dragonofdispair | Entries tagged with art journal

Focus Question: Do you think it is important to be able to draw the human figure? Why?

it do think it's important. you may never draw (or sculpt) a human again after learning, but it's important. mostly because it's something that is familiar to everyone. everyone can relate to the human form. everyone has a (slightly different) idea of what that form is. knowing how to physically and emotionally render that form into your chosen media can me a test: *can* you render that in such a way that both the form and the emotion inherent to the body are both recognizable.

i noticed that neither of the artists (faith wilding and do-ho suh) do any work with human forms. i suppose that was to make the point that some artists don't use humans in their works and are still admired and successful. this is true enough. and if an artist is not inspired to use humans in their works, they don't have to. but i still think it's important to learn how, even if you never use it.

Current Mood: still slightly sick

Focus Question: How have medical, computer or other technologies altered our perception of our bodies? How have contemporary artists chosen to express these new representations of the human form? What is the the difference between nudity and pornography?

medical technology gives us a more accurate knowledge of the human form, both inside and out. computer technologies make it so that that knowledge is accessible to everyone. if i'm curious of what the human brain looks like, i type "human brain" into google and it gives me 33,900,000 results -- and while many of those will be completely useless, it conveniently gives me a separate set of results within that of images. so now i know what a human brain looks like viewed from x-rays. mris, and autopsies. (it also gives me video results -- yay for youtube! -- but i didn't watch those.)

so all in all, i think we have a more accurate physical knowledge of what the human body is. so what does that leave us with? well, as with photography, we could, as drawing-artists, continue to depict the body in the most accurate way our skills allow, or use this new technology and knowledge to abstract the body. or attempt to explore the symbolic meanings of the parts. or any combination thereof. which seems to be what all three of the suggested artists are doing...

nudity and pornography... in some minds, there will be no difference. i, however, am not a sex-obsessed, mentally twelve-year-old moron whom i would very much like to...yeah, not going there. basically, pornography is an image which is designed to arouse and which has no real purpose beyond that. just because someone is nude in a picture, doesn't mean you're supposed to be getting off on it. and some perfectly good porn shows the subject, or subjects, fully clothed. the lack of nudity doesn't make it not-porn.

Current Mood: okay

Focus Question: Colors have symbolic meanings. Write your symbolic impressions of twelve colors.

red--violent emotions...love, lust, anger, rage. also commands: stop.
orange -- halloween. energy. caution.
yellow -- sun. happy.
green -- nature, growth. cool shade. hidden things.
blue -- water. ocean. rain. coolness. cold. ice.
indigo -- shadow. deep affection. royalty.
violet -- energetic affection. to me, violet has often been a color that symbolizes color itself
grey -- dullness. meh. coming rain. thunder and energy.
black -- darkness. night. hidden things. romance and danger.
white -- purity. light. things unstained.
silver -- goodness and right. light. protection.
gold -- wealth and power.

Current Mood: amused

don't wanna do this...am sick...

Focus Question: Why are materials important to the process of art making? What kind of materials do you respond to mostly in your art practice? Why?

...i get the point of materials directing us to an artist that uses only the computer, but remind me to never show that to my fiance, some of it'll give him a seizure... was hard for me to look at. maybe try again when no sick...

why...they're important because they are the foundation of what you create. a charcoal drawing's different than a ink one. etc. i like to use clay. the use of my hands in making that is what i respond to best. of flat media...like charcoal best. feels like carving.

Current Mood: sick

Focus Question: What is critique? How is a critique useful? What is the function of art critics?

obvious why we had this question this week -- we had our midterm critiques this week. joy. for once no artists...

a critic is someone who analysis a work. it's useful so that an artist can see how someone other than him- or herself can get an understanding of how that work is viewed. sometimes the symbolism is too specific to the artist himself and a work's meaning can't be truly understood by someone else. sometimes there's a flaw in technique that's detracting from the rest of the piece. etc.

and as great as being evaluated by teachers and peers is, as far as i can tell... the function of art critics in the more professional world is to determine which artists become well known and which ones don't. honest opinion.

Current Mood: cynical

i would first like to point out that the soda cracker mosaic of the american express logo was fricking awesome...

Focus Questions: What constitutes plagiarism in art today? Does it matter who created a particular work of art? What is the difference, in your opinion. between plagiarism and sampling? Does the presence of the artist's hand in a work of art change its value or meaning?

hate this question...

so, in order: taking a work whole cloth and claiming it as your own for the fun and profit of doing so, rather than to make an artistic point. i would say that neither of the artists (john kindness and the critical art ensemble) were plagiarizing what they were depicting. even in the very clear case of using a logo (like the american express thing) in or as the art. each was done for the point of taking something that we see every day and making us realize we're seeing it. that's the difference between plagiarism and sampling, btw. and by the fact that sampling in art exists, yeah the presence of the artist's hand changes it's value and meaning.

Current Mood: indescribable

need to do this while it's still this week. don't want to...bleh.

Focus Questions: What is the difference between "realistic" and "representational" drawing? What is an abstract drawing?

realistic -- drawing something as it's seen, as perfectly as the artist is capable given skill and variations in view and hand.

representational -- can kinda tell what it's supposed to be, but it's out of context, very abstract, or both

josh dorman -- kinda like. not sure i would have wasted a good map like that (fiance likes maps). odd. would call it representational.

dawn Clement -- search came up with a jazz artist who doesn't mention drawing at all. don't think i've got the right person...

Current Mood: tired

doing this early this week...

Focus Questions: How is drawing different from a photograph? How have imaging devices like scanners and photographs impacted drawing?

... is o-matic supposed to be an artist's name? 'cause when i typed that into my search i got a hundred different responses that had nothing to do with art...

drawing and photography... at it's root, drawing is different from photography because the solutions an artist needs to come up with when drawing an object or scene regarding size, value, and arrangement in space are unneeded when taking a photo. the artist's individual rendering (such as my heavy lines verses other's soft, light lines) is also absent, since in a photograph there are no lines to divide the positive and negative space.

second question... i think that photography has pushed drawing further into the realm of the abstracted and the non-objective art than i personally like. i understand the the shift -- what's the point of drawing a perfectly rendered and colored leaf when some moron with a scanner can scan a bunch of leaves and have even more perfect leaf-renderings than any artist using a pens an paper ever could? (...well because scanning leaves like that gives them a really odd displacement because of the unique light of the scanner that shouldn't be replicated under any other conditions...but that's beyond the point and i'm seriously digressing...)

i personally would have preferred it if abstracted and non-objective art hadn't gotten as ... let's say "overly emphasized" ... as it had. i like knowing what i'm looking at. one can theoretically write volumes on the meaning of a dozen blocks welded together. but i've never seen any real meaning behind such things. shapes, landscapes and creatures that have been abstracted down to their simplist forms, like a bird being shown only as a curve of wings in flight are one thing... but --

--okay. off the tangent train... back to the point.

and part of the point is this week's artist(s) -- i think i get it on the multiple artist things though...i'm supposed to look at them all and tell how they're related or some such..

so william kentridge and walton ford... probably a pair of examples of what i was talking about regarding the abstraction of things. walton ford's bird prints are very realistic, with every feather in its place, while kentridge's are line drawings with overlays of cirlcles and lines that have little to do with the subject. even found on of a bird, fancy that...

Current Mood: indescribable

Focus Questions: Why are some things considered difficult to draw and other things easy? What do you thing is hard to draw? Do you think it is easier to draw from life or memory or imagination? Why?

okay...i get the answering questions deal, not entirely sure about the artist research stuff. what are we researching again? lessee... artists: kara walker, mark lombardi...both or just one? confused...

k.... let's go start with answering the goddamn questions:

difficult vs easy to draw? easy things are easy because they're simple shapes and simple colors with simple shadows. difficult things are more complex in shape, color/pattern, or because of the way the shadows are produced by this item. things can also be difficult because they may be things that are very difficult to see as flat. or because we think we know what they look like and thus get some of the proportions and stuff wrong.

people -- real people that are supposed to be recognizable from the drawings -- are extremely hard to draw. so are most things that i'm actually looking at. observational drawing is difficult for me in general. anything with soft edges...

i draw best from a sort of combination of life and imagination. imagination mostly because i like drawing imaginary things a lot, but i've found it works the best when combined with a bit of the observational stuff. there's no reason a goblin's hand shouldn't look a bit like a human's and having hands to observe means that the whole goblin looks a bit more real for having hands the onlooker and view as being functional.

questions overwith. onto the artist...

...which i really do wish i could skip...

so kara walker: i think i like that. silloettes. (stupid spellcheck, gives me "sellouts" as a suggestion for the misspelled word...) rather fantastical ones, at first glance. i think i like. they don't seem to really be doing fantastical things, just, the poses of the figures are very... etherial. fae-like. they're humans, not any sort of fairies (at least in the pictures i found) but that's the way they struck me. it's not a style i'd ever really want to work with myself -- course i'm also primarily a sculptor and silloettes (silouette? silouete? gah!) are something that's very much a flat media thing.

mark lombardi: wikipedia says "lombardi called his diagrams narrative structures and they are structurally similar to sociograms – a diagram drawn from the field of social network analysis". after looking up "social network analysis", i think i agree. it's odd. i'm not sure i could say anything more at the moment.

Current Mood: cranky

Focus Question: What is drawing? Why is it useful to learn to draw? If everyone draws the same object "realistically", why are the drawings different?

drawing... using an implement to make a mark on a flat surface? 'cause a kid making scribbles with a crayon is drawing. sometimes it's better drawing than what most adults can or will do. cave drawings are drawings. usually we like to think of drawing as representational of some sort though -- drawing some thing as opposed to putting random colors on a page. not that that isn't useful...

why's it useful... i'm going to assume that for "useful" we're talking about making a relatively accurate sketch of something -- real or imaginary. useful applications of drawing: designing things, such as the interior of a home -- deciding where to put the couch and things -- sketching things out for memory, designing things again -- like laying out the design of a stained glass window (which is fun, btw. i've done it.) -- making a design to be transfered to something else, allowing a more accurate image of an imagined character.

now we're talking about drawing objects... why do objects drawn by different artists look different? i can think of several reasons off the top of my head...

1) everyone sees an object differently. i don't just mean emotionally and mentally -- though i do mean those -- but physically. everyone is a different size, they're eyes are different widths apart, and have different degrees of near-sighted or far-sightedness that are differently corrected for.

2) everyone expresses their views of an object differently. couple classes ago, the entire class had to draw a tricycle. a broken tricycle, at that. and at the critique, i couldn't help but be just a little envious of the people who expressed their lines lightly, barely there, or gracefully. my lines are nearly always heavy, dark, and entirely *there*. sometimes it interferes with the picture, sometimes it enhances it, but either way the lines are dark and heavy, rather than light. i also have a tendency to think of the positive space as darker and more solid than the negative. durning the tricycle exercise, this meant that the first thing i'd done, was make a dark, solid, tricycle frame, where others had outlined the tricycle and darkened the negative space.

i'm sure there are others reasons...