For my final art project, I decided to recreate Jo Baer’s Korean series. This is a minimalist series of work that focuses on using the edge of the canvas. In Jo Baer’s pieces, she only uses three colors: the white of the canvas, black and another pale color of her choice. What I did was slightly different. Since I wanted to keep with the minimalist theme, I stuck with her overall template of the Korean series but I used colors that Baer would have never used such as gold and I used the patter of newspaper which again, Baer would never have put in her minimalist  art work. There are four different pieces to my project. For each one, the focal point is the edge of the canvas because the center is left blank. In my opinion, the eye path is different for each piece depending on which piece your looking at because of the colors, patterns and negative space. Another thing that I did that Baer would not have, was cute through the paper so you can see through it. In addition, one of the reasons that I decided to use paper instead of paint like Baer did was because I wanted it to have more texture. Something that I found in Baer’s pieces was that they had the ability to look three dimensional. Even though I couldn't make the piece fully 3D, I wanted to use the texture of the paper to represent that. Something that I learned about minimalist art is that its harder than it looks. Not only was thinking about each individual composition hard, but as I thought more about each one, they started taking me longer to make and got more complex. 

The one thing that I think I’ll really take away from this glass is what I learned about color and the overall composition of artwork. I think it is really helpful that I have a new knowledge of color now because I can use that in multiple aspects of my life. Before this class, I obviously knew the primary colors and basic elements of colors, but in this class I learned the relationship between them and actually painted my first color wheel which gave me a way better understanding of the concept of color. Additionally, since learning the different compositions of art work, I always notice it in whatever piece i’m looking at, even outside of class. I enjoy that I subconsciously do this now because it forced me to think about the meaning of the artists work and what he/she was trying to accomplish. 

If there was one thing that could be better in this class, my suggestion would be making more big projects that take a longer amount of time rather than having a bunch of small project back to back. Overall, I really enjoyed this class and learned a lot about myself as an artist and art in general.

Postmodernism introduction

-Citizens of the middle ages/ members of premodern tribal societies could live their entire lives without meeting people who differ from them.

-In the modern ages, it is hard to even get through a day without experiencing different realities

-New technology and communications have caused us to view the world in a different way ( expanding and shrinking)

-stage of realism- the era of the bourgeois 

-age of modernism- expressed dissatisfaction with the world 

-age of postmodernism- dislocation and fragmentation os language communities

Jean Baudrillard

-Disneyland - model of entangles orders of simulation (illusions, creativity) 

- Disneyland imaginary is neither true or false

Postmodernism- Frederic Jameson 

• Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes
• different ways to read the painting

-hermeneutical - the work in its inert, objectical form is taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it with the truth

Escaping Flatland

After reading Escaping Flatland by Tufte, it gave me a new perspective on all of the information I take in on a day to day basis and how I process it. Before reading this, I honestly never noticed that the majority of the information that I interact with is two-dimensional. This obviously includes social media but I never took in to account how this is true for most learning tools we use in school as well. For example, books, essays, pictures etc. The fact that most of the information we take in and learn from is two dimensional makes me wonder how limited the amount of information or the way we process it is. 

During our trip to the Baltimore Museum of Art, I noticed many interesting pieces of art. I was very intrigued by the modern and contemporary art, so I spent most of the time that I had in that section of the museum. While I was looking around, there was one specific piece that stood out to me which was "Greater Black Astral Dripper" by Jimmy Joe Roche. This piece was made in 2013 and I found it particularly interesting because it was based on the brain and psychological testing. Another piece that I thought was very interesting was "Won't" by Ed Ruscha. This piece was made in 1964. I liked that there was really no information about it on its informations tag so it was left up to interpretation. The final piece that I photographed was painted with oil on canvas by Jo Baer in 1975 and was left untitled. I thought it was interesting how something so plain could be so left up to interpretation and even end up in such an amazing museum.

Visibility

Italo Calvino points out that there are different aspects of the imaginative process. He specifically mentions that one can either put an image to a word, or creating words from an image. However, Calvino states that the imagination is like the problem of “the chicken and the egg” because we never know what creativity came from where. For example, are specific images that we see in our minds made up? Or are they things that we have seen in the past? It stood out to me when Calvino wrote “ Think, for instance, of a writer who is trying to confer certain ideas which to him are contained in mental images. He isn't quite sure hoe those images fit together in his mind, and he experiments around, expressing things first one way and then another, and finally settles on some version. But does he know where it all came from? Only in a deep vague sense. Much of the source, like an iceberg, is deep under water, unseen-and  he knows that. An individuals imagination seems to be a very complex things. Just like how everyone perceives art differently, we all have completely different imaginations too. 

Reading "The Whole Ball of Wax" gave me a deeper understating of the concept of art in general. Everyone views art differently. Some people see it as a form of entertainment, some people see it as an expression of society and some people simply don't think it means anything at all. The list of different perspectives people have on art goes on and on. In some cases, art can change peoples outlook on the world without even trying to. Something that stuck with me in the article was when Saltz said " Neither Andy Warhol or Donald Judd made overtly political art. Yet both changed the way the world looks and the way we look at the world". I believe that since art is interpreted differently by every individual, it can have a million different meanings. Art has the power to provoke different emotions from everyone who sees it and also impact society as a whole. It is a truly unique from of expression to the world.