Loyola Light Show

The light show Loyola put on was spectacular. All around the McManus and Humanities area, Loyola's campus was lit with a myriad of beautiful colors. These lights ranged from a whole lot of things, but the two pieces of art that caught my eye most were the big lit up Loyola L and the colored lights on the windows of Sellinger. I have included photos below. The L changed colors every few seconds and it was really cool to see how bright it really was. This is a cool form of modern art with the bright color scheme and using all of the colors on the main color wheel.

Also, the windows on the side of Sellinger that you can see if you are walking to the College Center from the other side of the bridge, were lit up all rainbow. You can see the lights from so far away which I thought was really cool. Like the L, these windows had all of the colors on the wheel, except instead of changing, they always stayed the same colors. All in all, I thought the light show was cool and I can't wait to go again next year!

The Six Diegos

I have been studying the Swiss artist, Alberto Giacometti, throughout the semester and did my final project on him. Giacometti was a surrealist and existentialist who was known for his skinny sculptures and his simple drawings. I chose to use his drawing style for my final project. In 1958, Giacometti drew his “Portrait de Diego”. Giacometti used a black crayon for this portrait and it honestly looks like he just drew a bunch of lines to create Diego.

I based my project off of this portrait, but instead of one, I made six Diegos. For each and every portrait I drew, I used a different writing utensil. The top row (from left to right) was drawn by a colored pencil, an ebony pencil, and a colored marker. The bottom row (from left to right) was drawn by a thin sharpie marker, a crayon and a normal pencil. This gave each portrait a different feeling due to the diverse textures the different tools were able to create.

Giacometti only used black during his portraits, but I wanted to modernize it up a little bit by adding slight color. I didn’t want to go over the top by adding every color on the color wheel, so I stuck with only blue and alternated between blue and black/gray portraits. Creating almost like a “checkerboard” feel, the blue definitely spices up the project a little bit making it more enjoyable to view. This is a monochromatic color scheme because blue is the only color used, with black/gray complementing it.

The focal point of my project is supposed to be the portrait in the top middle (the ebony pencil one). I think this because it is the best looking portrait out of the six in my opinion, so I decided to put that in the top middle so everyone’s eyes can look at it first and then look around at the rest of the portraits. Each portrait also takes up about two thirds of the space on each canvas. It was important to make it more than half to show that the main part of the drawing is Diego, not the white space behind him. Although not obviously not 100% perfect, each portrait is symmetrical, so if you were to cut it in half across the middle, each side should look exactly like its counterpart. The value of the piece is generally dark, as there are no bright, fun colors popping out at year. The project keeps to only black and blue.

This was my favorite class out of the five that I took the entire semester. I have only taken one art class since middle school, so I really did not know what to expect going into this. I learned about so many different two dimensional design techniques and even got to learn about an artist all semester. My favorite part was the satisfaction you felt when you completed a project; just being able to look at your completed product and be proud that it is your’s.

If I had to change one thing about the class or something that I did not like to much, it would be that there was not enough time for the projects. I felt like I would stay up late Monday night doing a project due Tuesday, just to get a new project due for my next class Thursday after I handed in my Tuesday project. It obviously is not as taxing as, say, studying for accounting for that much time every week, but there was definitely a lot of out of class time put into all of the projects. Overall, it was a great class and the art skills I learned will definitely help me in the business world to make me become a great marketer.

Postmodern Visual Analysis

“Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.”

My project includes twelve images: four cars, four negative things, and four cool places. I glued them on the bristol paper and painted the background a nice, dark green. After, I added some lighter green around it and some yellow paint splats. The addition of the lighter green and yellow gave my project an analogous color scheme. After that dried, I used the brush and ink to add a layer of black marks to the project. I think that the focal point is the Great Sphinx because it is in the middle and it is something that everyone recognizes and will look at first. I also included many dots and lines and other shapes in the project to add to the effect.

I chose to use the green colors, because of the part of the quote that says, “everything is to be discovered.” I took that part of the quote to mean discovering the world and mostly nature. The four negatives (the taxes, empty refrigerator, the rain, and the empty wallet), are what the cars are driving away from. The cars are trying to drive away from them because driving is a “form of amnesia.” As the cars drive away from the negative things on the outside of the project, the center shows a few cool places that can be discovered and explored. As you can see, that is the connotative meaning to my postmodern project.

Postmodernism Intro

• It is a mix of a lot of different types of cultures. "Simply turn on the TV and you might hear a world music group singing a blend of Irish love song, Indian raga, heavy-metal anthem, Mongolian Buddhist chant -- and all to the tune of peyote drums, gamelans, didgeridoos, panpipes, nose flutes, alpenhorns, sitars, and tambourines."
• Artists try to go back into the past centuries and plug in the unknown and try to represent it.
• "These postmodern artists or architects simply take note of the new mix of messages, symbols, cultures and media, and then create a video, song, painting or building that reflects the Postmodern condition." This quote shows what a postmodern artist's main goals are.
• Realism -> Modernism -> Postmodernism

Jean Baudrillard

• Social microcosm is what draws the crowds to Disneyland, not the imagery.
• Outside in the parking lot is nothing special, but once inside, it is like an entirely new world with much more gadgets to use other than your car.
•  "Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real: country, all if "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of hyperreal and of simulation."

Jameson

• Two different ways to read Van Gogh's painting of peasant shoes. The first way being for sheer decoration, the second way is to stress the raw materials, the initial content, "which it confronts and reworks, transmaterials are to be grasped simply as the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state."
• "This equipment," he goes on, "belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. . . . Van Gogh's painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. . . . This entity emerges into the unconcealment of its being."
• There is definitely a warning of postmodernism art. It is easy to just view what the art has on its surface.

George Kubler - The Shape of Time

We read the section of George Kubler's "The Shape of Time" called "The Limitations of Biography". This part of Kubler's work then has many different subsections in italics. The most interesting subsection that I read was Talent and Genius. Here, he mentions that it is so difficult for people to judge artists based on their talent. "It is meaningless to debate whether Leonardo was more talented than Rafael. Both were talented. Bernardino Luini and Giulio Romano also were talented. They came late when the feast was over through no fault of their own," (Kubelr 6). He is trying to get the point across that the latter of the artists may have been just as talented as the famous Leonardo and Rafael, but they just weren't in the right time period. They could have had the same talent as Leonardo or Rafael, maybe even more, but art just was not what it was during DaVinci's era. Clearly, it is very interesting to talk about talent when differentiating artists and their pasts.This is one of Bernardino Luini's paintings, Madonna del Roseto.

Data Visualization

Data visualization is a really cool way of showing data and a good way to get your point across. It is a linear process of decision making based on a few basic principles: the designer, the reader, and the data itself. In the video, a few data maps that stuck out to me were the ones about Facebook users around the world and flights taken in the United States. All of the different dots and lines for the data are all so interesting and nice to look at. It also shows the hot spots of where the most people are on Facebook or where the most flights were taken. Josh Smith said, "Data is just a clue to the end truth." The data's goal is to get truth across in a visually pleasant way. There is also always a hero of the piece. This is normally the central point of data that most people look at first and will look around following it. As you can see, data visualization is a very cool way to show data but it is all about showing different ways to interpret it.

The first picture was normal lighting while the second picture I took with flash. I hung a piece of white paper on the white wall. In the first picture, the paper has a slight yellowish tone in front of the dirty white wall. In the second photo (flash), the tone gets "cooler" and more blue. There is also more of a contrast between the two whites.

Phase 2

Ways of Seeing

My biggest takeaway from John Berger's Way of Seeing was with regards to the camera. The addition of the camera completely changed the way we are able to view art today. A pressing point was with the angles and such, which we often see with girls and snapchat all over the world everyday. It's all about which angle makes you look the best. Also, nowadays, it is less important to actually see a work of art on person because we can just Google search any piece of art and see it in less than a second. Time has brought us many new ways of seeing and interpreting art and it really depends on the eye of the viewer.

The Last Supper by Andy Warhol (1986)

Strange Fruit by Alison Saar (1995)

Man Pointing by Alberto Giacometti (1947)

This was probably my favorite piece of art from the museum on Thursday. This stood out to me because of how simple it was, yet how thin and difficult it must have been to make. The description here says, "Although his lean figure occupies very little space by itself, it successfully delineates and commands the surrounding area, directing the viewer's attention by means of outstretched arms and pointing finger." Like I mentioned above, it definitely commanded the surrounding area as this was the piece of art in the room that intrigued me (the viewer) the most. It really makes you wonder who or what this man is pointing at. It is thought that this piece of work traces all the way back to World War II.

Imagination and visualization are both very important components to art. The first thing Calvino brought up regarded some of Dante's work. It was also very interesting how he brought up St. Ignatius of Loyola because that is where we go to school. Calvino also questioned where these images and visions that we imagine come from? The answer I think to this relies heavenly on the person's past experiences and his or creativity. The more creative a person is, the better he or she probably is at visualizing future events. For example, when I played baseball from the age of 5 to 18, I would visualize hitting a double in the gap while on deck. This way I would actually believe I was going to get a hit when I stepped up to the plate. This is an interesting comparison between art and sports, because you better believe the artist has some sort of vision before he or she starts his or her work.

Art's Purpose

Art is very powerful in today's world and has been for quite a long time. Saltz makes it clear that it is not powerful enough to stop AIDS or global warming, but it has a different kind of power. Art can show emotion in any situation and it is beautiful because it is up to the eyes of the viewer to determine what the art really means. Oscar Wilde said that the moment you think you understand art, it is dead for you. That means that most of the true beauty in art is about deciphering what it is really about. Art also soothes. It has a miraculous way of healing pain and that is a power in itself. In each and every piece of art, you are seeing yourself, and questioning what YOU are viewing. Saltz even tells the story of how viewing art made a painter feel better after one of the darkest days in American history. One quote that stood out to me was, "Art is often political when it doesn't seem political and not political when that's all it seems to be." This intrigued me because it shows that art is often not what was meant to be.