Baltimore Museum of Art

Last week we were lucky enough to take a trip to the Baltimore Museum of Art. While there we got t see a wide variety of 2D and 3D art pieces from many perspectives and eras of art. Usually. when I go to art museums I am drawn to more impressionist work like Monet, however this time I was more drawn to modern and more "crude" art pieces.  

 Chur by Sascha Braunig

This piece was in a room of a lot of other works that all seemed strange and like they did not really make a ton of sense, but art can be different to everyone. This kind of brings me back to this weeks lesson about lines. This is a bunch of lines that pattern out and make a brain in the middle. This is definitely more of a modern piece that I would not usually be drawn to, but I really liked this.

 View Overlooking Ceret by Chaim Soutine

This was one of the first paintings I saw when I was walking around that really caught my eye. I really like the thick lines and bright colors. I like that you don't really know what you are looking at and it takes a minute to actually understand. This is a landscape. At the top you have the dark sky, the middle is a group of zig zagged mountains, and the bottom is a river the goes through the mountain. At first glance you could probably argue that anyone could just throw some paint on a canvas and get this result, but I really like the little details and intricacies that make this so powerful. 

Still Life with Lemons by Georges Braque

I really liked this painting because of the lemons. They look so 3D even with the thick black line around the yellow. I like how simple the idea is and how lifelike the execution. I am also a big fan of the shading. Realism is not usually something I like because if is just like taking a picture, but I like this because their seemed to be an angle that made it more then just a bowl of lemons. These lemons are leaping off the page.

All in all, I really enjoyed the museum and I like that I found different styles interesting to me. I would definitely want to go back or branch out and try other museums and see other pieces that I have never seen. 

Visibility

I am not sure if I am interpreting this correctly, but I think Italo Calvino is trying to get across the notion that all things can be summed up into images. when you read something or hear something or even see something you can create an image in your mind that represents that to you. We are all born with an imagination. We have original thought and ideas and we all dream. All of this is images that we think about. In class we discussed our weeks. And we said that when we think about something in our past a flash of pictures of soundless scenes come to our mind. This is our mind showing us through images everything we can remember. This is an idea Calvino was talking about. This "real" recall could be mixed in with the imagination that Calvino discusses. Our imagination can warp and change and mold things into what we want them to be. Maybe you did not have the best week, but it does not mean that your mind cannot imagine a better one. You can also imagine a future and set goals. This ca all be stored in your mind as images. The imagination is a really interesting thing to have and can be the basis of a lot of thought processes in this course in creating some interesting art pieces.

Essentia

I attended the Essentia gallery in the student center. It was pretty cool to see what some of our peers have been working so hard on. I had never been to a gallery before, but I really appreciated being able to see there work and possibly be a source of inspiration for me since I haven't been in an art class in a really long time.

I really liked this piece by Rachel Yuhas. It sort of falls pretty well in line with what we are doing in class. Dots are the the most basic levels of art. This takes that notion to a whole other level. Her goal was to complete a circle with us coming from the stars and us wanting to go back to that. Each "dot" is a sort of planet in the universe. I really liked her thought process and how she really used the space she was given. Like the universe it looks never ending.

Can Art Change the World?

In reaction to Jerry Salz's "Whole Ball of Wax", I found it really interesting to think of art as a cat, as they do in the paper. Cats are not as open with their affections as dogs are. They are not as ready to give up their intentions like a dog. Cats need to be interpreted. Cats need to be analyzed more in order to really see what they are all about. It is the same way with art. Art is not just what you see in front of you. It is not just paint on a canvas or a clay on a table. And even still it, sometimes, is not even what is the easy conclusion. All art has a message. Some art is a little more literal then others, but there is a message. Like the paper says, it may not have the ability to change the world, in that it can end world hunger or stop climate change, but it can show the world what those issues could mean and get people to think about the world in a different way.

Take this image as an example. This photo was published by National Geographic magazine. This photo is a piece of art. However, this photo does not have the direct ability to change the world. It does, make people think about the climate change and see that it is real. They can see that something is wrong and it is time to make a change. Art cannot be the change, but it can cause the change.