diverting devotions

Good play. It was nice to be so close and personal with the actors. I like readings alot. The emotion is raw, and not overly practiced.

Walter Gropius from Art in Theory

Gropius view on art is,it is a balancing act of what you physically see and how you emotional feel and your mental understanding of it. He set up a school teaching students how to paint what they see, not in a stylistic way. Leaving the interpretation completely up to them, not striving for a "look". They would have plenty of time to develop their own style as it happens.

I feel this is the way UNH teaches art. I completely agree with this way of painting. I find it extremely important to have an understanding of form and structure while I make art. Expression is good, but it is funner and more fulfilling to express myself in times when I feel suffocated by the structure of my classes. It is also important to have a basis of knowledge to be able to understand how to express emotion. It is a hard to tell someone how you feel if you don't know how to speak their language. Some people might say, well you could express your emotions and feeling through primal screaming and body language. Once again you need a basis of understanding yourself and other's to express to them and yourself effectively.

Human beings love their brains, we love logic. To express ourselves effectively we need to incorporate some form of logic into it.

The Enveloping Air by John Berger

Monet. In one part of the article Berger said how he didn't know why Monet would paint the same place multiple times, what he was trying to get out of it. As an artists I feel like you can paint or draw something as many times as you want, but you are never going to be able to fully express what you feel about that place. You can go over it in as many washes as you want, but there is always going to be the emotion inside of you.

In another part he talks about Monet painting his dead wife's portrait. It reminded me of the earlier article we read about the nursing home. Yes, when you paint you respond only to how you are seeing not necessarily what it is. I always feel bad for the models in class when the teacher compares them to being nothing different from painting a vase or ladder.

Avant-Garde and After by Brandon Taylor

This article talked about artists reintroducing figures into their paintings. It also talked about feminist art, and it's lack there of.

I honestly couldn't focus very well on this article. I know it also talked about incorportating war images into art during times of ...war.

Artists, Critics and Content

Happenings. Honestly I could feel what they meant just by reading the article. It is a rather interesting idea. While we were at diverting Devotion it was even that much more emotional to be so close to them in the Henessy Theater than the Johnson Theater. My only hesitation is that when people start to shrug off conventionalism they get sloppy. So if they are making a huge paper mache tree, I'm hoping they are putting love and caring into it's design.

It was good to hear where the artist is coming from and what they want out of art. So I gather all this is to play off of the human experience. To make you feel, the ultimate artistic experience.

I do like being in artists space more than just seeing their artwork. I like talking to them about Disney music, laughing with them about walnuts and decaying fruit that you keep getting people to pick up because it looked fake. Everything is enhanced by being in it's own environment, when you take it out of it's environment it does look more exotic and exiting but it looses history, meaning, and importance.

Between the lines

This art show included modern art that revolved around line. Free lines, as I might call it. It seemed as if the show is about people's interaction with lines. Like the artist who dropped the string on the floor and let that shape dictate his art piece.

Louise Bourgeois

She talks about how art is just life. It is a way of expressing one's self, and living life. She is talking about how all art that is produced now is modern art, since it is modern.

I think she is right that being able to be an artist is a privilege. If no one takes favor on you, you could not survive. But I suppose you could have a side job, and make art solely for yourself. Then it is no one else's beneficence.

Letters to Emile Bernard

What I got from the letters was about letting life take over your painting. When you paint, go for what you see in nature. It is not so much what you want it to look like, but what it is that is important. They talked about putting your love into the apple. Where as he would not show his love to people openly, he would put it into painting the apple, there it would live forever.

I like the idea of painting what I see, but it does take some exaggeration. But you learn a lot about beauty and what is important from painting what you see.

what passes for art

Walter Pach is complaining about modern art. He is talking about how going away from the old way of making art is wrong.

I have been talking to other artists and also people who do not study and make art regularly. Not everyone, but alot of people I know who don't study art, don't appreciate vague artwork. Now what I mean by that is art that isn't all about the details. I once brought my cousin into the PCAC and she very shyly said "ummm I don't really like anything in here, I like your older work." And what she mean by that was the work I did in high school to get photo realism. I completely understand what she means by that, but the more I learn about colors, composition and all things painty, the more I love the looser, more playful stuff. I like to see skill and emotion, dedication and expression. Things have been reproduced, now is the time to create.

downtown's daughter

(tiny furniture still)

Lena Dunham writes, directs and stars in films. She has a sense of humor that mainly pokes fun at herself. For her plots she uses scenarios from her own life.

I actually got really excited about potentially seeing this movie. I watched a trailer and was surprised, it seems like it could be really nice.

I'm impressed with how strange this girl is. How she is awkward but okay with it. I admire that.

Poetry Recycled

What is it about sitting in the front that people shy away from? Is it rude to sit in the front. Does the middle to back, have a better experience? Is the front for people who intimately know the performers? Personally, I like not being right there, it is too personal.

I must admit, If it were not for the last song I wouldn't have like the performance. There was not enough chaos, I suppose. The last piece was crazier than the others. Very good.

I always find I think of ridiculous things all the way through "serious" performances and find my self giggling the whole time. I don't mean to be rude, it is just that there is so much that could possibly be funny about the situation, like if someone in the audience was so overwhelmed by being emotional involved in the show that they two burst out in song. And the kind of over the top, I don't know what the words or the melody is but I want to be part of this, type of singing one does in the car while no one is around.

Are vocalists ever considered an accompaniment to piano? They are right? I just feel like piano is always seen as an accompanyment to other things. But maybe that is just what I focus on.

Singing is interesting, because the words don't need to have personal meaning to hold emotion. Words hold little meaning to me in a piece. Normally I don't start listening to the words of a song till the second or third time I hear it. But then again when I am talking to a person, I hear their emotions not what they are saying most of the time. It makes for an interesting conversation sometimes. Later on, after the conversation is over, I have no idea what they said, but I remember their tone.

I liked her bracelet, It was a beautiful glitzy rainbow to watch flicker...

This class makes me hyper and chatty.

constipation

After talking to my self for a while in the car on my drive home, I started to think about how I wished painting was emotional ex-lax for me. I don't know where all the emotion comes from or where it can go. Why can't I just put it in a bucket and sell it on the side of the road to people who feel empty. I would have a sign saying "buckets of fulfillment, come dampen your dry sponge with life's wonder". But I don't think it can ever go away. I'm stuck with it.
Maybe the problem is it is like ex-lax, where it purges me temporarily only to worsen the problem. But what I really should do is just eat enough fiber from plants and whole grains, and exercise (this is all figurative). But how?!?!

Still life

Mary Gordon parelles what she is witnessing in her mother to Bonnard's painting style. She sees her mother's decaying life as a tragedy, and she does not understand how Bonnard can take a distanced view of the world. Bonnard paints decaying fruit and flowers, because he says they have more character. But Mary sees the decay as something terrible not a new beginning.
I think everyone has their own interpretations on life and it's importance and meanings. Just yesterday I was drawing and painting dying roses. I found it rather ironic to read this article right after I was enjoying the roses so much. the colors intensified and the stems and leaves curled in a way that fresh flowers never dare to try. It all just depends on how you look at something. Maybe, if an elderly person was in the right mind frame, would love to be painted. Painting something like a nursing home is not making a mockery of what is happening but showing that everything is beautiful. I don't think it is wrong to find everything beautiful.

Frank Stella & Carl Andre

Frank Stella got overwhelmed by making decisions about his paintings and decided to take all emotional/visual/thoughtful work out of it. He wanted to make direct paintings. He wanted no emotion, so he uses straight lines of color.
Ad Reinhardt is saying that is what it is, and it does not need to have a reason for itself.
Art is like wearing your glasses on upside down. Okay, You have your glasses on upside down, some people are going to love it, and some people aren't going to understand it.

Tradition and Identity

David Smith starts off saying how he viewed art, was some formulaic procedure, with special equipment and lots of planning. He goes on to say, how he later realized that art can be made by anyone, with any tools, anywhere. He talks about how art is about seeing and feeling, about going with the imperfections of creation. He believes that art is about the visual aspect of unspoken abstractions. I agree with him that art is free-play. One can make it with any medium, just as long as they are expressing themselves. Truly anything can be considered art, it just depends on who is talking, or thinking, or interpreting.

A Painter's Wisdom

It took me a while to decide if this article was poking fun, or serious. Sadly, after all that thinking, I don't find it funny. The article was basically telling artists to not sell out. They shouldn't follow the trends to sell paintings or be a slave to money. Generally artists should make the art they want to make.

Criticizing Art Chapter 1-pgs1-10

The first few pages of Criticizing art talks about the Art critics point of view. It started off saying how the word criticizing usually is taken to mean negative opinions, where as art critics criticize art because they love it. Art critics also have to figure out how to address their audience, and how to stay focused on not being so vague as to not make sense.

Making an Artist

In Making an Artist Wade Saunders talks mainly about how mostly all artists have assistants now. The article goes on to say that the artists don't want to have their usage of help widely know. They want to have the lonely, dedicated artist idea alive. The artists who were once an assistant to another artist talk about how the artist's style rubbed off on them, not only their art style but their way of treating their assistants. The artists also talked about how they give their assistants little direction, and let them fill in the spaces with their own creativity.

Procrastination

In Later Jad how it is only in the past few years that we have been having a major problem mes Surowiecki talks about how procrastination is a part of humans understanding of time. The article talks about the possible roots of the problem, such as people not knowing what is best for the. The procrastination makes them feel worse than just performing the task in the first place. No where in the article does the author talk about the perks of procrastination.