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.

Artists from 1950-1985

Looking at art from 1950-1985, I enjoy looking at pop art. For an artist from 1950-1985, I chose Larry Rivers, a pop art artist from the Bronx, NY. Larry Rivers is considered by many scholars to be the "Godfather" of pop art because he was one of the first artists to really “merge non-objective, non-narrative art with narrative and objective abstraction”. My favorite artwork of his, is Tanfastic from 1966. I also enjoyed looking at artwork from Jim Dine, an American pop artist. In 1962 Dine's work was included, among other pop art artists, in the ground breaking New Painting of Common Objects. My favorite piece by him is “Study for This Sovereign Life”, it was an oil painting made with sand in 1985. I think this piece is very creative and the color is very vivid.

Metropolitan Museum of Art Trip

The Metropolitan Museum of Art reflects the global scopes of collections and extends across the world through a variety exhibitions, excavations, professional exchanges, conservation projects, and traveling works of art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's roots date back to 1866 in Paris, France, when a group of Americans agreed to create a "national institution and gallery of art" to bring art and art education to the American people. In 1938 the museum extended with a new building called the Cloisters museum and gardens. This branch focus' on the art and architecture of medieval Europe. When I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I looked at paintings from several artists including Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Braque, Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Pablo Picasso and my personal favorite Salvador Dali. My favorite section of the museum was the Modern and Contemporary Art wing of the museum. The first artist I viewed was Edgar Degas and his sculpture “The Fourteen Year old Dancer”, it was very different in person than what I saw online. My favorite artist that I visited was Salvadore Dali. My favorite was “Madonna” which was painted in 1958 as an oil painting on canvas. It is Dali's rendition of Raphaels Sistine Madonna reference to the Passion of Christ.

Artist from 1910-1950

Salvatore Dali is best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Salvatore Dalí's expansive artistic collection includes film, sculpture, and photography. The Basket of Bread, painted in 1926, is a painting that depicts four pieces of bread with butter on them sitting in a basket. The painting resides at the Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Fl.

Diego Rivera began drawing when he was only three, just a year after his twin brother's death. He had been caught drawing on the walls. His parents, installed chalkboards and canvas on the walls for him to make use. The kid, painted by Diego Rivera is one of my favorite pieces by him, next to the skeleton is Frida Kahlo, his wife, and himself in the painting.

Frida Kahlo is best known for her self-portraits. She once said, "I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best." Frida Kahlo's work is remembered for its "pain and passion", and its intense, vibrant colors. Her work has been celebrated in Mexico as emblematic of national and indigenous tradition, and by feminists for its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form. I enjoy her piece “The Suicide of Dorothy Hale” which is an oil painting from 1939. It is on display at the Phoenix Art Museum in Phoenix Arizona.

Artists from Impressionism

In class we learned about several different artists who were known to be the original artists for Impressionism. The impressionist style of painting is characterized by concentration on the general impression produced by a scene or object and the use of unmixed primary colors and small strokes to simulate actual reflected light. The principal Impressionist painters were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, and Edward Degas.
Édouard Manet, lived 1832-1883, was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects. His early works, The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia, caused great controversy and served as a principle for young painters who would create Impressionism. Today, these are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art. Music in the Tuileries is an early example of Manet's painterly style, it is said to be inspired by his life-long interest in leisure. While the picture was regarded as unfinished by some, the suggested atmosphere imparts a sense of what the Tuileries gardens were like at the time.
Here, Manet has depicted his friends, artists, authors, and musicians who take part, and he has included a self-portrait among the subjects:

Edgar Degas^, born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas in 1834. Degas was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. Degas is known to differ from the Impressionists in that he "never adopted the Impressionist color fleck", and he belittled their practice of painting “en plein air”. Degas explained, "no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and of the study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament, I know nothing."

"Little Dancer of Fourteen Years" is a sculpture by Edgar Degas, in 1881 of a young dance student named Marie van Goethem. The sculpture was originally made in wax before it was cast in 1922 in bronze. It is built from wax, an unusual choice of material for a sculpture of this time, dressed in a cotton skirt with a hair ribbon, sitting on a wooden base.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist from 1841 to 1919, who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. I found his oil painting, Mme. Charpentier and her children, one of my favorite paintings of his because I felt it showed a sense of closeness between Mme Charpentier and her daughters. Mme. Charpentier and her children was an oil painting on canvas painted in 1878. It is currently on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

 

“Impressionism, http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/glo/impressionism, Feb 1, 2012”

What is Art?

What is art?

Art, noun, defined by google as “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture” or “works produced by such skill and imagination”. Many objects that we know as art today were not perceived as art many years ago, as well as the artists. Many of the objects we identify as art today were made in times and places when people had no concept of art as we understand the term. These objects may have been appreciated in various ways and often admired, but not as art. Art is the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects. I believe anything created can be art. Its a sense of creativity, art is something that is visually appealing to a person in any way.

Aesthetics can be defined as, “a set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty, especially in art”. It is the branch of philosophy that deals with the principles of beauty and artistic taste. The word derives from the Greek aisthetikos, meaning "of sense perception." When we about an aesthetic experience, we are usually talking about some form of art.

"What is Art?, What is an Artist?”, http://www.arthistory.sbc.edu/artartists/artartists.html, Jan 2012