Final Analysis: Sunshine in a cloudy day

Denotative:
At first glance you can see a faceless woman with long dress that has different tones of violet. She is holding a bright yellow umbrella and rain is pouring down over the whole scene. The top part of the piece are patterns of lines running down into the central piece. The bottom portion of the woman's dress is more simple and incorporates blue shapes into the dress rather than actual flowers.
The piece is very colorful and in the painted portion one can see the heavy brushstrokes.

Connotative:
This piece can be translated into different meanings and can inspire diverse memories about what might be happening to the woman who is standing in the rain. Personally it reminds me of prom night or a gala and having to stand in the rain while waiting for a cab. It makes me feel upset and annoyed at the fact that she is so beautifully dressed and the rain is ruining all of the effort put into her elegance and beauty. However, the colorfulness brings about a contrasting feeling of joy, excitement, and happiness. These bright and cheery colors are not only used in the dress, but also present in what seems to be red cobblestones and yellow,white, blue, red, and orange patterns falling down like rain. This completely changes the negative, sad, and upsetting connotation of the piece into a more vibrant and jolly one, which can reflect the woman's high spirits and excitement to get to the event.


Ideological:
This image of an elegantly dressed woman standing in the rain can evoke negative feelings, but with the bright and funky patterns I intended to contrast that feeling with happiness and optimism. I used different linear patterns at the top of the piece to reflect rain pouring down, but I purposely did not make it look like rain because I wanted to challenge the idea of rain as an upsetting factor in our memories. Rain should be cheerful and joyous, just like the sunshine does. Through this art piece I not only intended to transform our perception of a bad day, but also inspire people to look for delight and small bits of joy in the worst of days.

This semester has helped me develop my appreciation for art by exposing myself to different artists and using my own creativity to produce art. I learned how to gain appreciation through constructive criticism that is informative and descriptive. I think overall, the course's aims are reached, but something that I do think should be incorporated is the means through which artists become inspired to do their work. I think it is an essential aspect of art and one that could influence students to look for ways in which they too can find inspiration in different ways and use it to their advantage.

post modern project:

"we live in a world where there is more and more informations, and less and less meaning."

denotative:

 At the top you can see a girl drowning hopelessly and beneath her is an over load of colors and images. The colors used are red/purple, yellow/orange, and blue/green. These colors are both present in the pictures and as part of the background. There are some pictures in black and white. There is also different patterns of lines going across the piece.

connotative:

It reminds me of a huge camera flash coming up from the top left corner- crossing through while loosing some of its brightness, which related to how an information can slowly loose its own meaning as it is passed on.  The images of the NYC remind me of how overwhelmed I get when I'm there, because there is so much going on all at once, that it is almost hard to take everything in.
The cameras remind me of our generation and how we are constantly trying to take a shot of every moment while losing the ability to live in that moment.  Picture, pictures, and more pictures are just adding to the exacerbated society that lives through a lens.

ideological:

I used the top girl to simulate how we are drowning in an overwhelming load of information. I used bright colors to reinforce the intensity of the information. The black and white images represent the after effect of what comes with soaking in all the information that the world is constantly throwing at us. We become lonely, paralyzed, and even lose sense of purpose. The bright colorful images represent the meaningless behind the information that we are taking in. They are bright and filled with patterns and props, but they show no true significance.

I was at the MICA exhibition for their post back grad program about a week ago and thought to share something that reminded me of our class. One of the students created an app that used colors to represent emotions and feelings. With that in mind she used the color schemes to create t-shirts that represented how the individual was feeling that day. Attached is a picture of her exhibition. This reminded me of how we used the color wheel and the different patterns to represent different emotions through our different projects. 

Another person made a book on clip art which I thought was so cool! There was another exhibition of a girl who made a museum in the perspective of people who will live in the future. So the museum had objects from today, like an old flip phone, a camera, etc. She placed the objects in odd ways as to explain how the future will have no idea what are the objects functions. 

Postmodernism

-the double level process of interpreting and understanding post modernist painters like Vangoh 

          -placing the background or the historical context for which it is set 

          -the shoes what it represents in that time and place

-confused with utopian realm of the senses ??

-interesting concept that the idea of art comes form the gap between world and Earth or body and nature

-Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes "does not speak at all"! -bold statement

-central issue of postmodernism can be seen in Warhol’s paintings and its centralization on commodification

Kubler's, "The shape of time", gives fascinating insight on how "luck," as he says, might define who becomes a well know artist and those who might have had the same talent but didn't make it.
He says, "Times and opportunities differ more than the degree of talent." This reinforces the idea of being lucky and growing up at the right time in the right place. For example, it might be easier for someone who was born in a family of well known artists to become a famous artist himself, rather than someone who was born in the streets with the same or even more impressive talent to make it to fame. This is what happens to undiscovered talents. Furthermore, he identifies temperament and timing of entrance as the factors that will define the individual's chance of success and achievement. Another concept that he talks about and I found very interesting was the metaphor about the life cycle and how that relates to art and history. It explains how the life cycle is sustained by one unchanged principle of organization just like style is in art. It is not as we sometimes assume, that one historical style is unprecedented, but actually a recurring theme that was transformed into that specific style depending on the different environments.

Since the moment we are born we are exposed to images all around us. The increased exposure to visual context has helped humans develop the capacity of understanding what these visuals mean and the message they carry. In this video, we learn about data visualization and the components that constitute it. Something that really grabbed my attention was how significantly important visuals have become in our society. They help give meaning to things that have always been ambiguous or too complicated to put into words. It is through this means that humans can rapidly see, grasp, translate, and understand terms and ideas that were once unknown or difficult to understand, like numbers that are too big for us to even imagine. This can be seen in our day to day when we use google maps to move and travel to places we have never been. Another example is how images are used to portray data on the amount of people that fly on a daily basis or the number of users in the internet around the world. These data images bring knowledge and facilitate our understanding of the unseen, unknown, or complex.

Different tones of white:Whitescapes

 First I began by superimposing a white sheet of paper to a white binder. I started to note differences in the hues of white. The white binder started to look more creamy and the sheet of paper was more blueish.

 Then I compared the white sheet of paper to the white wall and there was an even more dramatic difference between the two. The wall became more yellow and brown while the paper became more red/pink.

I turned off one of the lights and noted that the wall became more brown and less of a bright yellow and the white paper became more blue. 

original Ad logo- Dairy Queen

Photoshop

In Ways of Seeing by Jon Berger, he speaks about how we view the world around us and how we try and put it into words. It is fascinating how as Berger says, "seeing comes before words". We are born with eyes that glance at the world and capture it, and as we grow we try and describe it with words that we are beginning to learn. It all comes in through our sight before being spoken. Every image is taken by someone that wants to capture that moment. The same with painters, they decide on what particular moment should be recreated according to the way they feel about that instance. That's why when we see an image or a painting we are looking at the visual through the photographer's lens or artist's eyes. Although it is their personal perception of a moment in time, the viewers also bring out their own personal way of seeing that image, therefore it becomes not just the artist's but the viewers perception of that image. Jon Berger says,"The way we see things is affected by what we know and what we believe." But, what we see also defines much of what we know and believe. Therefore, its an equilibrium between the two that constitutes what we believe, what we know, and how we will judge what we see.  It also made me realize that most of everything we see comes with a source of bias. This bias comes from 2 things, the way we interpret it according to what we know, believe, and have seen before, as well as our power to decide over what we see and not see. For example, Berger talks about how camera changed the way we looked at paintings. Taking pictures of a painting we liked and multiplying the image in order for other people to look at it, is never the same as coming into a museum or the setting where the painting was purposely set and admiring an art piece. The environment that surrounds the painting is part of the meaning of that painting and once that painting is photographed and moved into peoples homes or offices, the meaning of the painting changes according to the environment in which it was brought into, but has no purpose of being there. It is so difficult to see without having any personal conjectures or biased opinion on the painting, because we are living through our own eyes and thus own believes, which will always have a part of what we see and appreciate.

After going to the Baltimore Museum of Art,  I became fascinated with one particular artist named Henri Matisse. Every time I go to a museum I try to pick one artist that I was most amazed by and then I write it down so that I can look out for his works when I go to other museums. When I first saw Henri Matisse's work it reminded me a little bit about one of Pablo Picasso's many styles during his lifetime. I have always been a great admirer of Picasso's work and thus why I think I was immediately breath taken by Matisse's work. My ultimate favorite out of all of his exhibited work, was the Purple Robe and Anemones. I love how he used the bright and colorful patterns that look like different quilts to represent an image. It is a depiction of a woman sitting down pondering, a very habitual thing, yet he knows how to transform into an outstanding work. It seems as if the painting is in movement because of all the different patterns that bring the painting to life. I am amazed at the way he the colors all work with each other and although all are very bright and have different patterns, you are never lost in the painting. Astonishing work done by Matisse, who takes realistic and habitual moments in daily life and turns into fun, lively, bright, and outstanding pieces of art.

Purple Robe and Anemones, 1937, by Henri Matisse

The Yellow Dress,1929-1931, by Henri Matisse

 Large Reclining Nude 1935, by Henri Matisse