Extra Credit: Questions About The Course

COURSE CONTENT
1. Which assignment did you ENJOY working on the best? Why?

My favorite assignments were visiting the art galleries because I would have never taken the time to do that on my own. After learning about some history of art, concepts, and certain artists, it definitely made the art galleries more interesting. I really appreciated taking the time to study the art but also the architecture and organization of the gallery itself.

2. Which assignment did you ENJOY working on the least? Why?

The assignment I liked the least was probably the video reviews, while I found them helpful to the course and some of them were very interesting, it got a little bit repetitive doing the blog posts on the video reviews for the last couple weeks. Most of the videos were an hour long so it definitely took longer to write up the main ideas and relate them to the text.

3. How did you like using ANGEL?

I liked using ANGEL a lot. I think the way the modules were set up was really organized and helpful. 

4. If you had the opportunity to change this course:

-What would you keep? I would keep the blog, I thought that was unique to this course as I have never been required to keep a blog before. It was a good organization tool to keep things in one place and it was helpful to have access to my classmates' blogs to see their perspectives, ideas, and project outcomes.

-What would you remove? I would remove some of the video reviews just because it became tedious at the end. They would have been nice maybe every other week.

-What would you add? I can't think of anything specific I would add. We definitely had a lot of assignments that kept me busy. 

5. Would you recommend this course to your peers?

Yes, I would recommend this course to my peers. However, I would warn them that there are so many assignments. I did a pretty good job keeping up with everything. I think I only missed 1 assignment and was maybe late on 2 things, but I think in total we had about 50 assignments including the discussions, blog posts, projects, quizzes, and extra credit opportunities. I am not used to that from other courses I have taken. I put a lot of time into this class between the readings, writing assignments, projects, and watching videos. I don't think I would have kept up as well if I had taken this course during the fall or spring semesters. 

6. Please list any other comments you would like to share.

This was a good course. A good size workload but I felt it was well spread out and graded fairly. I learned a lot more than I thought I was going to and I learned to like art a lot more than I did before.

Blog 16: Reflections of AED 200

Questions and Topics for Your Blog Posting:

1. What were you expectations for this course and where they met?

Reading back to my first post: "I expect to learn a lot. I have never taken an art course before so everything should be fairly new to me. I am open minded and ready to learn what art has to teach us! Just by skimming the syllabus I know I am unfamiliar with a lot of the objectives as far as analyzing and evaluating visual arts. I know I will be gaining a lot of new information through this course." My expectations were met in all aspects of my original response. I definitely learned a lot of new information and a lot about analyzing and evaluating art.

2. Now that you've been through this course, What is art? How would you define it now compared to your intial posting?

I would still define art as an expression of creativity through a process that brings out emotions for the artist and the viewer.

3. Who was your favorite artist in your original posting and who is your favorite visual artist now? If there is a difference, why do you think so? If you have the same favorite artist, why do you think so?

In my initial posting, I didn't name a favorite artist. I now feel like there are a collection of artists that I consider favorites. For some reason I am really fond of Francisco Goya and all of the work I have seen by him, as well as Jacques-Louis David. I really liked a lot of the older artists with the more classical looking oil paintings. 

4. Now that you've completed this course, how do you feel about taking an online course? Is your answer the same as it was in your first posting? How is it the same or different?

This answer would be the same as my first posting. I have always enjoyed online courses. This one was very organized and manageable for me.

Art Gallery Visit # 3 and Art Material Exploration: Self Portraits

Through Google Art Project, I explored The Art Institute of Chicago. Through their collection I found some unique self portraits.

    
     Self-Portrait with a Visor                            Self-Portrait                    Self Portrait Drawing at A Window
           1776                                                        1887                                            1648
       Jean Simeon Chardin                           Vincent van Gogh            Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn

1. I selected these inspiration pieces because they were from three different centuries and were all very different. I think the first portrait is very realistic looking, the second portrait screams van Gogh with his unique style even if you didn't know it was a self portrait you could guess he was the artist, and the third portrait is black and white and very old as it is from the 1600's.

2. I chose a pencil because that is what I am most comfortable with.

3. I felt like the entire self-portrait was a challenge for me because I am not comfortable with drawing. I was trying so hard to make it look somewhat like the picture. I didn't want it to look like I was just scribbling a quick picture but it still came out looking that way.

4. This piece represents me because it is very simple. My personality is very black and white and I very simplistic so I think the lack of extreme detail and color is really fitting especially with the tone created by the expression on my face.

5. I mostly just used line and form to try to create the shape of a person.

6. I wouldn't say I enjoyed this project. If anything it really stressed me out trying to get it to look more realistic and I am just not skilled enough in drawing to make it look how I want it to look.

7. I think my final art work is horrendous! I don't know how I could have made it better though. I really tried to draw what I saw in the picture but it just wasn't happening for me. I think the nose has to be one of the most difficult things to draw. It was so hard to even try and create realistic shape of a nose. My hands are really bad too. I had a lot of trouble trying to create good proportion. It also looks a little funny from the way the scanner picked up the pencil.

Blog 15: Video Reviews

1. For each video list/discuss the key concepts you learned.

2. Do the videos relate to the creation of your Art Criticism project? If yes, explain how. If no, explain why not.

3. What is your opinion of the films? Do they add depth to understanding of art criticism?

Greenberg on Art Criticism: An Interview by T.J. Clark
1. This interview from 1981 is by T.J. Clark asking Clement Greenberg, "The great critics aren't just people who put judgements taste into print, are they?" Greenberg responds with, "You know, I happen to think writing about visual arts is much tougher than writing about literature or music. Some of the best criticism I have ever read is music criticism." He goes on to explain, "When you write about music, you're a formalist. You have no choice unless you want to do one of these program guy things where you emote, you know, the only thing is traditional writing. Music, you're pinned down to the damn score. And visual art doesn't have a score." Greenberg explains that overtime he learned that "we don't ask anything of art, except to be good." Clark argues that the art in which Greenberg admired, often didn't fit what you took ought to be the kind of art that issued from a serious engagement with Matisse and Miro. Greenberg replies that it didn't fit with the prejudices he'd acquired. He says that it is great to have your prejudices knocked around.
2. This video does relate to the art criticism project because we get to meet an art critic and hear his thoughts and opinions. Greenberg explains that good art can come from anywhere and anything. He also talks about ignoring his prejudices and accepting all types of art. I thought this was important because like all aspects of art, you really have to keep an open mind. Especially when you are criticizing it, because like he says there is no score on the visual arts.
3. This film was worth watching. It added depth to my understanding of art criticism by hearing first hand knowledge from an art critic himself.

Jackson Pollock: Michael Fried and T.J. Clark in Conversation
1. Michael Fried and T.J. Clark talk about the work of artist, Jackson Pollock in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Michael Fried is an art critic, while T.J. Clark is an art historian. They both agree that Jackson Pollock is a major modern master. For this conversation the men are standing in front of Pollock's work Lavender Mist of 1950. Their past disagreement about Pollock was significant became clear at the time when a new social history of art, with which Clark was identified, began to challenge the prevailing modernist account in which Fried had been a leading figure. Clark's view was that the most important feature of avant-garde art was its oppositional character, the way it refused the assumptions of the Bourgeois culture since the 19th century. But for Michael Fried, this was to get modernism upside down. For him, modern art mattered because of it's positive qualities, especially the way it kept on renewing itself. So whereas Clark's emphasis was on the historical role of modern art, Fried stressed the independence of its aesthetic.
2. This video relates to the creation of the Art Criticism project because it is interesting to see the two sides of this conversation. While both men make great, strongly presented points, they are seeing the work from different perspectives. There is the historical view and the aesthetic view.
3. This was an interesting film. I was happy there was a narrator between scenes of Clark and Fried talking because he definitely helped to summarize the overall ideas of the conversation. I was sometimes confused just listening to the men talk and it was a little bit over my head, so I was thankful for the breaks with the narrator. 

Project 4 Response Blog

For this project, I really spent a lot of time considering what theme I wanted to work with. I really wanted to search for something different than the works we already got to explore in the text but I also wanted to see works from some of the artists we had learned about. I decided to go with ocean theme, titling my exhibit: Nautical Artistry. This theme allowed me to search through familiar artists to see if they had done any ocean themed projects, but also explore new artists.

Artstor became very helpful once I figured out the log in process. It allowed the opportunity to search through so many paintings in one spot. I also liked the feature in which you could search different time eras. For the last part of my slideshow I was looking for more modern pieces so I was able to narrow my search to the last 20 years.

I organized my exhibit into three sections that would all fit into the nautical theme but still provide different types of art: Classical, Abstract/Surrealism, and Modern.

The Classical Pieces included:
1. The Shipwreck by Francisco Goya
2. Watson and The Shark by John Singleton Copley
3. Birth of Venus by William-Adolphe Bourguereau
4. Raft of Medusa by Theodore Gericault
5. Undertow by Winslow Homer
6. Seascape by Vincent van Gogh
All of these pieces are similar styles from the 1700 and 1800's. Van Gogh fits into the time frame but is definitely a transition from these classical pieces into abstract works. His technique is very different from the first 5 paintings.

The Abstract/Surrealism Pieces included:
7. Ocean Greyness by Jackson Pollock
8. Ocean Motion by Roy Lichtenstein
9. Collective Invention by Rene Margritte
10. Ocean Park #49 by Richard Diebenken
11. Fire and Water #3 by Long Nguyen
These pieces were all very interesting to me as some of them were not typical ocean scenes. Most of them were just lines and colors that were representational of the water. Collective Invention was interesting because we saw a realistic ocean scene in the background but the focus was on a fish head merged with a woman's legs.

The Modern Pieces included:
12. Island of the Infantile Avarice by Robert Williams
13. The Ocean of Whiskey by David Sandlin
14. Lost Correspondent by Jason deCaires Taylor
15. Dream Object (I got lost...) by Jim Shaw.
All of these modern pieces were done between 1996 and 2006. These were very different from the first two sections. After watching the Lowbrow video I was led to Robert Williams and was able to find a piece of his that fit into my theme so I was happy to include a new art concept that I recently learned. In this category I was also able to include a sculpture into my exhibit with the Lost Correspondent.

The only problem I really had was as much as I enjoyed Artstor as a resource, it seemed that if I found a piece in their collection, sometimes I couldn't find it anywhere else online and it made it hard for me to find complete details on some of the pieces.

Overall I enjoyed putting this slideshow together. I was really happy with my theme and think I found unique pieces to put together. My favorite items would be Watson and the Shark and the Lost Correspondent.

Blog 13 & 14: Video Reviews

The Lowdown on Lowbrow: West Coast Pop Art

1. Lowbrow is art that nobody else knows how to categorize. It somewhat has a meaning of its own. Lowbrow is going against the stuck up art culture world and took their own spin on art. It is also a social scene that involves a lifestyle and related popular culture. Big Daddy Roth was a huge part of Lowbrow art. He was a sign painter well known for his psychedelic posters. Lowbrow art is known for its bright, eye catching colors, with a psychedelic- cartoon like style. Zap comics, hot rod girls, and cartoons were all seen in Lowbrow art. Lowbrow artists also had a connection to the drug culture around the time of the vietnam war. Robert Crumb and fellow artists started underground comics. Lowbrow is always a narrative, it is dynamic, moving, and something is always about to happen. It was interesting to learn of the tiki culture coming back with the men that were in the service who loved the tahitian culture. Lowbrow artists were also fascinated by these lands and used them as inspiration for their work. 

2. This video was helpful for the Art Exhibition project because now I have a different type of art to search through for ocean themed art that will bring a totally different feel of art to my theme. 

3. I really enjoyed this video because although I have seen some similar types of art I had never heard of or didn't know it was called Lowbrow art. 

Displaying Modern Art: The Tate Approach

1. The Tate Modern Museum has drawn in crowds of thousands of visitors. The museum pioneered a new form of display by Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museums first director. The forms of display he developed for this art had come to be seen as the characteristic type of modern exhibition. Works of art were displayed on white walls and picked out with flexible lighting. The works were then categorized in a series of rooms that were each dedicated to particular art movements or individual artists. He believed that art was ultimately self contained and bore little relation to social, political, or intellectual history. Barr's model of a modern art museum was unable to incorporate the new expanded field of art. Tate Modern had to find a new way to display modern art. The new idea was to display the work in four sections. The thematic approach allows the curators to bring together works of art from widely different points in the last century. The four themes were: Landscape, History, Still Life, and the Nude.

2. This video related to the creation of my art exhibition project because it explains the way a museum would design and organize exhibits. While Tate Modern started with pretty specific categories but then redesigned to four broad categories. While I chose ocean life for my project, it would have fit into the entire landscape category in this video. 

3. This was a helpful video and it added a deeper understanding to the art concepts I practiced for my project because the video shows many examples of the different examples and explains why they are categorized the way they are.

Bones of Contention: Native American Archeology

1. The video begins with the story of how white people dug up the bones of an Indian girl and her baby to be studied. A native american woman was very bothered by this and went to her governor to fight this discrimination. 

Blog 12: Video Reviews

Abstract Expressionism and Pop: Art of the '50s and '60s

1. I chose this video because these decades both seem like an exciting time for art since there was lot of interesting history being made during this time. I was also interested in learning more about pop art.

2. The space which figurative paintings fill is quite different than the space that abstract paintings fill. When we travel into the ideas of an abstract painting we have to look deeply into it. We travel towards it in imagination but it meets us half way. Franz Kline was an abstraction artist living in New York. When Kline began to reject figurative paintings, he seemed to reject all elements that might recall it by association. In his early work in the 1950's Kline restricted himself to purely black and white. He was interested in the neutrality of black and white and their interrelation. He is not just painting black on a white canvas but he paints the white just as he paints the black. The way we perceive black and white is the same idea of how we interpret depth and surface. Mountains and Sea was painted by Helen Frankenthaler in 1952, it went on to influence a whole generation of American artists. Mountains and Sea consists of pale colors. The shapes are indeterminate smudges and blotches. The illusions to real objects are too vague to gain attention. There is an overall fascination and mystery with these colors and illusions that come out of the surface. Willem de Kooning paints, Morning: The Spring, a work that is unrecognizable but brings a lightness to its abstract shapes. Wind, sunlight, and reflection come through the colors and off of the painting as everything flows together weightlessly. Much of the painting is monochrome except in the bottom corner where the bright yellow figure jumps away from the picture. In 1954, an artist named Jasper Johns took the stars and stripes and created a piece called Flag. Before Johns created Flag he went through a streak where he destroyed almost all of his previous work. Flag was a new beginning and the turning of a page for this artist. Looking hard at this piece you begin to see it differently and to question its significance. Johns was known to choose subject items that were found in the every day world that had become invisible and wanted to bring them back to life through his art. He took these subjects and made them interesting, beautiful, and interestingly seductive to the viewer. The colors of flag are bold and simple, they are merely symbolic. Andy Warhol paints a portrait of his fellow American artist Robert Rauschenberg, titled - The Texan: Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg. This painting includes the portrait 28 times in one work. The image shown of Robert is tough and private, but not specific. Andy Warhol is undoubtedly know as pop art's most famous son, but Robert Rauschenberg is actually said to be the father of the movement. It seems this piece is Andy Warhol paying homage to the father of pop art. Pop art embraces the rhythyms, images, and textures of modern city life. This portrait of Rauschenberg displays each picture in rows of lines. Warhol had developed a silk screening techniques to produce multiple images. Roy Lichtenstein: Girl With Hair Ribbon is the last pop art piece we see in this video. This work shows a brightly painted girl looking over her shoulder somewhat surprised or maybe upset. She is seductive with her half open lips. Lichtenstein uses a mechanical painting style. He uses areas of blank canvas with dotted colors to create patterns that make up the girl. This image is both simple and sophisticated. The abstract pattern takes over the entire painting. The details are very vital to this piece and take over the whole for the viewer. The way he chooses to convey his ideas is amusing and powerful.
3. This video related closely to chapter 22. The pop art section in the chapter talks a lot about Andy Warhol, icluding a biography page on him and we also see Lichtenstein in the text as well. The artists of pop art really brought excitement to the art world with their new creative techniques and important messages to convey.
4. This film was really helpful to expand on the art of the 1950s and 1960s. It was nice to "meet" some of the artists that worked around the time of Warhol and Lichtenstein and how they compared. It was also interesting to learn about the Rauschenberg piece. I learned that he was said to be the father of pop art and I thought it was interesting that Warhol created The Texan piece as sort of a tribute to him.

Hockney on Photography
1. I chose this video because most of the other videos we've watched have been more about painting so I thought it would be interesting to hear more about photography. After reading the summary on the video page it sounds like this man made a transition from painting to photography so it should be interesting to hear his story and see his work.
2. This video is about the career of David Hockney. He was a great painter from Britain who developed a strong skill for photography. Listening to Hockney speak about cameras you can immediately feel his love for his craft. He clearly got into photography because of his fascination of the chemical process and experimentations a camera could bring. He began with a polaroid camera in Los Angeles. His work is incredible. He describes his piece that features Bill Brandt. It is a series of 49 polaroids laid out in a large 7 x 7 square. Each polaroid is evenly spaced to show Bill Brandt sitting with a woman. He uses the polaroids to create these grids that take the medium to a whole new place. Vogue magazine did a 40 page spread with David Hockney in 1985. This was really cool to see because not only did we see some of the pieces hanging in a gallery but the video was also able to show a copy of the magazine. Hockney explains one piece from this project with a chair. The chair is created with a series of images of different parts of one chair that are collaged in a way to use all the individual photographs to show one chair. Hockney explains the perception of this chair and how the linear perspective might take you one way but goes on to explain that his idea was actually with movement. He saw one side of the chair one way as he approached the front of the chair and then kept walking to see the other side of the chair. The image isn't suppose to be like you're just standing in front of a chair but movement is created. Hockney from then on was fascinated with perspective. One of the coolest things Hockney did was take photographs of his own paintings. The video shows him taking a picture of a painting of a vase of flowers he did but he left the real vase he was using to paint from beside his painted piece. He then used the camera to see his painting a different way and make his painting even more realistic.
3. This video connects to chapter 22 in the text. The video and the second half of chapter 22 explain how art has evolved since the eighties and how the digital realm has changed the world of art. David Hockney was like any other painting artist until he got his hands on a camera and his work went in an entirely different direction. With Hockney's work it is interesting to learn where the world of painting and photography intertwine. Hockney went back and forth between painting and photography on different projects to allow him to develop his projects in a stronger way. He would paint from pictures he had taken or photograph his paintings to see them in a different way. Hockney was adamant about always looking in a different direction.
4. I really enjoyed this video. It was probably one of my favorites from this semester. It is incredible to hear David Hockney hear about his experiences and ideas and thought process as he was creating his photographs. His passion about photography just pours out of him in a really genuine way. This video definitely taught me a lot more about photography, cameras, and printing. It also gave me more insight on perspective.