Link to her gallery: http://www.karenblairartist.com/paintings/
I think Karen Blair's art is really nice!! It's interesting to see how her art has evolved from being more realistic to being more abstract. I love her older art especially. Her painting of the chair and the table with the lamp kind of reminds me of Van Gogh's painting of the bedroom. I love her outdoor scenes of the trees and stream because she contrasts the oranges really nicely by using purples in the trees, water and sky. I like how her colors aren't completely accurate of reality but they give off a certain mood (like the yellow sky in the painting of the woman gardening and the blue rocks in one of the stream paintings).
Link to her gallery: http://www.karenblairartist.com/paintings/
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I really love Jee Young Lee's work. Her original challenge was how to utilize her small studio space in Seoul (11.8′ x 13.5′ x 7.8′). Instead of finding a new location, she challenged herself to build some these beautiful, elaborate sets and preserve them through a single photograph. I think it's amazing the effort and time (often months) she puts into transforming her small studio for each project. The transformations look almost as though they are animated or from another world, but she does it all by hand and refuses to digitally manipulate the photographs in any way. All of her designs have their own back story, each one inspired by either her personal life or old Korean fables. I think her creative problem-solving and her attention to color and detail are very inspiring. Link to the article: http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/lee-jeeyoung-stage-of-mind-room 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!
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!
My painting has been coming along slowly. I still have a lot of work to do and not much time to do it! But I like how it is looking so far.
I haven't made much progress on my in-class project yet, but I'm working hard to get the angle on the railing and patio right so that the image will make sense.
I finished my home project! I actually really like the way this one turned out. I did it in just a couple hours, in only two sittings. It took so little time because I loosened up and just got the essence of the detail without working as precisely as I did in my last painting.
Awareness: Photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen Seamlessly Integrates His Body with the Natural World11/6/2015 Article Link: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/11/arno-rafael-minkkinen-portraits/ I love his photos, especially "Oulujärvi Afternoon," the photo of his back peaking above the surface of the water. I think these photos have a lot of tension and paint a story way beyond themselves, along with being beautifully done. The compositions are so nice, including enough of the body parts so that you can tell what they are, but leaving enough out of the photograph to make you wander what's going on. The reflections in the photos with water are beautiful, probably enhanced a little but not enough that it looks unnatural.
Article link: http://notable.ca/a-photographer-is-removing-phones-from-his-images-to-show-how-addicted-we-are/ I thought this was a really clever project, and one that people should look at and pay attention to. I think it was smart to take the pictures with multiple people in the shot, all on phones or ipads, because it shows how the technology replaces the moments they could be sharing together. The photos I posted above were the ones that I thought to be the strongest because Pickersgill captured moments that really shouldn't involve people looking at their individual devices--a wedding day, a family dinner, a boat-ride, and a play-date with three little boys (or maybe they're brothers). These are times that people should be interacting, enjoying each other's company. The black and white also makes it seem like the photos were old-fashioned, when phones didn't exist, leaving their hands empty and showing how unnatural it is for people to be so cut off like that.I thought Hoss Haley's work was neat! His style isn't my favorite type of art in the world just because it doesn't really move me that much, but there were some things that I thought were pretty cool. My favorite thing was the Gray Scale (top picture) because I liked the texture and spherical shape of the sculptures. I like how each sphere is very separate, but they're all necessary to create the interesting whole. I really like how Haley uses industrial materials to create his work because it gives them kind of a rough quality. I would be interested to find out more about where he draws his inspiration from and how this show fits into his body of work as a whole!
I've decided on the top one for my class project and the bottom one for my home project. I can't wait to get started once this sling comes off!
Unfortunately, I've sprained my arm so I can't paint for a little while :( But I'm using part of class time to figure out what I'll do for my next project and home project. I have so many photos of Malta it's hard to decide! These are just some of them!
Since I really enjoyed doing the small, detailed painting of Malta in oil paints, I think I'm going to explore with that a little more this year. It was a neat situation because, since I was away in France this summer, if I wanted to paint, it had to be on a small canvas so I could pack it and take it home. And I had to use oils because they were the only paints I had. I wasn't extremely excited about that, but it ended up to be a blessing in disguise because I discovered I really like working small and detailed and with oil! I took a vacation with my family to Malta at the beginning of the summer and I made sure to take some pictures of scenes I could paint, so I have all of those available photos. I think for at least the first part of the year I am going to use those photos to make small detailed paintings like I did for this first one. I'm excited to explore further!
I think protest art is a very effective form of civil disobedience because images have power. Art is striking. When I walk down the street, I may not read signs and bulletins, but I definitely look at graffiti. When I’m online scrolling through facebook, I might not stop to read a long article, however persuasive the title, but if I see a passionate, powerful image, it catches my eye and I study it. I think art entices people, and when you draw people in, it’s easier to sway them.
In the article, “CRAFTIVISM: THE DO-IT-YOURSELF PRACTICE OF PROTEST DESIGN,” Grindon says, “Many of the rights and freedoms we take for granted were won by disobedience. Oscar Wilde called it man’s original virtue.” A lot of artists are taking up this “virtue” by protesting though their art, which I find very fascinating. I’ve seen a lot about protest art outside of the two articles we read. For example, I found an artist who commented on the beauty industry’s effects on women by photographing nude women with marks from tight undergarments and clothing, razor burns, etc. It’s hard to explain the power of the statement by simply describing it. The images hold all the power. I was very shocked and impressed after reading “The Guerrilla Girls Are Still Relevant After All These Years.” The Guerilla Girls are evidently extremely effective, using bold, captivating, and concise facts and images to communicate astonishing truths. The article says, “female artists had solo shows at major museums, and powerful women worked as gallerists, curators, journalists, and tastemakers. But there’s something about seeing the black-and-white numbers presented by the Guerrilla Girls, usually in the form of accessible posters, that’s eye opening and enraging.” I think most people know that there is income and job inequality between the sexes, but a lot of people, including myself, don’t always know the extent of the problem. As the article says, “the statistics outlined in the works are staggering.” I think a lot of people would be surprised to know: “The colorful 2007 mock tabloid Horror on the National Mall!, originally presented in the pages of the Washington Post, lists jaw-dropping numbers: at the time, the creators of art on view at the National Gallery of Art were 98% male and 99.9% white; respective numbers at the National Portrait Gallery, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery were not much better,” and also: “As detailed in the article, a 2014 report by the Association of Art Museum Directors found that only 24% of institutions with budgets over $15 million have female directors, and these women make 29% less than their male counterparts. In addition, just five of the thirty-three museums with budgets over $20 million have female directors.” Not only is securing jobs a problem for women, but job mobility is evidently an issue. According to the article, “statistics for the low numbers of female museum directors” underlined “how few women work their way up from entry-level museum jobs into the upper administrative echelon.” I thought reading both of these articles together was very informative, because “CRAFTIVISM: THE DO-IT-YOURSELF PRACTICE OF PROTEST DESIGN,” explained how protest itself is important to create a just society, and show how artists can help contribute to that effort. “The Guerrilla Girls Are Still Relevant After All These Years” talked about a very strong, specific example. The Guerrilla Girls article says that, “one of the things that’s appealing about the Guerrilla Girls’ message and the way they broadcast it is that they make clear that everyone in positions of power in the art world bears responsibility for the current state of affairs and can work to improve the situation.” I think art is very personal, and people make intimate connections with art. Because of this, art has the power to confront and to sway, which makes it a very effective method of protest. I started this over the summer at my summer house, but I don't have any oil paints at my normal house so Coach Hall said I could finish it for my class project for quarter 1 at school, where there are oils! I've enjoyed doing it so far.
"What a body of work!" - TODAY show “Painting on the body creates a special connection to a person that other visual art forms have trouble accomplishing; it’s a distinctly human experience.” -Trina Merry Trina Marry creates unique mind-blowing body art that has been featured in every major media outlet including TIME Magazine, The NY Times, NBC, ABC, The NY Post, Forbes Magazine and the Discovery Channel. The scope of her work ranges from avante garde performance pieces in museums to commercial advertising campaigns. A Native of the Bay Area with a degree in film, she moved to New Orleans to apprentice under the world renowned body artist, and current judge on Skin Wars, Craig Tracy. She currently lives in New York City where she studied under Robert Wilson at the Watermill Center. Highlights of her career include creating 10 commercial and fine art series that have gone viral, crafting living installations at the San Jose Museum of Art and ESMoA, executing a social media campaign for Ford Motors Corporation & a national commercial for NERF, and receiving numerous industry awards. She currently holds the title of “World Champion” in the Fine Art Bodypaint Installation Category. “Blows our minds… Brilliant.” -Life & Style Magazine" Wow I love her!!! I think that she does an amazing job of using the human form to present her beautiful paintings. I can't imagine painting all of that so well in such a short period of time! She has to do every painting in one day and make sure she photographs it (if it's outside) before the sun goes down! Her pieces show such a beautiful combination of painting skills, human motion, and photography skills. She inspires me to take a risk with my art.
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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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