Wednesday, March 23, 2011

The Renaissance and Public Art

Currently, the students in Art History AP are studying the High Renaissance. The art of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael often stand alone due to their incomparable beauty and their status as the ultimate portrayal of perfect technical execution. Nevertheless, they also demonstrate important developments in artistic practices that came before the Renaissance and continued to affect the production of art after the Renaissance had faded into the annals of history.

One of these developments is the continuation of public art. The students had already encountered unavoidably in situ art in the form of frescoes--the earliest of which comes from the time of the Minoans, a civilization that spanned from the 27th to the 15th century BC.


(I love this fresco. It looks like a Dr. Seuss illustration!)

Frescoes continue throughout time as the go-to medium for public art and the artists of the Renaissance utilize this style of painting in order to create some astonishing masterpieces. The early Renaissance master, Giotto, used fresco to illustrate scenes from the Old Testament in the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy.


Lamentation
Giotto, 1305

But Michelangelo does the unprecedented in his creation of the Last Judgment fresco in the Sistine Chapel...


The Last Judgment
Michelangelo, 1535-1541

But why is the medium of fresco relevant today? What is the current status of public art?

There is a current and undeniable trend in public art that favors the temporary, the ephemeral, and, often, the socially conscious. These elements combine and come to bear in the budding forms of street art. Street art includes but is certainly not limited to traditional graffiti, stencil art, sticker art, wheatpasting, video projection, guerrilla art, and street installations. Because many forms of street art are considered vandalism and are thus illegal, many street artists create designs that are temporary in nature and often require very little time to execute.

Some street artists, however, have become incorporated into the mainstream and work for corporations and private clients. One such artist is a chalk artist (creatively) known as Chalk Man. He is very much an artist inspired by the tenets espoused by Renaissance artists, especially those of realistic perspective and effective trompe l'oeil, a French phrase meaning "to deceive the eye."

















Above: Hell
Right: Alice

Keep in mind: These chalk drawings are on flat, two-dimensional surfaces! How's that for deceiving the eye?

Another well-known contemporary street artist is Shepard Fairey, especially noteworthy for his "André the Giant Has a Posse" or "...OBEY..." project and his stunning Barack Obama campaign poster.


Shepard Fairey reworked this image in a clever and somewhat blasphemous way for Showtime's Emmy award winning television show Dexter, a police drama about a blood spatter analyst who moonlights as a serial killer.


But it is the (in)famous street artist Banksy who gives the greatest nod to the public religious works of the Renaissance fresco masters. How does the work below engage with the history of public art? What commentary does it offer? And how is its public nature important to the message it sends?


Let me know what you think! Leave a comment!

Monday, March 21, 2011

Jasper Johns and the Gray Scale

Ms. J's Foundations class has moved beyond the line! And they have moved onto something even more exciting--the gray scale!

If you don't know already, this is a gray scale:


And making one is significantly more difficult than you might imagine. The students mixed black and white acrylic paint over and over and over again until they created a great enough variety of pigments to make a successful gray scale.

But where does an art class go from here? Once we have a mastery of monochromatic gradation, how do we apply it to personal creation?


For inspiration, we need to look no further than the works of this man--Jasper Johns. Jasper Johns is a American artist, born in 1930, who works primarily in painting and printmaking. His art most notably incorporates images from popular culture, especially Americana iconography like the American flag and maps of the United States.

The Foundations art class, however, is using his monochromatic paintings of numbers, letters, and other stenciled signs for their primary inspiration.




Some of these pieces feature one large subject:





















Other works like this are more complex:


Jasper Johns
Jubilee
, 1959



Jasper Johns
Map, 1962


With these images in mind, the students have begun to design their own Jasper Johns-inspired pieces and prepare to utilize the gray scale to make those designs come to life!



Thursday, March 17, 2011

Teaching Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party"


The Dinner Party
Judy Chicago, 1974-1979


I decided to mix things up.

So I began observing a 6th grade class and a 7th grade class.

They are NOT like high school students. And they really, really like Justin Bieber. It is UNCOMFORTABLE.

Anyway. The middle school art teacher, Mr. E., is starting a new project with his 6th grade class based on Judy Chicago's famous installation piece The Dinner Party, a beautiful conceptual work meant to comment upon and remedy the absence of women in modern historical consciousness. The triangular table features 39 place settings--complete with personalized tablecloths and plates as well as silverware and a goblet for each guest. There are 13 settings on each side of the triangle and these sides are representative of different historical eras. The first side spans prehistory to the Roman Empire; the second spans the beginnings of Christianity to the Reformation; and the final spans the Age of Revolution. The students in Mr. E.'s class examine examples from Judy Chicago's piece and discuss the impact that her guests made on women's rights.

Here are some examples from the table:







Emily Dickinson















Virginia Woolf
















Georgia O'Keefe












Then the students get to select their own guests and create a personalized plate and place setting for the new addition to the table. Students from past classes have invited women like Oprah Winfrey, Eleanor Roosevelt, Lady Gaga, and, the founder of the school, Florence Baldwin.


Who would you invite?

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

The Importance of the Line and Engraving


Recently, Ms. J. has been teaching a unit to demonstrate the importance of the line to her Art Foundations class. As one might imagine, the line is the basis of and the primary building block for many, if not most, artistic endeavors. In order to teach the line, Ms. J. begins with the notion the of gesture--a movement meant to convey an idea or emotion. Students draw a single curvilinear line, which takes up most of their paper, and then draw over the line again and again and again until they accumulated layers of graphite/charcoal that sweeps the original line into an evocative gesture. Additionally, the layered lines create areas of light and dark, which starts to indicate the existence and effects of value.

The students go on to draw true verticals, true horizontals, and diagonal lines. Then they combine these elements to create two-dimensional renderings of three-dimensional objects. They practice cubes and then draw a box from observation... This has mixed results. And is accompanied by very little enthusiasm. Overall, the students are unimpressed by work at the easels. They frequently seem bored and they continually try to abandon their easels to find their friends to talk and gossip. Alternatively, they enjoy "secretly" texting. (Note: Rarely, if ever, are the students actually deft enough to text in secret. It's obvious and they should either brush up on their deception skills or abandon the entire endeavor.)

Sadly, the students don't seem aware of the fact that lines are actually fantastic things, capable of constructing unbelievable works of art. In particular, lines assist engravers and more contemporary artists like illustrators. Let's introduce some examples!

First, engravers, the linear predecessors of illustrators:






















Left: Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Albrecht Dürer, ca. 1497-98, Woodcut

Right: Knight, Death, and the Devil
Albrecht Dürer, 1513-14, Engraving

If you're going to talk about engraving, you have to talk about Albrecht Durer. Born in Nuremberg, Germany in 1471, Albrecht Dürer became a painter, engraver, and printmaker as well as a mathematician and theorist; he is widely regarded as the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance. In particular, his command of composition and value are awe-inspiring. And because of the mediums he worked in, he possessed an unbelievable command of line.

The Italian engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi also utilized line beautifully. In addition to using line to add value in his engravings, Piranesi's lines create complex and even sublime compositions too. He particularly demonstrates this ability in his Carceri series--a group of images depicting terrifying and fantastical prisons.

Carceri Plate XIV - Carceri d'invenzione
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ca. 1745


Does that image look familiar? Remind you of M.C. Escher, maybe?



M.C. Escher
Relativity, 1953


But what about illustrators? I did mention them, didn't I? Yes I did! And here I'll mention two of my favorites--one who seems to have been influenced by Dürer and another who seems to have a much closer affinity to Piranesi and Escher. First, there is Gustave Doré, a French engraver and illustrator who was born in 1832 in Strasbourg, France. He was commissioned to execute numerous illustrations for literary texts including, but certainly not limited to, Dante's Inferno, Cervantes's Don Quixote, and Poe's The Raven.






















Left: Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno: Schismatics-Mahomet
Gustave Doré, 1857

Right: The Holy Bible - The Deluge
Gustave Doré, ca. 1866

I admit it--those are pretty brutal images. But they are also beautiful for the pristine engraving technique and the use of value and light. Let's lighten this up with a work by our second illustrator, Sir John Tenniel, the famous visual genius behind Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass.



Alice in Wonderland
Sir John Tenniel, 1865


See! Lines are amazing!

So I hope that in spite of their inevitable early teen blasé attitudes, the 9th grade Arts Foundation students eventually realize how wonderful lines can be!