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.