixing them on their palate. Up close, the dots are very distinct but as the viewer moves back the points begin to blend together, creating an array of dots that form beautiful colors.

3. In the Color video, what made the biggest impact on you in regards to color and it's effects on emotions?

The reactions that the painter, June Redfern, had to the colors in her own painting were very interesting to me. She would finish a section, go outside and look at it with binoculars, and then get angry or frustrated and paint over it. It looked nice to me, then she covered the figures in black and it looked ruined! I was happy when they revealed the finished piece at the end and she had managed to make it look better than ever. 

4. In the Feelings video, what made the biggest impact on you in regards to color and it's effects on emotions? 

The most interesting segment of the Feelings video for me was Rothko’s red paintings that he made for The Four Seasons in the late 1950s. He was using deep reds in order to paint “something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room.” He ended up giving up the commission he had received and put the paintings into storage. It was a nice parallel to the Van Gogh segment from the Color video, in which Van Gogh’s hatred for the café caused him to paint it in ugly greens and reds to show his distaste.

Module 3 - Elements of Design Photobucket

This project was pretty difficult for me for a couple of reasons. Trying to keep specific elements and principles of art in my mind as I was taking pictures was far more difficult than I thought it would be. I'm just used to taking tons of pictures of my daughter doing kid stuff and that's about it. I never really thought about their artistic merit (which I think shows in my attempts). Luckily, I have a decent, older SLR that I received a few years ago so I'm comfortable with the camera and its limitations. Photobucket's push towards using their 'stories' instead of making their albums and slideshows more intuitive was a little annoying too.

Album view

Slideshow

Module 2

1-Key Concepts of the video and article

Key Concepts: CNN - What the brain draws from: Art and neuroscience

Pattern processing is a very important aspect of the human species that helped us to survive when we lived as animals, and now that we no longer live that way that same aspect of our brains allows us to appreciate and understand art. Humans are able to recognize images made completely out of outlines, see faces in abstract art, and create 3-dimensional on a 2-dimensional canvas are all possible due to our highly evolved pattern processing capabilities. 

Key concepts: Aesthetics: Philosophy of the Arts

This video focuses on the definition of aesthetics, a philosophical theory of what is beautiful and what is art, based on the ideas from various philosophers, from Plato in the fourth century BCE up until the modern era. It shows how the idea of aesthetics have changed dramatically throughout the ages, either as a reaction to terrible events such as war and famine, or as a new technology such as photography frees the artist to be as free as they want to be.

Key concepts: Evolutionary Origins of Art and Aesthetics

This video focused on the neurobiological origins of art and the effects that art has on the human brain. I learned that how we perceive art is a continuation of our survival mechanisms that we have honed over the last millions of years to recognize prey and predators.

2. Which philosopher's theory on aesthetics do you feel is most important? Be sure to mention the philosophers name, era (time in history), and contribution to the aesthetic theory in your response.

I believe that RG Collingwood's advancement of the concept of expressionism in the early 20th century was the most important theory of aesthetics. He believed that the purpose of art was more to express the emotions of the artist at the time of creation of that art than it was to elicit responses in the audience. 

3 - What do you think about Changeux and Ramachandran scientific view of aesthetics and art? What was the most interesting fact you discovered from each speakers lecture? 

Changeux’s lecture gives us a neurobiologist’s point of view on how we perceive art and its evolutionary origins as a descendant of tool use by primitive ancestors of humans. He gives many examples of how viewing art affects our brains on a biological level, such as how our brains perceive obvious images versus unobvious images. The most interesting fact that I learned from Changeux’s lecture was his explanation of how the brain reacts to surprise and how it relates to an artist’s search for novelty in their art.

Ramachandran’s lecture’s main idea seemed to be that art is about ‘deliberately altering’ an image to ‘produce pleasing effects on the human brain.’ The most interesting thing that I learned from Ramachandran’s lecture was about teaching shapes to rats and their understanding of the rules, which in his example was teaching a rat the difference between a square and a rectangle by placing food in the rectangle and not in the square. If shown a rectangle that is even more stretched out, ie less square and more rectangular, the rat will prefer that over a rectangle with sides that are closer to the same side because that rule of rectangularity is what the rat has come to associate with food.

4 - How do the videos and article relate to the readings in the text?

The article and the neurobiological video relates to the text as an expansion on how the human brain is wired as a pattern processing machine and how that relates to our perception of art. The philosophy of aesthetics video helps to explain the history of aesthetics and how art has changed from its beginnings to where it is now, as our understanding and definition of art and beauty has changed through the centuries.

5 - What is your opinion of the films and article? How do they add depth to understanding of the topics in your reading in the text?

I enjoyed the article thoroughly because it was easier to grasp the information that was presented at my own pace and in my own voice. I had trouble with Changeux’s accent, which along with the inability to read a lot of the information on the slides that he was presenting, made following his lecture pretty difficult. I had to rewind a lot. I believe they added a lot to my understanding of the biological and neurological aspects of art, as the book doesn’t delve into them very much.

Module 1 - Initial Blog

1. How was the process of creating the GMail account and setting up the Blog?
    It took about 3 minutes total and wasn't hard at all.

2. What do you expect to learn in this course?
     I expect to learn about art history and the vocabulary needed to discuss art intelligently.

3. How do you feel about taking an online course?
    I have taken a ton of online courses and enjoy taking them.