I was commissioned by my English teacher, Mrs. Williams, to paint her two dogs over Christmas break! I'm pretty much done with the first one. It was really fun to branch out and try something different!
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My sister, Hazel, took a gap year from college this year and went to Peru. She had a wonderful time, and I decided to paint one of the photographs of her with her friends in the sand dunes for her Christmas present. She really liked it. :)
I’ve always believed art serves as an outlet for emotions and is a way of sending a message, and I think that for people who are in pain and are suffering from war, art is becoming increasingly popular. It is like a therapy to people in suffering, allowing them to let out their anger and hurt. Furthermore, they are able to extend beyond themselves to make an impact on the people at large.
However, art on warfare has always been important. The two articles, “Horror Is a Constant, as Artists Depict War,” by Alissa J. Rubin, and “When Modern Art Met Modern Warfare,” talk about art about war throughout history. Rubin points out that, “Artists in the early 19th century still focused on the heroic. The 1802 portrait of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David that opens the exhibition depicts him as a warrior-hero, on a white horse that is rearing onto its hind legs.” However, “Barely 15 years later, the conception of what was worth depicting had shifted dramatically. A lithograph by Théodore Géricault titled ‘The Return From Russia’ puts a different face on Bonaparte’s legacy: It shows two wounded men, one on a horse, his head bandaged and his eyes covered as if he had been blinded, while the second man plods along next to him, both exhausted and broken.” The article “When Modern Art Met Warfare” talks about the British sculptor Jacob Epstein, who, in 1913, “unveiled his modernist masterpiece Rock Drill, a looming and threatening figure that was half man, half machine. The sculpture was a fusion of plaster flesh and an actual pneumatic drill, symbolizing the rapacious nature of industrial technology.” However, by 1916, when Epstein had re-created the work for another exhibition, World War I had started, and the figure was transformed. “Three years later, he’s not interested in that predatory aggression. He gets rid of the drill, chops the figure in half, amputates the arm, and shows us the Frankenstein monster we have become —mutated, amputated, and cowering.” While art used to portray the heroic ideal, it has become more and more realistic overtime, aiming to show the horrors of rape, murder, human injustice and violence. Now it aims to show and bring attention to the atrocities of war without romanticism and without hiding anything. When people are informed of war, genocides, injustices, and more, it is often through facts, statistics, and maybe personal stories. But people rarely get to see these examples. “When Modern Art Met Modern Warfare” talks about an exhibit called, “The Great War in Portraits,” which portrays world leaders and famous generals from World War I contrasted with the individual faces of anonymous soldiers. Moorhouse believes that, “seeing these faces helps the viewer move past the facts and figures.” In “Horror Is a Constant, as Artists Depict War,” Alissa J. Rubin agrees that images are more powerful. She says, “I have witnessed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as war and its aftermath in the Balkans, and yet each time, I find casual destruction of life and of hope something hard to bear, the images seared into memory.” I think that images do sear into people’s memories and affect people on a more emotional basis. Rubin says, “When one group of people decides to kill another, it is a horror at once specific and universal.” Art allows this feeling to become universal. It touches people in new and profound ways. I've been working really hard on my painting lately, and I think I've made a lot of progress! One of the challenges I've had is depicting the background because it is really hard to tell what's going on in the background in the photograph. I've just been doing blotches of color similar to the ones in the photograph and hoping it reads well!
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AuthorMy Name is Willa King, I am a sophomore at Maggie Walker Governor's school, and I am an Art 3 Student. Archives
June 2016
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