The famous and very strongly browed painter Frida Kahlo was born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón in Coyoacán, Mexico on July 6th, 1907. She is most famous for her self-portraits, and she has been celebrated nationally in her home country of Mexico for her work as well as by feminists of all ages for her depiction of women’s experiences and the female form. After Kahlo sustained several injuries from a traffic accident, at age sixteen she abandoned studying medicine in order to pursue a career in painting. During her three month period of immobilization, she began working on her now famous self-portraits. Her parents helped to accommodate her immobilization by providing her a special easel and oil paints and brushes. Throughout her lifetime she created 140 pieces, and around 50 of them are self-portraits. These pieces incorporate different symbolic images that incorporated pain from her personal life such as her tumultuous marriage, with fellow painter and activist Diego Rivera, her intense physical pain from her several injuries and disorders, and multiple miscarriages. Her biggest inspiration is noted to be indigenous Mexican culture, which is noted through her incorporation of vivid colors, symbolism, and more primitive style. She also liked to use Christian and Jewish themes, and she liked to combine the traditional Mexican themes with her more modern surrealist renderings.
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I skateboard myself and, therefore, think skateboarding art is really cool. To make the texture of this art they probably layered broken skateboards, glued them together, and then took a sander and started sanding it until it got smooth. They are a lot of variety in colors in this art. I would assume to make the space for the inlaid eye ball would be hard. Instead of using what they used for the eye, I would have suggested that they should have used a bearing. That is what goes in the middle of the wheel to make it move. The broken boards in the back of the head make the piece have a lot of movement. The lines in the wood make the picture stand out. The lines are going from left to right in this art. Art historians have noted many different methods artists have used to creating artwork pieces. The art historians rely on formal analysis, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and iconography when analyzing art. Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, applied psychological aspect to works of art. He worked with symbols that could be made into messages from the conscious mind. Jung's ideas became popular among American abstract expressionists in the 1940s and 1950s. Surrealist concepts of drawing conclusions from dreams and the unconsciousness were inspired by Carl Jung's work. Balance and harmony were very important to him. Jung thought that people would benefit from spirituality and appreciation of the unconscious, instead of relying on science and logic. These beliefs triggered art historians to analyze their work. This became an important part of creating art. Jackson Pollock created a famous series of drawing that went along with his visits to his psychoanalyst. The drawings were later thought to be very powerful as a therapeutic tool. He coined “Drip painting.”Griselda Pollock used psychoanalysis of reading in contemporary and modern art to influence the Feminist theory. Psychological thinking and theories greatly influenced art history. Many people including Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Marx contributed to this influence. “Psychoanalysis has strongly informed the re-framing of both men and women artists in art history.” "Art History." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 12 Oct. 2013. Web. 12 Dec. 2013. "Carl Jung and Art History - Google Search." Carl Jung and Art History - Google Search. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2013. A piece of art that has always interested me is the Cloud Gate more commonly known as “The Bean” located in Millennium Park in Chicago, Illinois. Being that I grew up 30 minutes away from down town Chicago this sculpture by Anish Kapoor was not even there until a year after I moved since it began construction in 2004 and was completed in 2006. When I first went to see it finished in 2007 I was amazed by the size, beauty, and reflective properties it had. Now that it is there it is hard to imagine it not being there, it would be like there is a missing piece from down town Chicago. The sculpture created by Kapoor was constructed of 168 stainless steel plates flawlessly welded together to make it seem like a full mass. Kapoor was said to be inspired by liquid mercury while creating his sculpture, Cloud Gate.Since it is built upon Park Grill it is elevated from the street to help capture the city's skyline and distort how it looks. On a clear beautiful day it can capture the beautiful sky almost illuminating the entire sculpture. The “gate” has an opening that is 12 foot tall that allows anyone to talk underneath and see their own distorted image. The nickname“The Bean” for the Cloud Gate is easily recognized since it shaped like a bean. This allows it to seem more like a “gateway” to the clouds and helps distort the images of people, buildings, and the sky. Kapoor's design of the Cloud Gate is a great one for the amount of tourists it attracts and how it helps illuminate Millennium Park. It's a great piece just for the fact of the amount of fun people have watching their image in “The Bean” and how gorgeous and flawless the piece actually is. It was a great addition to down town Chicago in my opinion being someone who grew up so close to the action. "Cloud Gate." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 25 Nov. 2013. Web. 7 Oct. 2013. Throughout Drawing 1 I have learned many different techniques about drawing and learned many different things in general about art. For example, I had no idea what the seven principles of design or the five elements of art prior to taking this class. Learning the different principles and elements has helped me to strengthen my artistic abilities.
When I first came into Drawing 1 I was not comfortable with drawing realistic portraits because I was not very good at shading the face, therefore, making my faces look very unrealistic. With the techniques that I have learned this semester I have been able to improve my portrait drawings. I feel more confident now then when I walked in the door 9 weeks ago. I have enjoyed this class throughout the last 9 weeks. I feel that I am better at 2D art and like 2D art better then 3D art. I can relate the elements and principles of art to my artwork much easier when creating 2D art than 3D art and am excited to move on to Drawing 2 next semester! Throughout the semester we've been working on different methods and different materials to work on. I've had a wonderful time working with the different methods but, only one method caught my eye the most. Working with artist grade colored pencils would be my favorite method because, I've learned so many different ways to use it and different designs to put into it. I've learned that these colored pencils are different from colored pencils you would use when younger. They contain higher degree of wax and pigment. It allows for rich, deep and Luminescent color. The colors can be easily blended together. The different techniques you can use in colored pencil is magnificent. Theirs so many different ones. You have stippling, hatching, cross-hatching, back and forth stroke, scumbling, shading, incised marks, basic overlay, and burnishing. I learned all these techniques and tried my best to use every single one in my pieces. Its great being able to learn how to blend and put your picture together so well. You should never press to hard with the color pencil because it will start to make a very waxy surface and makes it hard to cover or to blend into things after pressing to hard with it. Color pencil would have to be my favorite just because, I’ve learned something I'm good at without even knowing. (Attached to this post is the first colored pencil drawing I did this semester.) One type of art that really interests me is 3D Pavement art, or
anamorphic art. This type of art is typically done in cities, on either the sidewalk or the street. It has been used in many different countries throughout the world. This type of art is based on perspective, so when viewed from a certain angle, it will look three dimensional. Pavement art was first introduced in the year 1984, by artist Kurt Wenner. He was inspired by perspective and wanted to create art that would appear to “rise from, or fall into the ground”. The geometry used by Wenner to create these illusions is known as Wenner's hyperbolic perspective. Since Wenner's idea was introduced, several other artists have adopted the idea and decorated streets and sidewalks all over the world. Some of the more popular artists to do this include: Julian Beever, Melanie Stimmell, Edgar Mueller, and Eduardo Rolero. They are all internationally recognized pavement artists. Julian Beever has been creating 3D art since the 1990s and is the most popular of the four mentioned. He has created countless artworks, including advertisements for numerous brands such as Coca-Cola and Ballentine. Eduardo Rolero is an Argentinian artist, who is best known for expressing satire and social criticism in his artworks. Melanie Stimmell is one of the most well-known female pavement artists, and she has won numerous awards for her work. Edgar Mueller is a German street painter who has completely devoted his life to creating 3D art all around the world. Works Cited: "The 5 Most Talanted 3D Sidewalk Artists." Bored Panda. Www.boredpanda.com, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2013. < http://www.boredpanda.com/5-most-talented-3d-sidewalk-chalk-artists/>. "About the Artist." Kurt Wenner. Http://kurtwenner.com/, n.d. Web. 2 Dec. 2013. < http://kurtwenner.com/images/PDFs/Artist_Statement.pdf>. "Lament for Icarus." Melanie Stimmell. Http://melaniestimmell.com/index.php, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2013. < http://melaniestimmell.com/icarus.php>. "A History of Pavement Art." All My Own Work -- A History of Pavement Art. Http://screever.org, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2013. < http://screever.org/category/cartoons/>. When Hitler was made the Counselor of Germany in 1933, one of the first things he did was attack the art styles of Cubism, Futurism, and Dadaism due to its so-called degenerative qualities. Hitler, being a self proclaimed “art connoisseur”, thought that the only acceptable forms of art were classical portraits and landscapes of Germanic origin. Due to the severe dislike of “modern” art, Hitler plundered all forms of “modern art” from the occupants of Europe and then destroyed or sold it( though other Nazi dignitaries did keep some of the art for their private collections). The money from these sales would then be used to fund a Hitler-approved art museum in Linz. In the 1940s, the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives organization was founded to help find and protect the plundered art that still remained in Europe. The workers for the MFAA group were called "Monuments Men” and faced the challenges of stopping allied forces from sending recovered art with“off-limits” signs to their family back home. Eventually, the MFAA started to use white tape(tape indicating mines in a certain area) to seal off an area that had a lot of art. The MFAA has recovered about 700,000 pieces of art throughout its existence and is still trying to recover the estimated 100,000 other pieces of art missing. This semester I learned about horizon lines and vanishing points. These aspects of drawing significantly improved my drawing skill! A horizon line is a line horizontal at the vanishing point or points and this line usually is where the sky meets up with the land in the background of the picture. A vanishing point is the point or points where all lines that will point toward. For example, if
you are drawing a picture of a table right in front of you and the vanishing point is in the background then the sides of the table will point toward to the vanishing point. You can have multiple vanishing points as well. We worked on two point perspective which has two vanishing points and three point perspective which, you guessed it, has three vanishing points. When multiple vanishing points exist you must think logically and figure out which lines will point toward each vanishing point. For three point perspective, there are two vanishing points like normal and one vanishing point that is either above the horizon line or below the horizon line. All vertical lines will point towards this point and all horizontal lines will point toward the other two. By doing this technique I was able to hone my drawing ability. All pictures from: http://www.watercolorpainting.com/perspective_1_2_3_point.htm Lately in our Drawing 2 class, we have been working with soft pastels. This field of drawing is completely new to me. I have never before worked with these pastels. I quickly found out that they like to smear everywhere! They were so messy! Eventually, thankfully, I got the hang of using my fingers and the side of my hand to smear and smudge the color where I wanted it
to be present. Although these pastels are a nightmare to get precise lines and texture on your paper, they do give a unique color and blending variety to your piece. They very easily blend with other pastel colors to form new shades and tones within your drawing. The piece I recreated was an abstract image of water droplets on some leaves. To give the piece an interesting look, I added blues and purples to some of the leaves, even though we all know leaves are not blue or purple. The blending of greens and turquoises within the leaves creates a much deeper affect to them. Using all these different colors on the different leaves gives the piece a nice movement to it, causing the eye of a viewer to scan the whole piece, as appose to one section. Shadowing with pastels is a tricky task. To obtain the darker greens and blues I needed, it was necessary to blend the black with greens and blues. This blending gave a shadowed look to the overlapping leaves. With the bright colors on the leaves, a dark background put a nice emphasis on them. Also within the background are blurred spots of color to give the effect of objects behind the plant. The background is not just black, it also consists of a dark blue blended together with the black. The blue enhances the darker back and draws the eye. The focal point of the piece is the water droplets falling from the leaves. To get the effect of a transparent drop of water, you had to look at the water not as water, but as separate sections of color and lines. At the time, it may have seemed odd, but in the end the effect of a transparency was there. The different colors within the droplets draw the eye directly to them. They are different than anything else in the piece, causing a curiosity to what they are. Pastels may be difficult to work with, but they create a look different from many things. They blend very well and give many unique shades to your piece. They give great movement to the piece that is appealing to the viewers eye. |
AuthorWritten by art students of North High School in Evansville, Indiana Archives
December 2013
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