What personal significance do you find in the ideas that you have recorded in your informal visual journal? What does contextual and cultural referencing in art mean? How can you use cultural and contextual referencing in your own artwork?
We say, humans have five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. I would say “thought” would be the sixth sense, and in this class we were training it frequently. When we see an image, the teacher will always ask: What do you see? and What do you think? The answer will start with: I think… and yes, that’s the key word of thought. How to define the thought of the senses? It’s not only just about thinking and describing, it also integrates the previous five senses. In short, it’s like collecting all the ideas together and using your own way to express/deliver the feeling. And it’s personal and unique, everyone is different. Well, I think contextual and cultural referencing is like a dictionary of art. It explains the background/definition and try to connect the sense it made between art and meaning. I learnt a lot of history, backgrounds and ideas of art. I also got to know a lot of artwork from different subjects in this class. It increases my vision of art to be more broad and diverse. The way I can use it for my own artwork, as I said previously, is like using a dictionary; not only can I use the knowledge to identify artwork more accurately, but I can also utilize the knowledge as a reference for my own artwork.
