Artist # 22 Vincent Van Gogh

Along with Monet's impressionist style, I thought I would go ahead and do Van Gogh as well. I learned that Van Gogh wanted to become a priest, so he went into seminary. He ended up flunking out and then moving to Belgium to teach the scriptures. He wanted to be as the Belgium people and live poorly, so he lived in a small shack. When the church found out about that, they excommunicated him. I thought that was pretty harsh! After that he becomes very poor and barely gets by, making paintings practically for free.

He made paintings of the Dutch land and of poor workers. The purpose of the paintings was to say that these people are dignified. They live honest and dignified lives. It's kind of ironic that he went to seminary and taught scriptures because in his paintings, he's not really giving any reference or credit to God. He's saying that the people have what they have because of how hard they work. They get where they are by themselves, not by God.

Van Gogh's most famous painting, and possibly one of the most famous paintings of all time, is his Starry Night.



Each piece of the painting is very distinguished. You can tell the stars from the sky, the fields from the houses, etc. It seems pretty obvious that in a painting you should be able to distinguish those things, but when it's an impressionist painting out of lines, it could be a little more difficult. Some other paintings by Van Gogh are:

Artist # 21 Maurizio Savini

I came across this artist and thought that he was interesting. He uses pink chewing gum and fiberglass. His work is really good considering what he's using to sculpt with. It would be very difficult. Here's a quote by Mario Codognato found from this blog.

"The sensual act of chewing, the voluptuous warmth of rebelling saliva, the artificial and secretly aseptic fragrance which spreads from the mouth as a promise and missed kiss. The synthetic fleshliness of the pink color, the obsessive square shape of the product unwrapped and ready to be shred to pieces by the power of the tongue, all compete in crashing on the senses. Applying all this to the power and energy of the Sculpture and its history causes a short circuit having the capacity of turning the ludic into stately and vice versa. The strict minimalism of parallelepiped is subverted by the uniform coating with many bars of chewing-gum completely cover it, rendering chewable to desire, soft and provoking to forbidden touch, what was abstract and distant."



I read that he manipulates the gum when it's warm. He said that the most important process of his work is fixing the sculptures with formaldehyde and antibiotic.

Savini is still relatively young and his work has been displayed all over the world, selling for a lot of money. I think that his sculptures are interesting and different, but I don't necessarily like them. I wouldn't buy one or want one. I don't like that the whole thing is pink, and knowing that it's gum. It makes it seem like it would fall apart, or not be sturdy, characteristics I like to think of sculptures having. I'm not sure about the subject matter he chose for his sculptures either. He has done humans, in odd positions, and animals. I couldn't find an explanation of that, but there must be one because the positions he puts his people in is different and looks like it means something.

Artist # 20 Claude Monet

Right now in Art History, we're talking about Monet, so I thought I would do him as on of my artists. I think Monet's paintings are very beautiful. They're something that I would want hanging in my house. The impressionist style is beautiful to me. When I was really looking at the paintings in class I realized how talented he was. He really tried to paint what he saw. He was interested in the way that the eye perceives colors, and images the way a camera lens perceives them. He uses even brush strokes throughout his whole paintings. So it's very uniformed.

I love the colors in this one. They're so vibrant. Another thing about Monet, is that the paintings become this three dimensional piece. The paint is left on the canvas, it's not supposed to be an illusion or hidden. You can see the texture, and the brushstrokes. The detail of his paintings are also amazing. It's kind of ironic because impressionists are leaving impressions of images they see, but he does it in a way where there are still many details. You know exactly what the painting is of in that way.



I think that this painting of lily pads is really pretty too. Again the colors are very strong, because that is one thing that he focused on. His landscape paintings, such as this one evolved from his previous notion of landscapes. Before he painted scenes like a train station, or a shipping dock and called it a landscape. To him, every scene was equal because of how the eye sees it. Later on he shifted and painted landscapes that was the kind that we're used to-nature.

Here is the shipping dock painting:


The last paintings I chose were his grainstacks. He was interested in showing the right color, and light of different times of days and seasons. He painted straight from the scenes and so he would have to work quick to get it just right. Here are two examples of his paintings from different times, but essentially the same composition.

Napkins

Our group got together last Thursday to talk about where we're going with it and what we need to do. At that time there wasn't really anything we could do besides try to come up with different drinks to use for the display. The original three girls who came up with the idea want to use 40 napkins and to try to use as many different drinks as possible. At first I was kind of annoyed that I joined this group because if we didn't have enough they said we would just split up the drinks and buy them to use. I really don't like having to buy stuff for this class and I already had to for the other projects. I kind of wished I joined a group that wouldn't cost any money. Especially when I know it's just going to get thrown away afterwards.

This is a diagram of our instillation:


The plan was to have maybe red velvet fabric or something hanging up with the napkins pinned to that. The look we're going for is formal museum. I didn't think that red velvet really says formal museum. We went to the fabric store and picked out a black satin instead. I think that will look good with the napkins on top. I think it will tie everything together nicely instead of red. Yesterday after class we all went out buying the supplies. We purchased our fabric, found the right size of napkins, and pins. Now all we have to do is make the stains of the drinks on the napkins, make the labels and pin everything up. I think it will go pretty smoothly. Keeping the fabric up might be a little tricky, but i'm sure we can handle it.

Proposals

So, I couldn't really come up with a good way to portray my idea for this last assignment. When we had to tell our ideas to the class, I didn't really know what to say, but I did say something. Everyone seemed like they knew what they wanted to do and had groups already established. After all the ideas were announced, Veiko asked if I wanted to work with him. I was a little relieved that I wouldn't be working on my own and presenting my proposal alone.

He had an idea to do something with toys, more specifically dolls. He wanted to cut them in half and have them sitting in jars. (Like they're being preserved). I was a little confused and we were sure how we would make it work, so we tried to think of other things we could cut in half. (We like that idea). We thought of using old shoes. At first the idea was to portray migration and people who migrated to the U.S. We would mount the shoes, cut in half, on the wall and have a short version of their story. We wanted to use all different kinds of shoes though, so we realized it couldn't be base on migration. We decided to try and get all different shoes, baby shoes, high heels, sneakers, etc. donated and display them. We would have a short story of a significant event or something that happened in those shoes. It would be like telling this person's life story with their shoe. We thought that cutting them in half was a really interesting way to look at the shoe and let you see inside of it. You don't normally, or ever, see a shoe cut in half. Veiko was working in a workshop where there was a blade that he could cut the shoes easily in half, so that wouldn't be a problem.

The day we had to present our proposals came, and I was a little nervous after hearing other student's ideas. At the same time I heard some ideas that I didn't like at all, or didn't see the point that got chosen for the project. Anyways, Veiko made some really great visuals of the shoes to show while we explained our idea. I honestly wasn't really passionate about our proposal and wasn't too surprised when ours wasn't chosen. I joined up with the group doing the liquid stains on the napkins. I wanted to do a few others too, but people joined on pretty fast.