Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute

Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute is an art school located in Utica, NY, and it also had a museum open to the public with many famous artists as well as students’ artwork on display. The School of Art offers a nationally accredited college program and an active Community Arts Education Program that serves adults, teens and children. They also have a performing arts building where the school puts on over 100 shows a year. For my paper on a contemporary artist I will be visiting this museum and talking about the famous artists featured as well as the students work on display.

My favorite artist so far

My favorite artist this semester is Salvadore Dali. On my trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art I bought a book all about his works. The beginning of the book shows portraits that he has done and my favorite portrait is the one of Luis Bunuel, painted in 1924. I liked this piece so much because even though he uses dark colors everything is clearly shown. He used a lot of shading as the background and little actual painting strokes. Dali once said "Christ is like cheese, or, to be more precise, like mountains of cheese", it is said he based a decent amount of his paintings on this saying. Such as his most popular painting "The Persistence of Memory", he says the painting derived from a dream of runny Camembert and represents an image of time devouring itself and everything else around it. Another painting I really enjoyed was his "Portrait of Paul Eluard", it reminds me of the background of "The Persistence of Memory". The background is blurry with no detail, but the actual portrait of Paul Eluard is very vivid, including the lion and everything else painted into his body.

My Altar

In my room I have a jar filled with pictures and little souvenirs I've gotten over the past 3 years. It is filled with memories I've made with my friends and boyfriend since I've started college. I originally didn't plan on this happening, I started throwing things in there that I didn't want to throw out. It started to fill up with movie stubs, concert tickets and little toys I've gotten over the years. As I was looking through it I found my favorite part of this jar, which is the ticket stubs from the Liberty Science Center. One of them is from when my boyfriend took me to the Liberty Science Center for my paper in Mass Comm 1000, and the other is when we went back to see a film in IMAX.

Food as Art

To me food is art because people such as Buddy Valastro and the hosts of Cupcake Wars sculpt cakes and chocolate. You can design foods to look like almost anything. There are countless events organized around the symbiosis between art and food, such as food events held in art spaces, which aren’t considered art, but still make use of food in an artistic way. Prudence Staite sculpts with chocolate and food, to make edible art. “Art should be interactive and stimulate all the senses, especially taste!". Prudence also creates painting with food, she believes you can create anything from food.

Contmeporary Artist

A contemporary artist I chose is Nikko Hurtado, a tattoo artist from California. Nikko's inspiration for tattooing comes from cartoons and comic books, he specializes in portraits of film and television characters. He has unique style and a huge imagination. In junior high school he attended art classes where he learned to draw professionally and went on to take extra classes at The Art Center of Pasadena. He opened his own tattoo shop in 2010, called Black Anchor Collective in Hesperia, CA. His work to me stands out because he is able to make the tattoo look realistic, with portraits the skin tone and texture are amazing. 

The Goonies

The Goonies

Ever since I was little, The Goonies has been one of my favorite movies. I never paid close attention to details in the movie when I was little. This time when I watched it I noticed a lot I've never seen before, such as the camera work and lighting used to convey certain scenes. In scene 5, Steven Spielberg has a thunderstorm in the background to convey a darker atmosphere when “The Goonies” find a treasure map in the attic, where they're not supposed to be there. There's also dark lighting in the attic to give off an ominous feel. Many scenes throughout the movie have mysterious music in the background as well.

The Godfather

          For my movie blog I chose The Godfather, because I have never seen it and I've always been told to watch it because it is a phenomenal movie. This year is also the 40^th anniversary of The Godfather. The movie begins at the wedding reception of mafia boss Don Corleone's daughter, known as “The Godfather”. I really enjoyed this movie because it had my attention the entire time. I wasn't expecting to enjoy this movie as much as I did. I believe this movie deserves to be on AFI's greatest films list. The entire movie has impressive use of camera work and dark lighting in most of the scenes. In my opinion the cast used in this film makes it feel so realistic and makes the film a masterpiece. It was hard to chose just one scene to convey the entire plot of the movie. I chose two scenes in the movie because I felt the first scene in the movie really helped portray what the rest of the movie was going to lead into. “I Believe in America”, about 6 minutes long, shows immediately, the main character, Don Vito Corleone is a very important person to the plot. The director uses dark lighting to convey a serious conversation between the two characters, the lighting only shows the two characters with no background scenery. The Godfather and Tom Hagen, the family lawyer, are hearing requests for favors because, according to tradition, "no Sicilian can refuse a request on his daughter's wedding day." One of the men who asks Corleone for a favor is Amerigo Bonasera, an old family friend, whose daughter was beaten by two young men who received minimal punishment. Don Corleone is mostly disappointed in Bonasera, who'd avoided contact with him for so long.  He agrees to have his men punish the young men responsible. The second scene I chose was scene 6 of 23, “The Shooting of Don Corleone”. The scene begins with two characters joining together against the Corleone family, Sollozzo and Luca Brasi. Sollozzo stabs and kills Luca Brasi after joining together. I chose this scene because the director conveys the meaning through camera angles and sound. There is no dialogue in the scene, you hear footsteps coming and see Don Corleone's reaction to the footsteps. After he gets shot several times, you see the emotions coming from his son Fredo who was the driver and people on the streets. The next part of the scene shows his son Michael, reading the newspaper and finds out about his father and they do not know if he's dead or alive. The purpose of this scene was to show Sollozzo's assassination attempt against Don Corleone, due to him not accepting his offer to help finance his narcotics smuggling operations.