Sunday, November 29, 2009
overall experience
art write ups
In 1689, Kangxi, the emperor of China, embarked on a tour to inspect his southern provinces, undertaking a two-thousand-mile journey from Beijing to the cities and towns of the Yangzi Delta and back. Included in the emperor’s retinue were his mother, the dowager empress, as well as imperial wives, children, concubines, bureaucrats, and thousands of soldiers.
As part of the tour, Kangxi climbed to the top of Mount Tai, the “cosmic peak of the East” and a site sacred to all three Chinese religious and philosophical traditions—Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. For centuries, Chinese emperors had made pilgrimages to Mount Tai to worship earth (at the base) and heaven (at the summit) and affirm the legitimacy of their rule. An emperor only visited when he could provide a glowing account to the cosmos about the state on the empire. In Kangxi’s case, he could report on a new era of stability in the nascent Qing dynasty and increasing prosperity throughout the empire.
Kangxi’s visit to Mount Tai represented more than just the fulfillment of an age-old religious rite. Potent political symbolism was at work at well. As a Manchu, Kangxi was considered an outsider by the Han Chinese over whom he ruled. When the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) began to crumble in the early seventeenth century, the Manchus, who ruled the region to the northeast, began seizing territory. By 1662, the Manchus controlled Beijing, had disposed of claimants to the Ming throne and launched the Qing dynasty that would rule China until 1911. By visiting Mount Tai, the emperor sent a message to his subjects that he intended to rule not as a Manchu conqueror, but as a traditional Chinese monarch.
Given the importance of Kangxi’s visit to Mount Tai and of the inspection tour itself, it is not surprising that steps were taken to record it for posterity. Instead of a soaring obelisk or a towering arch, which would be the European choice, the tour was commemorated in a series of twelve handscrolls. The format was perfect for documenting a long journey, as it would allow the viewer to follow the progress of the emperor’s retinue. Each scroll measured twenty-seven inches from bottom to top and forty to eighty-five feet wide. Laid end to end, the scrolls spanned the length of three football fields.
Other museums
high museum
my experience in the high museum was a terrific one.. i was able to learn alot of new things as well as see alot of excellent works of art. It was such a wonderful experience and i learned so much, but i would love to go back again see more of the museum that i was not able to see. I really wish that i had more time so i could have seen the da vinci area which i heard was very excellent.
Notre dame football 5 pics
Human struggle
this picture is my favorite painting of all time becasue it is simply amazing to look at. he is walking for so long and cant seem to get anywhere, and the heat looks to be shining down on him so hard even as the sun goes down. It is very scary becasue some people actually probbaly feel like this in their lifes.
human nature as art form
is a culture
This is another blurb from an article:he art of climate change is the focus of several high profile exhibitions this fall and winter. As previously reported, RETHINK: Contemporary Art and Climate Change opens in Copenhagen at the end of this month and runs through the UN Climate Change Conference there in December. Not to be outdone, London’s Royal Academy of Arts presents Earth: Art of a Changing World opening December 3 and running through the end of January.
artists in society
A country that loves art, not artists
In a survey of attitudes toward artists in the US a vast majority of Americans, 96%, said they were greatly inspired by various kinds of art and highly value art in their lives and communities. But the data suggests a strange paradox.
While Americans value art, the end product, they do not value what artists do. Only 27% of respondents believe that artists contribute "a lot" to the good of society.
Further interview data from the study reflects a strong sentiment in the cultural community that society does not value art making as legitimate work worthy of compensation. Many perceive the making of art as a frivolous or recreational pursuit.
USA hopes to help close the gap between the love of art and the ambivalence toward artists in society.
Other insights further illuminate the depth of the paradox:
• A majority of parents think that teaching the arts is as important as reading, math, science, history, and geography.
• 95% believe that the arts are important in preparing children for the future.
• In the face of a changing global economy, economists increasingly emphasize that the United States will have to rely on innovation, ingenuity, creativity, and analysis for its competitive edge—the very skills that can be enhanced by engagement with the arts.
As author Daniel Pink posits in his book A Whole New Mind—Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future, we have moved beyond the Information Age and into the Conceptual Age. "In short, we've progressed from a society of farmers to a society of knowledge workers. And now to a society of creators and empathizers, of pattern recognizers and meaning makers. . . . We've moved from an economy based on people's backs to an economy built on people's left brains to what is emerging today: an economy and society built more and more on people's right brains. . . . aptitudes so often disdained and dismissed—artistry, empathy, taking the long view, pursuing the transcendent—will increasingly determine who soars and who stumbles. It's a dizzying—but ultimately inspiring—change."
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Art and film pretty much go hand in hand to me. Every film is a true piece of art. And every piece of art can be made into a film. Some movies are more than others but every single movie takes time and effort, as well does art. it is really amazing when you think about the truth to this and how closely related they are
I know what art is
Art is anything that you create on your own. It can be an intricate painting or it can be just a sculpture. It can range from a pencil placed at a certain angle art is whatever you want it to be. That is one thing i have learned from this class is that it is important to use your right brain and come up with new ideas at all times.
art education in schools
Art education in schools is lacking so much that we need to do something about it. Just having our mandatory 1101 one classes is not good enough, and wont cut it. We need to utilize our creative side it is crucial that we do not forget about our creativity or else our world can completely become one big triangle.
you tube art
poetry slam
Im having a catharsis
My right brain, my left brain
Interview with a curator
Interview with Robert Jacobsen
Curator of Asian Art
1. What is this room and how does it fit in with the larger building it would have been a part of?
In a cultured household in traditional China—a Confucian household—the library would have been the most important room in the house. After the great hall, it would have been the most important room, for certain. And it was here that the trained scholars, often working for the government as part of the bureaucracy, would keep their art. They would keep their books here. They would do their writing here. It could be poetry. It could be court memorials, but this becomes the intellectual crossroads of the home, and—to a degree—of Chinese culture.
2. What about the furnishings?
(1) Scholar's studies in the Ming and Ch'ing dynasties were furnished according to simple tastes. During the late Ming and early Ch'ing dynasties, rooms like this were put together by scholars—members of the Literati—and typically furnished with rather simple tastes: beautiful proportioned hardwoods, and cabinets that were simpler rather than ornate in decoration and overall appearance.(1)
3. What does the term "Literati" mean?
It's a whole class of Chinese men. They all were trained in Confucian classics—some served the state as scholar officials—and all played the reclusive role of retired gentlemen.
4. There are many natural elements in and around this room.
They would collect objects of nature, like great garden rocks.(2) The big rocks represented actual mountain landscapes of China. They would typically want to have plantings of bamboo and perhaps a few other plants just outside their window. Nature was very important to them. It was a focal point. It was a meditative process to view and think of nature.
And, of course, the Literati are the great landscape painters of China, so they were concerned with nature in much of their works. They were also often the nature poets of China, so they were interested in creating verse around landscape, the dynamic forces of the universe that nature and landscape represented to them.
5. Were they artists in the same way we think of artists today?
It's important to keep in mind that these scholar artists were not professionals. They prided themselves on being amateurs, on the fact that they didn't have to sell their works or pander to a mass audience.
(2) Rubbings taken from famous stone tablets were often turned into books. Most of their paintings are quite small—no larger than books, in many instances. They were very, very interested in collecting and studying their own history. Famous inscriptions were often taken from carved stone tablets, and these rubbings turned, then, into books that would be kept in the library.(2) These were sources not only of history and philosophy, but also of writing styles of past masters.
So we see a combination of this organic taste, this interest in nature, this amateurism and the interest in books and ancient China, all come into play in the type of painting they produced, which is something that was based on the brushwork of prior masters.
6. Lacking a mass audience, what became of their works?
Their objects were passed back and forth amongst one another. These artists painted for other artists in their circle, or friends of theirs. On occasion, pieces could be commissioned for someone's birthday, or an anniversary event or some sort of government award. The art was used that way, but it wasn't done wholesale for a mass market, for popular consumption. That meant that the paintings were often very small. They would be viewed by only one or two people at a time. They were hardly ever used as decoration. In fact, they were kept more like books in a library, which is why the library becomes the repository of their scrolls, their albums and their fan paintings.
7. So these scholars were both artists and collectors?
They did not collect huge numbers of things, by and large. When we say art collecting, we're talking about a few old things; many old books, to be sure—that counted—but ancient bronzes and ancient jades would be collected and used occasionally as display items. A cabinet could have held many treasures, but only a few would be pulled out and put on view during the various seasons of the year.
8. Back in the garden, it appears that everything is very carefully placed.
(3) Nature—in particular rocks from Lake T'ai—were a focal point for the study. They loved ancient rocks. Perforated stones from Lake T'ai are what are decorating the gardens. The big centerpiece stones were dredged up from the shoreline and arranged in gardens to represent the actual mountain ranges of China proper. Other kinds of stones from farther West were collected and prized for their ability to evoke an ink landscape.
9. You mentioned writing, painting, and poetry. Were these scholars also interested in music?
Confucius said that a true gentleman—a refined gentleman—was going to be a poet, a painter, a good archer—remember, he lived during the Bronze Age—but he also had to know and understand music.
(4) The ch'in—a kind of zither—was the scholar's preferred musical instrument. The scholars took this seriously, and an ancient zither called the ch'in—an instrument that dates back to China's Bronze Age, in fact—was the instrument of choice. So, this too would be found in a library, generally hanging on a wall or placed on the table at which they were played, as a reference to the refined intellectuality, culture, and sense of history that any true Literati artist would have.
10. Could you say more about the house itself?
(5) This study was the most elaborately decorated room in its original house. The late 18th century house that this room was taken from still stands in China. It was the fanciest room in the house and amongst the smallest of the rooms in the house, so we know that they concentrated their efforts on this room. The decorative work in the support frame, the ceiling beams,(5) and the latticework in the windows are far fancier than in other rooms in the house.
11. How does this compare with the museum's other Chinese room, the reception hall?
Unlike the Ming Dynasty Wu family reception hall, this Ch'ing study is not a freestanding structure that was linked up, as the earlier Ming house linked its structures up. This is actually a room taken from the corner of a very large, two-story walled structure. In fact, the bedroom is still above the library, just as we found it here. There was a small room upstairs that was reached through the garden doorway.
The study had a rock garden on either side of it. This one we were able to recreate with its pebble floor. Although the stones had been taken away long ago, we were able to find old garden stones and reinsert them where they would have been correctly placed.
12. Would the room have been as open to the elements as it appears here?
They were open to the elements, because a person needed the sun and the rain to keep the bamboo and other plants growing. So our scholar had his table almost in the center of his room. He had his book cabinets to either side. He had paraphernalia spread out. And he had views of nature before him and behind him—facing north and facing south.
The room itself is done in an individual manner. The artist—the patriarch perhaps, the scholar of the household—really was allowed to arrange this room in an independent manner. He was in charge of collecting what he wanted and placing these things where he wanted to look at them.
13. So the arrangement is not formally dictated.
The Wu house, being a reception hall, is far more formal. You had very little choice of where things went. It was more dictated to you by Confucian custom and traditional family worship. If you were the matriarch or patriarch of the household and had that exalted couch to sit on as head of the family, you would have been very, very formal. And you would have carried on conversations in a socially correct manner.
This room is almost the direct opposite. Here you got to be yourself—kick off your shoes, maybe put your feet up a bit, lean back, think, read, and enjoy nature. Because it was all around you in some way or another, via the painting, the stone, a garden rock or a poem about nature, perhaps. It was all in this room.
Public art
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Interview with robert chunn
::: When did you first realize you are an artist Robert?
I was in my early twenties when I discovered that I was born to be a painter. The idea of doing anything else is abhorrent to me.
+2 ::: Could you tell us some more about your work?
I mostly paint clutter. I like how objects cluster together on tabletops, in kitchen drawers, on my printer, etc. I try to take a documentary approach to the subject by painting things as I find them. Or, sometimes, I'll just pile up a bunch of old tins and cigar boxes in a haphazard way until something interesting happens.
As for the objects themselves, I'm more interested in their formal qualities (e.g. color, form, tone) than their everyday, functional use.
+3 ::: What is it that inspires you to paint a particular subject?
The subject has to capture my interest somehow: the way the colors and shapes play off each other, or the patterns of light and shadow. I try to find poetry in banality.
+4 ::: What famous artists have influenced you, and how?
I like the simplicity of form and color in the works of the Italian Primitives. I like Morandi for the same reason. You can see the influences of Giotto, Piero della Francesca, and other early Italians in Morandi's still lifes. There's a tender sensitivity and calm in their works that makes them a joy to look at. Two other favorites are Rodrigo Moynihan and Avigdor Arikha. They have a directness and matter-of-factness in their approach to painting that I find compelling.
+5 ::: What do you do for fun (besides painting)?
I enjoy drawing people in cafes, drinking lattes, watching old movies (anything with Humphrey Bogart), and playing chess.
+6 ::: What inspires you to create art and how do you keep motivated when things get tough in the studio?
I find it more painful not to paint than it is to paint. Painting keeps me sane in a cruel, cruel world.
+7 ::: How have you handled the business side of being an artist?
I'm still struggling with that one. For many years I painted in relative isolation and gave little thought to the business of being an artist. I just wanted to paint and draw, dammit! I lived on the cheap in Mexico and South America until I finally got tired of living out of a suitcase. When I moved to Seattle, almost two years ago, I decided it would be a good time to get my work out there where people could see it, and so, a new painting blog was born.
+8 ::: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
I never look that far ahead. I try to focus on what I'm doing today and let tomorrow take care of itself.
+9 ::: What is it about still lifes that keeps you painting them, and what are you working on at the moment?
Still lifes are always ready to pose. They don't talk or get tired or need to eat. They possess all the qualities of form and color that are needed to keep a painter occupied for the rest of his life.
Right now, I'm working on some single-object paintings that sometimes fall outside my usual alla prima method of working. Instead of finishing a piece in one sitting, I'll blend, push, and scrape the paint around to create a particular mood in monochrome and then add more layers of color and texture later. I've also started a series of alla prima paintings documenting the move out of my current home and into a studio apartment. Moving always represents a certain amount of upheaval and change, and I think I just wanted to record the event somehow.
+10 ::: What advice would you give to an artist just starting out?
First, get in the habit of carrying a sketchbook with you wherever you go, and draw from life as much as possible. Drawing trains the eye to see what is really there and not just what you think is there. Second, don't get in a big rush to develop a style. Play around with different mediums -- experiment. Rodin started out as a painter, and then one day he picked up some clay.