Reflection

In the beginning I was really anxious and didn't know what I was getting myself into. I must say after looking back to my blogs and the pictures that I put up of especially art exploration is really exciting to see. This whole class was inspirational, showed a different side of me. I had NO idea what so ever to accomplish all the things ive done in this class. I guess i needed some kind of push or dedication for me to explore of what more I can do. It was ALOT of work, but well worth it to see what I was able to do!

Self Portrait

This self portrait was pretty fun. I tried to look for something different and inspirational. This is a picture of myself and my son was he was just born. I remember this day to the fullest with every bit of detail. It was one of the most important days of my life.

I wanted to pick something that wouldn't make me give up easily and something that can motivate me to draw to my fullest potential. After I finished I felt like I could actually put this piece into a museum. It is actually hanging from a bulletin board at home, something that I can hold on to forever. I didn't know something as simple as this can remind me of such an important day.

The challenge I had was the immense amount of pressure. I overcame by this by taking lots of frequent breaks and rests. I put lots of shadow into this portrait. I was going to put color but I felt like it would ruin the moment. I am completely satisfied with this piece and didn't want to touch it any further so I just stopped here.There was a LOT of erasing!

Art Critique

My favorite part of this project was looking at other exhibits and comparing to my own. I really enjoy thinking and contemplating about how others came up with their own idea of a museum. This was a complicating, and challenging assignment for me. I had to open up my feelings and emotions to see how I would be able to relate to such paintings and artworks. I reviewed bunch of projects and compared to them. There were many simple and complicated ones. It was kind of easy to figure out who was serious and tried to make the best out of their museums and who didn't. People who did put lots of effort into it was very noticeable.

I selected the exhibit the related to Love because I took in quite interest from one of the first assignments for this class. It had to do with aesthetics and the meaning of beauty. Aristotle and Plato had lots of sayings for the term beauty.

The only challenge that I had for this critique was how I would imply my emotions and judgement toward the curator and artwork without expressing it too harshly. I definitely had different opinions from the curator on some artworks, which were completely different and some we though alike.

I would definitely like to read the critique people made on my project to see and open to how others reacted. It would be a total different kind of approach. I would rate my article about a 8-9 out of 10. I tried to minimize about what I can say since there was a page limit. I had to write down brief notes and comments about each paintings. The best part was how I was very free and open to share about what I thought compared to the curator.

The best part of working on this project was looking at other peers works and their museums.

TJ Clark and Renaissance

First of all TJ Clark's interview was a very laid back and open to the interview. When I read interview I thought of more professional and a formal setting. This was definitely not the setting. I was listening to the interview and TJ Clark was cursing "Damn" in every other sentence and smoking cigarettes right in the middle of the interview. I couldn't take my eyes of this and was pretty distracted by this.

First Pollock started his paintings as drips. The function of painting was between easel and the moral. The easel picture was a drying form and the tendency of modern feeling is toward the wall piture or moral. The time isn't right to blend them in from the wall or moral.

The pictures are interpreted as a halfway state and an attempt to point out direction of the future without arriving there completely. Discipline is most important in art. It had something to do with good paintings and bad paintings. For example, Lavender and mist are great sucesses but Blue Poles is a failure.

Michaelangelo never could've painted great without learning from earlier masters. There has to be an artist from all the artists that learned from the first. Giotto was one of the first. Discoveries of Giotto represented the first stages of Renaissance rebirth of great art. Roman artists had great appreciation of nature and beauty. They sculpted painted and made mosaics based on what they saw around them, for hundreds of years. The Roman Empire provided enough stability for the arts to fully flourish.

I learned about mosaics and descriptions in a different class. I think it was Art History. It helped me a lot in this class because the terms were familiar such as Baroque and the Goths.

Project 4

This is a very thoughtful and time consuming project. I started off with a paper and a pen and started to write down my strongest themes. I wrote down science fiction since I was able to combines aliens and lots of paintings that  came with it. I thought it was interesting because I don't see many exhibits with some kind of extraterrestrial themes. I submitted my theme for the discussion dropbox, but started to look at different themes in the meantime. I came up with colors or Comical themes. When I read the comments and replies, people really agreed with my choice and was actually excited to see what I would use for my exhibit. So I continued with it.

Module 13 & 14

These videos were quite interesting and had similar themes and topics for each video. It was about museums and curators. How ironic since we have to make our own museums and become a curator ourselves. This is quite thrilling and nerve racking since I don't know where to begin. These videos painted a picture and brought ideas to my mind. As I was watching the videos I wasn't only taking notes but definitely blanking out and day dreaming about how my museum would become.

Tate modern exhibits correspond directly with the chronology of our course which is 1900 to the present. This is called International Modern Art era. Theres a collection which is relatively traditional in terms of its focus on NATO Alliance, Western European, North American Art, emphasizing the canonical movements, surrealism, abstract expressionism, constructivism and pop.

A history embodied in a collection which principally excludes non-western discourses principally excludes art that is politically engaged and consistently ignores the contribution of women artists throughout 20th century so there is a very partial collection.

The way that we look at modern art is partly shaped by art historical concerns. Museums of modern art have played no less a role in framing our values and judgements.

MOMA which is the Museum of Modern Art in New York is powerful and prestigiou institution that pioneered a new form of display that was to dominate the exhibition of modern art for over half a century. This system for exhibiting what we were recent artistic tendencies was largely the product of museums first director Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

Barr's view of art was in significant ways a response to artistic modernism, the form that he used to display come to be seen as the characteristic type of modern exhibition. Barr displayed artworks that are primarily other responses of art and it traveled on a direct path to the present. Barr believed that art was ultimately self contained and bore little relation to social, political or intellectual history.

Art movements evolved from one another with experience we can see time based work like performance and video, ephemeral works that do not resemble the museum's commodity the museum usually housed.

There are four themes that curator use to organize the museum which is landscape, still life, history and the nude.

Video Reviews

The first video that I watched was the Modernity and art. The second video was mostly about Andy Warhol's method of printing. The first video made me reflect on how far our civilization have came. There were much centuries ago where painting was very different from what we call painting today.

Even in the Greek times shapes of men they were reflecting was a man , an idealized version of themselves which have the spark of divinity within themselves. Art has its own memory in itself. It has its own psychic strata. For example, you can see human consciousness changing a civilization altering itself. We see higher realm being, idealized versions of what we could be if we were better than ourselves.

There's some kind of spine-chilling if we connect art to the past. We sense some awesome and unquestionable set of values being carried on through art, but then art changes because everything changes. For example, during Industrialization man is separated from nature. Machines took over and they were the rule work. Science challenges religion. What eventually rises is modern life. The old illusions shattered and the new ones rule us. Our new freedoms pictures to us in advertising. Art describes us when we have freedom to be whatever we want it to be.

Present life is in the uncertain present. There is no single code for living. The burning issue right now is the uncertainty. The future will look back and look at us as a society defined by change, living constantly with oddness. Now art is about questions. For example, bricks piled up are about form. You don't have to make a cut into the sculpture to make it a sculpture but the bricks make a cut into the world. It shows different theories and points of view what the brick is really presenting about.

Andy Warhol gives such a great quote in the beginning of the video. He says department stores are modern day museums. This is somewhat true! Department stores and clothing lines use so much advertisement. These include manicans which act as sculptures. Andy Warhol is one of the famous artists who is integrated in the advertisement world. He is most famous for silk screen shots of Marilyn Monroe. The one that is most popular is the Cambell Soup.

Art Gallery Visit #2

The title of the exhibit was Burchfield Exhibit! This gallery was way different from the first one that I went to at Albright-Knox art gallery. It was more open and very spacious compared to the other one. This one also had concerts and shows with auditoriums. At the Albright-Knox it was mostly paintings but REALLY colorful. One thing that stood out in this exhibit was the music. It was this eerie, gloomy music that played pretty well with the theme.

It was mostly all the same colors and layout. The floor was very spacious. Sometimes there would be random sculptures or paintings in the middle of the floor that you have to be careful about. The lighting was dim, of coarse so it wouldn't ruin the paintings. At this one there was no security guards that would yell at your or constantly breathe behind your neck. They politely asked us to take pictures without flash. One of my favorite and VERY unique thing was on the top floor there was this machine that was made of motion sensors and every time you move, it controls the water dripping down. I am really into technology and was fascinated by this. I had most of my fun in this machine.

The artwork was properly organized according to the exhibits. There were several but I forgot to take pictures. There were similar to watercolors and acrylic paintings but very different from Albright-Knox. I realized at Albright-Knox it was VERY colorful with bright colors and the paintings would stand out at you. Another unique thing about the Burchfield was that there were some comments box or places you can write about how you were thinking at that specific spot or painting.

The first one that stood out for me was Ultima Cena by Stephen F Saracino. Now this was clearly similar to the Last Supper with Jesus. But it was really interesting how it depicted the Last Summer with these animal. There was balance in this picture and shows quite a symmetry. The next artwork I selected was this wonderful photo from Patti Ambrogi. This was a photo made up of many small photos. I thought this was very neat! It shows contrast and was remarkable! The final artwork was The Forest Through the Trees from Hillary Fayle. This is a great example of proportion. It depicts a forest through a small leaf. I thought it was fantastic yet ironic.

Video for Module 11

I watched videos for Matisse and Picasso. The second video that I watched was about the Mystical North for Spanish art. It's ideal how the world's famous cathedrals and buildings actually was influenced by art and great artists.

Drawing is painting with less materials according to Matisse. Paris was a great place for Matisse for his painting that is to say for his life was a man who needed to take risks. Matisse has two passions, the female node and fabrics the silks and velvets. For Matisse painting always meant, panic, struggle and fear. He used to try to deliberately instigate the struggle by setting up little visual tableaux. Matisse always had a model. He would be on the model, in the model and very inspired by models. It gives you a very particular vision of the model if you are so close. In fact it's a deformation almost like a fish eye vision. When you literally draw something from your lap, your vision is different from how it would be if you just took a few steps back from it. Matisse needs models because it serves to fix his attention and it has a relay action.

Picasso comes across this and makes fun of Matisse to provoke him. He was actually awarded Nobel Peace Prize. He doesn't travel or need tourism like Matisse. Picasso says "To me to paint a picture is to engage in a dramatic action in the course of which reality will be disengaged." He also says that dramatic action need solitude. Perhaps it happens at night as close as possible to the unconscious mind. Picasso does not use palettes or easels which is very interesting. He uses newspapers that are laid out on the floor. Lots of paintings from Picasso are objects that never existed. Picasso's inspiration comes from first and foremost life, women are the engine that drives him. Female mystery is the greatest subject.

After Goya finished the black paintings, his sight deteriorated to the point he could barely see. Within five years he was dead. He may have lit the fuse of modern art. It wasn't till t he start of 20th century that Spain became one of the power houses for modern art. Spanish modern art would be forced out of the friction between two opposites. This includes modern Atheism and ancient religion. Antoni Gaudi's style is organic and sinous and it was inspired by God's Natural World. Gaudi was a man who clung to Spain's Catholic past. He created the Cathedral in Barcelona. It is called Sagrada Familia. Gaudi saw himself as God's architect. It was God that he looked for inspiratio.

Dia De Los Muertos

In the beginning before I started to brainstorm ideas and find out how I can make a mask, I thought wow it must take really a miracle to come up with an idea. Every time I work on these projects I expand my limitations more and more, above what I think. I started off with the theme of Halloween and I'm pretty sure people started exactly the same place as me. When I thought of Halloween it automatically reminded me of the Day of the Dead. It is very popular and people should've heard of it. It the day when you celebrate the deceased. It is a really cool part of the Latin culture.

I started to google some pictures of the day of the dead, and automatically a mask pops up and I realized this was my project. I started to look at youtube videos and more images to start constructing my mask. I came up with these images from google which I downloaded. There are lots of pictures with flowers and flower petals with crosses. All the masks seemed pretty friendly to me and very comical. It wasn't too scary. I had to begin with the outline of a skull and that's where I started to work up the foundation.

I implied elements of texture and color and the principle of balance. It is nicely symmetrically designed. I used acrylic paint, leftover from previous projects. I tried to imply almost a similar theme with flowers and crosses with a skull. It then end it came out great! I had a really good experience with this mask, but I wish I worked on it earlier so I could've taken it around during Halloween. 

African Art

I watched both videos on African Art. It was very interesting. There were so many similarities between African Art and art from other countries. I liked both of these presentations because it let me feel I was in the museum looking at the statues and sculptures the way these people were describing it. You usually think African Art as static but a specific sculpture had a twisted back, turned all around and you could feel the notches of his spine and the tongue that was sticking out. African art that affected the west is more abstract, simple and dramatic, startling and exaggerated. Above all African Art packed an emotional wallop. It gives a way of psychological form to the human form or to any other figures or to a scene they wish to depict. Most common magical art objects were masks. For example there is a mask with two sides: white and black. The white side depicts a healthy person. The black side is the side of illness, we can see small posts which are victims of small pox. Masks were designed to scare us, but some didn't work and the Boas stopped making them. One of the groups that were made to scare is the Westerners. Rubber and Ivory was popular at the time in Congo when King Leopold was in power. The king wanted it out fast and sent soldiers to make sure that it happens. At the time bullets were very expensive and every time soldiers used it, the king wanted proof that it was used properly. The only time when bullets were used was when the slaves had a deadly disease and bullets were use to prevent from extending the disease any further. The soldiers would sometimes miss and hit another animal. Then these soldiers would sever the right hand off of natives in order to compensate for the bullet that was used. The nature of existence is what Art is about. Art is part of daily life in African culture. This is similar in our culture also. A strong aesthetic sense is revealed in the decoration of traditional homes and in the making of everyday utensils. It finds expressions in dress, hairstyles and other forms of ornamentation. Art was always important in traditional rituals. Many masks in museums were once used in ceremonies that combined artistic creations with sounds of music and dynamic power of dance.

Drawing of My Hands

This project definitely failed me. I didn't do this drawing correctly. It was impossible for me to draw or sketch my hand. I absolutely gave up. But then I had another idea. I traced out my hand so I have some kind of foundation for me to work on. Then I worked out on my shadows then the fine details such as my knuckles. I used a pencil for this project and a whole lot of erasing. It was VERY difficult to draw with my left hand, which is my non dominant hand. With this little cheat it did come out pretty well. I don't know if this counts or not. I would NOT consider using my non dominant hand to work on artwork in the future. My knuckles were also a very complicated piece because I had no idea how to sketch it out. I did some research to how other hands came out and it seemed that a lot of shadowing going on.

Velázquez & Image of a Master

It is inspiring how these artists started when they were pretty young. Some were well known of ever since 16 years old. I was interested in both these videos because it shows how much potential any one can have. The video with Albrecht Durer was well known for his drawing of his hands, which we are actually doing for this module.

Velazquez when he was 24 he started being a court painter for Philip IV. He started painting when he was way younger though. His painting, Order of Santiago conferred his nobility. He captured the moment which includes the light, air and other elements that disappear in a trice not because they are fleeting but because they are timeless. The worst art is his had no friends except only one which was the king. He had only one love who was his wife. His consuming interest was painting, and this was his friend, lover of literature and patron of the arts. It is incredible how talented you can be but I wouldn't want to live all my life to have just very limited amount of friends and paint forever in my life. Velazquez was a man of good character not very interested in government. The king guaranteed his livelihood and his future as a painter. When Velazquez painted he was free of artistic compromise or unwanted commissions. Velazquez basically painted what he wanted to paint. Velazquez always saw the king as eloquent, speaking not with his lip but with work. When he was on his trip back to Madrid, he painted Mythology Forge of Vulcan. For Velazquez the life mattered and not myths. Velazquez painted slowly and was very educated.

Albrecht Durer was born in 1471. He exercised a powerful influence on the art of Northern Europe. He was very talented, and performed a self portrait at age 13. He loved painting hands, which connects to what we have to do in our module for this class. Durer examined the process of aging carefully. For example, the ruthless eye of paintings determines the process of aging. There was some scrutiny of narcissism which was an art of scrutinizing his own face. After he visited to the Alps he discovered the art of landscape. Durer was the first true landscape artist in Europe. Durer was asked for an altar piece for their chapel inside the church. The theme was the virgin angels that distributed garlands of roses to rulers of church and state. Durer always had something to learn. From the Venetians, he learned how to employ the first brushstroke without color to achieve the effect of solid form simply with light and shadow. The painter examines his model through a grid then transfers each detail onto sheet of paper scored with the same grid. His search was the perfect form possessed by the Ancient Greeks and since lost. An example of this was his own self portrait.

More Human than Human & A World Inscribed

I was able to look at the subtitles for these videos and were easier to understand. I was able to stop copy my notes down successfully and play it again!

For the first video, More Human Than Human

It was quite interesting for me to figure out why art was around for such a long time. It began way before I was born myself. Images make us how to think, how we feel and they mold and define us. They are very highly influential to humans. You see certain types of images that helps promote advertisements. We see it in T.V and definitely around our surroundings. They have such a powerful hold on us. What these whole images have in common is a human form. This type of form is primary.

In this video, it uses an example of a gull chick. As soon as they are hatched their brains are stimulated not by the mother gull, but actually the red stripe on its beak. There was an experiment done using a stick with one stripe to see if these gull chicks would notice it. Certainly they did! There were more experiments done including a stick with multiple red stripes and sure enough they were even more stimulated and excited over this stick with three stripes than only one. There is an analogy here with the Venus sculpture with emphasized on the hips and the breasts.

The brains of the hunter and gatherers of the Venus producers exaggerated what mattered the most. They were living in the Iced Age, so features of warmth and fatness were highly desirable so their brains compelled them to exaggerate these features above others.

Egyptians were first settled humans to use images of the body extensively in their Art. The bodies don't have exaggerated features at all. All arms and feet were about the same size. Each part of the body was at the clearest angle. There were red grid lines that were found in a tomb which covered the entire body. Researchers analyzed this Grid recording numerous details. The figure was 19 squares tall and the feet were two and half squares long. The pupil of the eyes were one square off the center line. This whole concept was very important to the Egyptians. The Pyramids were designed with absolute precision which is a symbol of order that had risen from the desert.

The second video that I watched, A world Inscribed,

describes how hard of a Monk's life was. At that time there were the local lord who offered protection and different monasteries where the monks produced most of the books. Very few people knew how to read and write and was an extraordinary skill at the time. Monks were producing bibles to spread the work. But this spread of knowledge was slow and each book was written by hand. Average monastery had only 20 books. Spelling mistakes and errors corrupted the texts after many centuries. Letters would look like other letters, there were ink blot and caused the writer to leave out a line or paragraph.

Shortly after, literacy was needed for social development. Universities sprung up where students shared their bible and took notes together. This way multiple of books were copied at once.

Its really hard to imagine living at a time like this, where there are only shorthand of books. This tells us that knowledge is actually a gift to us. The ability to read and write is incredible. Without this ability we wouldn't be able to learn about the past at all!

Video on Architecture

I watched a video on prairie style and architecture: The science of design. There were truly both a fascinating videos. The first video was really intriguing and got me thinking about what kind of houses that I wanted to live in permanently in the future. The second video showed me different kind of apartments, especially a smart apartment.

All these video links to the textbook because architecture is a type of an art form. It depends how to want to layout a house according to nature and integrate the organic aspect into the clients' home.

Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect, and a very well known for the prairie style of homes. It was mainly composed of 7 feet tall houses but spread out horizontally. His main idea was the box like homes to wide open horizontal living spaces. Wright designed lots of single family houses in Chicago where homes should reflect time, place and landscape. The front door was mystique and not just slammed right in front of the house.

My favorite part of this was how Wright integrated the organic relationships between the house and its surrounding. The Vancouver landscape was also a inspiring creation. It is a landscape of mountains and trees rather than flat prairie. It consists of water, stones and plants that make it look like a quarry where the stone came from. The spaces of the house all flow out into the garden. The best design is total integration between the furniture, the house, the site, the client and the way they live. This the idea of Frank Lloyd Wright so he became one of the best architect in the western culture.

In the second video it was really cool to see the smart houses. I knew about this already. In the beginning it really defined how skyscrapers came about. The urban cities was the important spot of growth. There were no more vacant lots in urban cities so people needed to build up. New materials such as concrete and steel brought about the construction to build skyscrapers. A skyscraper is made up of super structure, which is all that stands above ground and underground subculture. Wood sticks are put in ground, then immense slab of concrete is extended out beyond the perimeter of the building.

Wind is important in considering for foundation. For example, wind in a 100 story building will be 4 times more violent than it is around a 50 story structure. When the wind swirls around a tall building, it usually breaks up into whorls or vortexes which alternate on the opposite facades of the building. It makes the building sway. A high rise with flat surfaces and right angles reacts very badly to wind.

A smart apartment is a computer, linked to the houses various appliances, ,the switches and electric plugs, the security system, and the unites that control humidity and temperature. Circuits converge onto the relay board and the board ids equipped to microprocessors that are in calculators or watches, that activate the relays and the real stats on computer's orders.

This was a really cool development and shows how advanced technology has become.

Reflection of Others

1. http://justuscr01.blogspot.com/
2. http://demiflynn.blogspot.com/

I really enjoyed the elements and principles of others. This was actually one of my favorites since i get to look at others and compare it to mine and see how they were thinking and their own views. I do agree with the different elements and photos.

Yes there was one that was the same as mine which was the acrylic color wheel. I really liked it because it showed different colors but very bright. I'm guessing we went to the same art gallery but there was one that I wanted to get a photo of but wasn't able to. It was a picture of giant chairs. That really intrigued me because I just imagined myself how grand I would be feeling if I sat in that chair.

There was one in Demi's blog, It was the fourth picture from Karin Davie's which really interested me. It actually made me focus on what the artist was trying to draw and made my head turn and twist.

I really enjoyed looking at other people's blog. This is actually one my favorite assignment that I did for this class. It really let me see the classmate's perspective on art. Not only was I able to see just these two projects but what interested me was the logos on how people represented themselves.

There weren't that many comments that I had on my blog except only two. It was helpful because it gave me insight on how my comments and my point of view affected theirs and agreed with me.

Through the Eyes of Sculptor and Glass making

The video Through the Eyes of the Sculpture enabled me to really see being a craftsman is very difficult but truly an impressive skill. This video talks about the daily life of Emmanuel Fillion who is from Italy and enjoys being a sculptor. He began sculpting lime stones and became a master at it. Lime stone started to develop at the bottom of the ocean and seas. The stone is heavy when wet when it comes out of the quarry.
Emmanuel Fillion started as a restoration artist which is where a sculptor works on an area of a monument such as the hands, the face or a foot. In restoration, a stone carver has geometric shapes and a plan to follow. The sculptor must use his feelings to carve life back into the shape. In order for you to know the limestone is good is to check the stone's sound to make sure there is no cracks. If there is a crack it sounds like an old pot. A sculpture comes alive in clay, dies in plaster and is reborn in marble. Marble is the product of limestone baked and squeezed and crushed together when tectonic plates collided over 50 million years ago along the Mediterranean coast. There is no waste in marble. Marble can be used for paper & pharmaceuticals.

The second video was pretty short. It is called the Glass and Ceramics. It is fascinating how glass is really made. Glass is made of sand, on of the most abundant substances on the surface of the sun. The properties are actually different from sand. It is a viscous liquid which stiffens when cooled. This miracle of glass occurs in fire of a furnace in a refractory earthenware crucible, the glass maker which prepares mixture which contains 60% to 75% of silica sand. Sand is mainly composed of silicon dioxide or silica. This compound forms crystals, extremely well ordered, atomic networks that are united by regular bonds. Glass makers adds fluxes which can be soda, potash, limestone or oyster shells. These components are used to improve fusion which occurs around 1500 degrees Celsius also prevent from being too fluid at high temperature.

It was really interesting how you really do blow into the glass to make the shape that you want it to be. Through the first video it showed how precise the limestone needed to be for each sculpture. Everything the sculptor had in mind needs to fit with every single part in order to make a master piece.

Art Gallery Visit #1

There were lots of paintings and sculpture inside the art gallery I went to. I never went to an exhibit of art and this class has made me open new doors and new experiences. It was a very neat experience for me.

The best impression I had was all the bright colorful paintings in the exhibit. The Peasant in the Fields is a good example. You can't really tell in the photo but the paintings are mostly in strokes. It was quite interesting because it seems so easy to draw but in reality really difficult. The second painting that really intrigued me was the acrylic painting. It had bright colors and I loved the way the colors gradient faded with each other.

The paintings that I felt connection was pretty hard to find. I found some paintings that actually related to me in some way. The painting that is titled Convergence was a great way to depict me. It has multiple strokes and different paints but is messy, yet so beautiful. The second painting that I related to was one of my favorite artists from Georgia O' Keefe. Out of the whole art gallery I was able to only spot one painting from her, so I put this painting up.

One painting that I would really like to know more about is the untitled painting from Celentano. It makes me use my imagination to expand the shape in the middle. It is an odd looking shape but very compressed. I want to learn how the artist came up with this idea. The next painting is called Card Players. I was looking at this painting to figure out how the title came to be. It seems canvases are lost in some kind of time warp. It seems like they are going around in circle, and want to get out but there is no way and the canvases are just stuck. This painting was really interesting since I was actually looking at this painting in a circle and my eyes were going in circles.

My Personal Logo

First I made a diagram or a list of my own personality. I had no idea what I was going to draw. I looked at many examples of logo and nothing really fit me. I had no idea where to start so I just started to write down random things about me, how I would define myself.

The process of making my logo not only took hours but it took me days. May be two to three days to finalize my logo. I am not an artist and I have no idea how long it takes my classmates to come up with one but I really had no idea where I was going with this. The idea that I came up with is finally, I have a Mexican wife and I really enjoy her spicy food and her cuisine. Her first name is Grissell which starts with the letter "G" and my first name starts with "P'. Somehow I wanted to combine the two letters which really tells me who I am today and how I live my life every day. So the letter P is shaped as a Jalepeno pepper which my wife uses a lot with my food and makes it really delicious. My second letter of my logo is a "g" which stands for her name and it shows a computer mouse. I love technology and my current major is Computer Information Systems. I enjoy working with computer and want to live with it for the rest of my life. So I decided to integrate it with my artwork and it fit perfectly with the letter "g."

After I watched all the information posted up on how to create my logo, I really had no idea where to start. With all the information put out to me, I was just lost and stressed about how I was going to make my logo. For example, the slides show more of patterns and symbols but really didnt give me any ideas. What helped me the most was actually writing down information about me. In the beginning I didn't know how to describe myself then how was I able to complete a logo about me? It was a confusing moment for me but I finally got it down!

First Painting with Acrylics!

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

- I was easier than I thought. In the beginning I was thinking about how hard it would be and was overwhelmed because art is not the best subject for me. I am not good at drawing at all. The medium colors, after blending with my fingers, it was hard to distinguish the colors from the value scale. The color wheel was pretty excited because after I had colored it, the piece actually came into life, very bright.

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

- I liked working on the color wheel because it was so colorful. It is really interesting how you can mix the primary colors and it actually changes into a whole new color.

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

- The most important discovery that I had made was black was impossible for me to make. I mixed around with lots of colors but always ended up with brown. I do not know if this normal or not. I am pretty sure you can't go wrong with mixing all colors!

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

- The color wheel can really go into depth. There are so many different shadings and contrast of colors in the color wheel. My favorite color is the ultramarine blue.

Paul Kim's New Creation of Photobucket!!!



Shape- This is the famous hexagon red stop sign. These lines on this sign in created into hexagon shape. Every time you see this exact sign it means to stop at all circumstances.
Pattern- This picture is a pattern because there is s repetition of a shape. In this case it keeps repeating the shape of a square but in different colors.
Value- This light that shines to the plant actually makes a unique color on this leaf like a light, semi-transparent leaf. Without any light this leaf is actually dark green. There is a differentiation of tone on this leaf because of the light.
Unity- In this picture there are several elements and principles all at once. The picture of the ocean you can see the movement. There is the element of space. There is a huge area of the ocean and the depth of the skyline. You can see the proportion between the ocean and the seagulls on the left side of the picture. There is also balance between the sky and the ocean.
Contrast- The dim light from the sky contrasts with the trees. In the windows we are able to see the texture of the leaves from the trees and the darkness from the background.
Line- This is the most basic building block of formal analysis. There is of coarse the skyline in the background.
Balance - There is quite a separation between the road and the sky in this picture. They both combine harmoniously since there is some kind of level. There is the sky, then the hills and the ground floor, the road.
Form- This is a picture of form because it shows an incredible amount of depth of this slide. You can see all length, width and depth.
Movement- You can see some kind of upward movement in the sand leading up to the baby.
Emphasis - In this whole background you can see cars, mountains, signs and the road but what really stands out and something you can't miss is the snow caps in the mountains. It is the small portion of the photo but definitely draws our attention to this part.
Texture - There is a rough texture to this sand at the beach. It is a different size and shape throughout the beach. You can even see small seashells that also implies the roughness of the texture.
Color- In this photo there is a photo of a blue orchid. Here if you look deeply enough, you can see there is a different shade of blue on the leaf of the orchid. In the background there are different flowers with different colors also.
Proportion - Here you would imagine a boat would be really big. Here, there is a picture of a person and in the back a huge boat called the Queen Mary. It is really an incredible size.
Space - In this photo everything seems pretty compact and small. But there is a big amount of space between the position of the photographer and the buildings.

what is color in art? How does art portray emotions?

In my own house I have flashcards of colors that have each purpose for each color. For example the color red is to get focused and color blue is to be inspired. I had no idea each color had a significant meaning. I thought color was just simply colors. Well, in this video I learned colors actually express meaning,

            In the beginning it opens up as a painter struggles on how to create her masterpiece or her artwork. I never knew painting was this difficult. I thought anybody who had a certain skill can easily paint. I had experience with watercolor before but that is such a simplified art than an artist trying to express her emotions through painting.

            Colors show different kinds of emotions and are difficult to control. For example, in Venice the artist was talking about how the sea color, the light that hit the water was fascinating in Venice.  Colors aren’t easily made as you think. You need to gather natural resources in order to make a specific color. For example the color, my favorite this rich blue color called ultramarine is the richest blue from Afghanistan.  It was used specifically for a virgin’s cloak in paintings.

            The artist in the color video had this main idea “keeping the whole thing going, keeping the painting moving from all different types of places.” The most fascinating thing I learned about this artist is there was no specific point where she started. She started to paint all different sides and all over the place but came to a point, a common point where the painting fit together. It was really neat how she used bright colors to show some kind of mysterious and how the buildings float on top of the water. It was a total different image that I had about how artists actually paint.

            In the emotions video it shows how most artists emphasize some kind of religious meaning towards paintings. For example the war between heaven and hell, and some famous paintings have angels or some kind of angelic glowing like the Mona Lisa painting. What actually hit me and was really interesting were the paintings of Goya. It was a different point of view and how he came about through painting was much different than most paintings that I know.

            Goya’s painting draws the worst of us. He uses body movement, gestures and facial expressions to show the emotion of paints and how he wants us to be free. Goya’s paintings have this kind of uncomfortable, unasked and the unwanted side of humans.

            What amazed me in the video clips were, paintings can actually show different types of symbolisms. For example, there can be expressions of politics and human psychology. All different types of time periods portrayed different views of God. For example the Medieval world equals God, Renaissance world equals humanity and God and the Enlightenment world equals humanity instead of God. Of coarse Goya’s period, he expressed God in his own terms. There were no afterlife and Hell is something that we create.

Module 2

I watched the videos that were posted. The videos included Aesthetics: Philosophy of the Arts and CARTA: Neurobiology Neurology and Art and Aesthetics. I have to read an article What the brain draws from: Art and neuroscience. It was hard trying to understand these professors but I tried the best as I can. The main topic of all these clips and news is What Aesthetics are.

From the first video I learned how philosophers thought of Aesthetics during his time. His main idea was the idea of beauty. It was hard understanding this video so I did a research of my own trying to back up my facts and have a better understanding what Plato's point of view was. A source that I used was Plato's Aesthetics. There were more philosophers that wrote on the theory of Aesthetics but Plato interested me the most. Other examples are, Aristotle and Francis Hutcheson. Aristotle focused on unity of action, time and peace. Plato brought about a meaning of beauty to me and stuck with me throughout the whole video. It distracted me because I wanted to know what the concept of beauty was. Beauty is defined as the quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind,whether arising from sensory manifestations (as shape, color, sound, etc.), a meaningful design orpattern, or something else (as a personality in which high spiritual qualities are manifest), according to the dictionary. Now there are three parts in Plato's theory. There is beauty, imitation and divine inspiration. 

The word beauty derived from the Greek word Kalon. They are the two terms that are similar but are applied to different items. Plato uses the word Kalon for a face or body than for works of art and natural scenery. Plato uses the work Kalon as admirable and closer to splendid and upright. Now after all the definition, I was up thinking Kalon is what I always thought of what beauty was but according to Plato, the term beauty has a greater meaning and such a powerful significance than I thought. There are so many different version of beauty. Beauty possesses the reality that Forms have and is discovered through the same dialectic that brings other Forms to light. This means the cause of all occurrences of beauty, and the cause not of the appearance of the beauty but the real being. Another point is that beauty doesn’t come in any Form. It bears some close relationship to the good. Therefore this type of Form has a higher status than the regular forms. Beauty offers a close relationship to art. These are the three aspects of beauty that Plato describes.

I can go on and on describing about how Plato inspired to think different on how beauty works and its form. These three essential foundations is the most important piece that made me grasp onto, then moving forward to other theories and definitions.

According to the article I guess in a vague way it describes how beauty is described by making some sense of lines, colors and patterns. Artists tried to create beauty throughout human history to create illusions such as depth and brightness that aren’t actually there but make works of art seem somehow more real. The article shows the basis to such beauty is Lines, Faces, color vs. luminance and shadows and mirrors.

Through human history, people used the concept of lines in almost all pieces of art. Things that are not real, like lines have an effect on how lively and real an art piece can become. For example, a line drawing of a face can be recognized as a face to any culture. It turns out that these outlines tap into the same neural processes as the edges of objects that we observe in the real world. The individual cells in the visual system that pick out light-dark edges also happen to respond to lines.

Faces bring us to modern-day emotions. Everybody can agree a happy face is a happy face and a sad face is a sad face. Our brains have a special affinity for faces and for finding representations of them. Our brains readily find faces in art, including in Impressionist paintings where faces are constructed from colored lines or discrete patches of color. These type of information can trigger emotional responses, even without bearing the awareness of it. Cavanagh explains that this may mean we are more emotionally engaged when the detail-oriented part of our visual system is distracted, such as in impressionist works where faces are unrealistically colorful of patchy.

Most people have three kinds of cones in the eye’s retina: red, blue and green. You know what color you’re looking at because your brain compares the activities in two or three cones. A different phenomenon, called luminance, adds the activities from the cones together as a measure of how much light appears to be passing through a given area. Livingstone explained that there are two major processing streams for our visual system, which is the “what” and “where” streams. The “what” allows us to see in color and recognize faces and objects. The “where” is a faster and less detail-oriented but helps us navigate our environment but is insensitive to color. Artists often play with luminance in order to give the illusion of three dimensions, since the range of luminance in real life is far greater than what can be portrayed in a painting. By placing shadows and lights that wouldn’t be present in real life, paintings are able to trick the eye into perceiving depth. To trick the brain into thinking something looks three-dimensional and lifelike, artists ad elements – lightness and shadows – that wouldn’t be present in real life but that tap into our hard-wired visual sensibilities.

Shadows are colored more darkly than what’s around them. It’s not readily apparent if the lighting direction is inconsistent. They can even be the wrong shape as long as they don’t look opaque. They help convince us of a three-dimensional figure. Studies have shown that people don’ t generally have a good working knowledge of how reflections should appear, or where, in relation to the original object.

Videos and articles relate to the readings in the text because they both have their own understandings and viewpoints of what Beauty is and the concept of it. Now there is no true meaning of what the magnificence or beauty is of a painting except how you, as an individual interpret it. According to Plato I have been interpreting beauty in a different way. He has open my eyes to see how powerful and important the meaning of beauty is.

The films were hard to understand but I am not so great and hearing and listening to things online. I tried to catch the key concepts and performed a research of my own to get a better understanding. I don’t know if this was a great idea or I was allowed to do this but I did whatever I can to try and understand what these professors were saying and to understand the article. They added depth by acknowledging their own theories and ideas of how we all define and understand what paintings are.

1. The process of creating a new gmail account was pretty easy for me. I have done this before and used different tools on google and it's great because it is FREE! But this is my first time using a blog. I had other friends who did blogging before but I never used it.

2. I expect to learn something of Art! After it is an art class but art was always one of my weak subjects in school. I am very open minded about what I am going to learn. I am very uncomfortable handling arts and crafts, colored pencils and definitely drawing.

3. I am slightly anxious about what exactly I will be doing in this class. I don't know if this is the right class for me and lots of questions and confusion. I will try my best to learn something from this class and share it with my peers.