#blogtasks

1.  Shepherd, M, (2001). Learn Calligraphy. United States of America: Broadway Books

2.  Whiteread, R. (1994) House

Retrieved 15 November 2015 from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/rachel-whiteread-2319

3. Giddings, W.V.  The House in Your Head

Retrieved 25 November 2015 from ;http://www.edgeoftheforest.com/house.htm

4. Robins, F.        Statement

Retrieved 25 November 2015  from; http://www.freddierobins.com/about.php

5. Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. (4th ed.). United States of America: The University of Michigan Press.

 1.       During my project for drawing transformations I spent a long time studying the art of calligraphy and general penmanship along with the study of handwriting, it took many books to learn the art of calligraphy and one of the most helpful of these was ‘Learn calligraphy, The complete book of lettering and design’ by Margaret Shepherd. By reading this book I learnt about different pen angles and pen widths and how they make a difference to your marks and therefore your lettering. The most important thing I learnt from this book was this quote “Calligraphy is a fine art like painting, sculpture, print making, drawing and photography – a way of seeing life and of telling what you see. The well trained, intelligent, creative calligrapher can explore the world of visual art as thoroughly as any painter. Through calligraphy you can learn about proportion, colour and line, positive and negative space, depth perception and light.” This showed to me that calligraphy was an art in its own right and therefore could be seen as a drawing transformation.

 2.       Whilst looking into houses and art that had been made around houses I came across Rachel Whiteread’s house from 1994. This sculpture was created by casting a Victoria terraced house in London’s east end. She built this sculpture to create an awareness of the intrinsically human scaled design which we are surrounded by. She removes the objects function in order to show a sense of absence and loss. I found Whiteread’s work incredibly inspiring because for me it showed that when you take away the houses function you are left with something blank to project your own thoughts and ideals onto. This gave me even more reason to carry on with my gingerbread houses because once you took away their Christmas and edible aspects all you were left with was the ideals that you projected onto it, for me that was structuring bad relationships and how relationships change as we age.

 3.       Whilst studying more into houses and what they mean I came across a paper written by William V. Giddings who had written a metaphor using a house to show how we handle stress and also how we can improve our reactions to people in order to create better relationships, friendships and general interactions. In Giddings’ metaphor he uses three levels to the ‘house in our heads’ these are as follows; the attic, “In the attic we feel  resentment, rage and fury over what other people, events or situations have done to us. We feel victimised and are furious about it.” This means our reactions are often blaming others for things that are going wrong in our lives and we tend to be unreasonable and judging others as if we are sat on our own thrown looking down on anyone who dares to comment on our behaviour. Next down is the ground level, “On the ground level our judgements are fairly brief and less intense and we spend more time in the process of accepting and figuring out how best to handle the situation.” This means we are much more willing to compromise and find solutions rather than getting angry. On the final floor is the basement, “Here in the basement we feel hurt, depressed, guilt and anxious. We feel victimised and are sad and down about it. Our self-talk her is full of Shoulds that blame and put-down our Self and we wallow in our own misfortunes and inadequacies and deficiencies.” On this level we find ourselves taking all the blame but not really fixing the issue that lies in front of us. This whole metaphor made me think a lot about the different levels in relationships which is why I decided to lay out my piece in a structure where the top houses were current relationships and the lower houses were past relationships, I also decided to put ‘the pile’ at the bottom to show relationships that had broken down throughout our lifetime.

 4.       Continuing on my house journey I had decided to look at craft artists that used materials that were viewed more as a craft rather than an art. This is when I came across Freddie Robins.” Robins‘s practice crosses definable categories of art, craft and design. She combines these elements elegantly, and with playful wit subverts meaning and making, fusing a melting-pot of approaches to ‘craft’.” Robins was a great inspiration to me as she had used knitting to make houses that explores contemporary issues of the domestic, gender and the human condition. As I was using gingerbread and it just happened to be December I was aware that I would have to have a strong contextual background for using gingerbread houses so it didn’t look like I had chosen that craft as I was surrounded by Christmas advertisements however being surrounded by ‘the spirit of Christmas’ was a huge reminder that I did not have the ‘perfect’ family or home to celebrate in which made me question the relationships I had been through that brought me to the point of life I was in so it seemed only fitting to try and create a perfect gingerbread house to represent me trying to create the perfect relationship in which to have my perfect Christmas.

Deconstruction

Deconstruction is a way of criticizing artwork. Deconstruction was created by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1970s. Derrida taught us that there is not only one definite meaning to be found in a piece of art work but rather many, these meanings can also often be conflicting. To deconstruct a piece of art work involves discovering, recognising and understanding the underlying and unspoken ideas, assumptions and cultural forms that surround the piece itself. For example François Boucher’s painting of Madame De Pompadour we can see that Madame de Pompadour is reading a book however we have no idea what book it is. Knowing which book she is reading could tell us more about Madame de Pompadour herself and perhaps why she had asked for the portrait in the first place. Only Madame de Pompadour herself knows why she asked for the portrait so making an exact analysis of the painting is quite hard.  

Simulacrum

Simulacrum is essentially the copy of a copy which makes it a degraded form. As used in post modernity the simulacrum is the idea that nothing is an original source and is merely copied copious times until the original is completely lost and the copy is no longer anything like the original. For example, Madame de Pompadour was seen as a fashion icon of her era and also was seen as very regal when in reality she was only the King’s mistress. The reason people viewed her as regal was partly to do with the clothes she wore and she wore these clothes in order to keep the simulation that she was royalty. The simulacrum is that she is copying royal clothing, whilst royalty copy each other’s clothing therefore Madame de Pompadour’s style is a copy of a copy making it the perfect simulacrum.

Transformation

Transformation is a marked change such as the caterpillar transforming into the butterfly. A transformation can be found in form, nature or appearance and can also be found in the process of one figure, expression or function being converted into another one. Within my work I have used a lot of calligraphy and focused on handwriting. I used old artefacts such as identity cards and ration booklets to see the difference between handwriting from the 1900s to the 2000s and how handwriting has transformed over the years. I then used my new found knowledge of handwriting and calligraphy to transform my own handwriting through consistent practice especially in my lettering and how to join up my handwriting so that my penmanship could be achieved with one consistent line and flow naturally through my letters. Now my handwriting has been transformed to have more of aesthetically pleasing appearance.

Metaphor

A metaphor is where you make an analogy between two things to show how one reminds us of the other. For example  in William V. Giddings work about the house in your head, as he uses a house to represent what goes on within our minds as we are faced with difficult issues such as arguments. In his paper he uses three levels to the house; the basement, which is where we feel hurt, depressed and anxious. In the attic we feel resentment and anger where as on the ground floor we feel accepting and calm. So his metaphor is that we move through the house or our minds by emotions, each group of emotions is a different floor and on each floor we handle things differently. So if you were angry in the attic you would react much differently to a situation than if you were feeling reasonable on the ground floor.

Infinity

BLOG TASK

Orient.

The Snake Charmer by Jean-Léon Gérôme.

After the lecture, Collecting the exotic - Orientalism and visual culture, I feel as though I can see a completely different sides to many paintings from the 18th century that focus on the Orient.

“The painting depicts a naked boy standing on a small carpet in the centre of a room with blue tiled walls, facing away from the viewer, holding a python which coils around his waist and over his shoulder, while an older man sits to his right playing a fipple flute. The performance is watched by a motley group of armed men from a variety of Islamic tribes, with different clothes and weapons.

Above text taken from wikipedia. 

I feel as though the painting is trying to draw the viewer in by the contrast and excitement of this situation. Muslim men who are snake charmers are never naked because of religious reasons, but it is accepted for young boys to be. Seeing a young boy holding a very dangerous snake would give the viewer excitement and certainly something to talk about, they boy weak and in danger isnt nearly as exciting as a strong man fully clothed, more able to defend himself. This isn’t actually a common scene to be depicted in a place where you would find snake charmers, the painter has decided to use this as a subject matter to create more interest, intensifying and re-enforcing the views of the exotic. I feel as though this links in with superior views that the west had over the east, thinking of the people as mere objects. The painter has chosen to edge around the fact that nudity is frowned upon in islam by using a young boy, really he should have painted a realistic scene, instead of disrespecting the views of these people. 

“The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.” ― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

My above writings and the quote by Edward W.Said are further backed up when you look into the paintings background. “The performance is watched by a motley group of armed men from a variety of Islamic tribes, with different clothes and weapons.” In other words, the painter has taken people and people from different Orients and decided to place them together in one painting, the people vary in skin tone, there are influences in this painting taken from Turkey, Palestine and India. The painting has no clear root. I think this is very typical of the 18th century painters. Taking what they want from cultures and turning it into exciting and controversial paintings to excite the viewers back home in the west, this enforces the fact that the east was just looked at as a whole, no one took anytime to find out about these people and their culture, the Orient was an imagined region. 

Bibliography : http://www.newenglishreview.org/Ibn_Warraq/Linda_Nochlin_and_The_Imaginary_Orient/ 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snake_Charmer

BLOG TASKS

Pleasure Gardens/disnefying the past.

After the guest lecture with Beatrice Behlen I decided to visit to pleasure gardens for myself. For such a small space there are so many objects and scenes for you to look at, upon entering you find yourself completely submersed into the gardens with face trees and foliage with the dark and soft lighting to make you feel as though you have stepped right into one of the 18th century gardens, further re-enforced when you find yourself in scenes which are projected onto the wall, you can see and hear the actors clearly and it feels as though you are stood there yourself. 

More and more exhibits are becoming engaging to these levels as we as humans feel the need to be shown more, for objects  to seem more magical, for history to seem more interesting. You begin to find events which are given narratives to get the viewer more engaged. This whole idea of disnefying the past is supported by this. Museums are having to work harder than ever to draw people in, they’re having to construct stories about exhibits for the modern viewers. 

Hayden white talks about this in his text : 

“The form of the discourse, the narrative, adds nothing to the content of the representation, but is rather a simulacrum of the structure and processes of real events, and insofar as this representation resembles the events of which it is a representation, it can be taken as a true account.” 

The pleasure gardens exhibit is of course very interesting, the whole thought of a victorian pleasure garden is quite exciting, for me personally just reading about it and hearing the lecture got me excited to know more. Although I feel that some people may have not thought that, that they would have needed to go to the exhibit and experience the ramped up and submersive display to feel as though they learnt something. 

Upon visiting you are able to view an array of lifelike models that have been crafted over a great deal of time, to appear real but also ghostly. They’re dressed in traditional outfits often found in pleasure gardens, outfits that have been constructed and bought together over time by the curators, yet they’re not complete 18th century outfits, the clothing has been taken form different people and eras to recreate the pleasure garden look, thus only giving you a small glimpse as to what they would have looked like. As well as that upon most of the models you’ll find hats constructed and made my Philip Tracey, adding a new and exciting twist upon the exhibit, drawing more people in to view it. This re-enforces again my point about museums having to almost redecorate the past, make it more exciting and interesting for the new generation of viewers.

Museums are having to work harder than ever, creating exhibits with fancy technology and showy lighting, I don’t think the curators are at fault here, but more the elite upperclass who are expecting more and more from museums, people should be happy to read about the past, instead of making their own versions of history.

Bibliography

Duringour second lecture with Lisa, we looked into how to create and maintain our blogs.  To help keep a well-organized blog it has been recommended to separate all our studio work and lecture notes on different blogs, which then can be relinked back together. This will be very helpful for my blog, as I was currently stuck with its development. It will help make less confusion between my lecture notes and studio work.

Other good points made:

·      Think about the title of each blog post

·      Blog about a blog

·      Summarise at the end of each week

·      Follow other students

Creativity

Task - “And now for something completely different”……

Is a quote from the television series Monte Python’s Flying Circus and used as a title as well as a catchphrase.  Within the series there would be an announcer (played by John Cleese), who would say this saying before a new series, opening credits and transition break within the show.  I use this quote many times without realising that this is where it had originated from.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Now_for_Something_Completely_Different

Task- Animation ‘Ryan’

‘Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality’ (quoted from: http://www.creativityatwork.com/2014/02/17/what-is-creativity/) Creativity can be in a form of beauty, art, images, nature, psychoanalyst, space and time and the mind. One artist who used the creativity idea of the mind is Chris Landreth’s animation of life of Ryan Larkin- ‘Ryan’.  Ryan Larkin was a Canadian Animator who was known for his multiple animations such as ‘Spare Change’.  During his later life he lived on skid row in Montreal, a result from drug and alcohol abuse, which was highly influenced from his childhood.

The 14-minute animation is based on Ryan Larkin’s life and the struggles he has been through, Chris Landreth is interviewing him in the animation.  The idea within the animation is to show the characters state of mind though emotional realism. Both characters have been broken down leaving only certain parts of themselves representing each person’s own demons.  Landreth has also used strong colored thread metaphors, which wrap around each characters face. Landreths is the fear of failure whilst Larkin’s is the loss of creativity- emotional scars, which represent that character.  Each color is a different meaning i.e. anger, happy.