Goldsworthy's eccentric philosophy
Jahi Nelson's List: FUNDAMENTALS IN ART 1
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For me looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. Place is found by walking, direction determined by weather and season. I take the opportunity each day offers: if it is snowing, I work in snow, at leaf-fall it will be leaves; a blown over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches.
Movement, change, light growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue.
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The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and the space within. The weather—rain, sun, snow, hail, calm—is that external space made visible. When I touch a rock, I am touching and working the space around it. It is not independent of its surroundings and the way it sits tells how it came to be there. In an effort to understand why that rock is there and where it is going, I must work with it in the area in which I found it.
I have become aware of raw nature is in a state of change and how that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Often I can only follow a train of thought while a particular weather condition persists. When a change comes, the idea must alter or it will, and often does, fail. I am sometimes left stranded by a change in the weather with half-understood feelings that have to travel with me until conditions are right for them to appear. All forms are to be found in nature, and there are many qualities within any material. By exploring them I hope to understand the whole. My work needs to include the loose and disordered within the nature of material as well as the tight and regular.
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Oct 01, 13
This necessity got to Goldsworthy early. From the age of 13 he worked on farms as a labourer. Most of the lads wanted to drive tractors but he never fancied that much, rather he liked the repetitive quality of farm tasks, which he likens to the grind of making sculpture. 'A lot of my work is like picking potatoes,' he says. 'You have to get into the rhythm of it.'
He always assumed that he might have to work as a gardener or a farmer for the rest of his life, which he says would have suited him fine as long as he could do his work. He was learning all the time. 'Farming is a very sculptural profession. Building haystacks or ploughing fields, burning stubble. And it is a brutal thing, too. Go round the back of any farm and there will be a pile of dead lambs. Farmers see more death than anyone.'
Goldsworthy engages and worries about the consequences of our general disconnection from the land and the food chain. He wants to confront the fact that for urban people the country is just something nice to look at on a Sunday out.-
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This necessity got to Goldsworthy early. From the age of 13 he worked on farms as a labourer. Most of the lads wanted to drive tractors but he never fancied that much, rather he liked the repetitive quality of farm tasks, which he likens to the grind of making sculpture. 'A lot of my work is like picking potatoes,' he says. 'You have to get into the rhythm of it.'
He always assumed that he might have to work as a gardener or a farmer for the rest of his life, which he says would have suited him fine as long as he could do his work. He was learning all the time. 'Farming is a very sculptural profession. Building haystacks or ploughing fields, burning stubble. And it is a brutal thing, too. Go round the back of any farm and there will be a pile of dead lambs. Farmers see more death than anyone.'
Goldsworthy engages and worries about the consequences of our general disconnection from the land and the food chain. He wants to confront the fact that for urban people the country is just something nice to look at on a Sunday out.
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What is design? Design is that which lays the foundation for making an object or an artwork. Design in something which sends out a similar message to a wide range of audience because it was intended to serve just the purpose for which it was created. Design is sometimes defined as both the process and the final product of an endeavour to fulfil a personal or professional brief. Design is also about demonstrating how beautiful something can be and sometimes, it is about changing life and influencing the future.
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Design is an attribute which doesn’t come just out of thin air and it is not a skill acquired from birth. It is a trait acquired from constant dedication to what you do and from extreme hard work put in understanding and learning the principles of design and using it effectively. Not every “designer” is able to produce outstanding designs just because he has a degree in applied or natural arts.
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How to avoid your Creativity Burnout
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Creativity is a mental process involving the discovery or associations of new ideas or concepts, fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight. Where does this ‘Creativity’ come from? Is everyone creative? If not, what is stopping them from being so? These are some of the questions that always strike our mind when we talk about being creative. From what I have learnt from my experience in graphic designing and blogging, everyone is creative. It is not a born trait or something which only experienced artists can boast of.
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Damien Hirst
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Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. In 1984 he moved to London, where he worked in construction before studying for a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths college from 1986 to 1989. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995.
Since the late 1980’s, Hirst has used a varied practise of installation, sculpture, painting and drawing to explore the complex relationship between art, life and death. Explaining: “Art’s about life and it can’t really be about anything else … there isn’t anything else,” Hirst’s work investigates and challenges contemporary belief systems, and dissects the tensions and uncertainties at the heart of human experience.[1]
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What is Composition?
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Composition is the pleasant arrangement of elements within a frame which give the most powerful ability to attract the eye, and to keep it exploring within the frame for as long as possible.
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Mary Blair is not only great at color, she is great at composition. A lot of young (and old) artists who say they love Mary Blair's work think they like it because it is simple and stylized. They miss what's really important in her work-fantastic art principles-like composition, the way she arranges the parts of her pictures into a clear and beautiful, functional statement.
Her art is completely logical. -
Composition is another lost principle of modern cartoons.
This is a big manual all about how to arrange images
within your scenes so that they are easy to read
and aesthetically pleasing to look at.
I made a series of manuals to help service studios
understand the Layout drawings we would send them for The Ripping Friends
because we found they would throw out all of
Jim Smith's, John Dorman's and my drawings and
redraw them in a cluttered, stiff, evenly spaced
wonky style.
The manuals didn't work because they were never opened,
but maybe you can find some use for the principles within.
If you ever want to do layouts or BGs for me, please learn this stuff first.
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Understanding Formal Analysis
<!-- end section title --> <!-- Center Column Content -->Discover how to analyze the formal aspects of a work of art by learning about the elements of art and principles of design that are used by artists working in various media.
Students who can identify the elements and principles and evaluate their role in the composition of a work of art will be better able to understand an artist's choices. They will be equipped to address whether a work of art is successful, and why.
The list below describes each element of art. Learn about the principles of design here.Elements of Art
The elements of art are components or parts of a work of art that can be isolated and defined. They are the building blocks used to create a work of art. -
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Balance is the distribution of the visual weight of objects, colors, textures, and space. If the design was a scale, these elements should be balanced to make a design feel stable.
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Emphasis is the part of the design that catches the viewer's attention. Usually the artist will make one area stand out by contrasting it with other areas. The area could be different in size, color, texture, shape, etc.
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Many artists and art historians consider Romare Bearden one of America's most important and inventive artists. But he's hardly a household name. NPR's Neda Ulaby reports that the National Gallery of Art intends to change that. Bearden is the subject of the gallery's first major retrospective of an African-American artist.
Bearden's primary medium was the collage, fusing painting, magazine clippings, old paper and fabric, like a jigsaw puzzle in upheaval. But unlike a puzzle, each piece of a Bearden collage has a meaning and history all its own. Shortly before he died of cancer in 1988, Bearden said working with fragments of the past brought them into the now.
"When I conjure these memories, they are of the present to me," he explained. "Because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time."
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Romare Bearden's History.
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Bearden took snippets of Harlem life and shot them through with vivid images of the American South. His family moved from Mecklenburg, N.C., in 1914 when he was a toddler, and he grew up in the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. Bearden's mother was a dashing figure, a reporter for a leading black newspaper. Family friends included luminaries such as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois and famous musicians who helped ignite Bearden's passion for jazz. One of Bearden's first patrons would Duke Ellington. Much later, he designed a record cover for Wynton Marsalis.
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Born on September 2, 1911 in Charlotte, North Carolina, Romare Bearden was a multi-talented artist and one of America’s foremost collagists. Bearden’s family moved to New York City in 1914 in an attempt to distance themselves from Jim Crow’s “separate but equal” laws.
Bearden initially studied at Lincoln University but transferred to Boston University where he was the art director of Beanpot, a student humour magazine. He then completed his degree in education at New York University. At NYU, Bearden was enrolled in art classes and was a lead cartoonist and art editor for the monthly journal “The Medley”. During his University years, he published numerous journal covers and wrote many texts on social and artistic issues. Bearden also attended New York’s Art Students League, studying under German artist George Grosz. Bearden served in the US Army between 1942 and 1945 and returned to Europe in 1950 to study art and philosophy at the Sorbonne with the support of the GI Bill.
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The Life of Romare Bearden
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rom the 1930′s to the 1960′s Bearden was a social worker with the New York City Department of Social Services and worked on his art in his free time. He had his first successful solo exhibitions in Harlem in 1940 and in Washington DC in 1944. In 1954, he married dancer and choreographer Nanette Rohan, with whom he shared the rest of his life. During this time, Bearden was active in Harlem’s art scene and was a member of the Harlem Artists Guild.
Bearden was a prolific artist who experimented with numerous mediums including watercolours, oils, collage, photo montage, prints, and costume and set design. His inspiration was gathered from his lifelong study of art from the Western masters, African art, Byzantine mosaics, Japanese prints, and Chinese landscape paintings. Bearden is best known for his collages which were featured on the covers of Time and Fortune magazines in 1968.
Bearden was active in numerous arts organizations and was a respected writer and spokesperson for the arts and for social causes. In 1964, he was appointed as art director of the African-American advocacy group, the Harlem Cultural Council. He was also involved in the establishment of art venues such as The Studio Museum and the Cinque Gallery that supported young minority artists. Bearden was also a founding member of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1972.
Bearden’s work is on display in major museums and galleries in the United States including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Bearden received numerous honorary degrees including doctorates from the Pratt Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Davidson College, Atlanta University, and others. He received the 1984 Mayor’s Award of Honour for Art and Culture in New York City, and the National Medal of Arts, presented by President Ronald Regan in 1987.
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Romare Bearden, Pittsburgh Memory, 1964
collage of printed papers with graphite on cardboard
Collection of halley k harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld, New York
© Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y.In a 1969 article, "Rectangular Structure in my Montage Paintings," Bearden explained his approach in making collages: "In most instances in creating a picture, I use many disparate elements to form a figure, or part of a background....I feel that when some photographic detail, such as a hand or an eye, is taken out of its original context and is fractured and integrated into a different space and form configuration, it acquires a plastic quality it did not have in the original....”
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The work of these three African-American artists—Romare Bearden (1911–1988), Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000), and Faith Ringgold (born 1930)—speaks to the enduring power of the narrative impulse, and to its endless possibilities for reinvention. Whether the subject is historical, political, religious, fantastical, or in celebration of the rituals of everyday life, these artists have significant messages to communicate—and aesthetic approaches that tend toward bold, clear, and exuberant formal expression. In 1951, Lawrence made a statement about his work that could hold true in reflecting on each of these modern storytellers: "For me, a painting should have three things: universality, clarity, and strength. Universality so that it may be understood by all men. Clarity and strength so that it may be aesthetically good." In each case, the artists' African-American heritage and the expression of black identity is fundamental to their artistic expression. All three grew up or trained or lived at various points in their lives in Harlem, and participated in the community in important ways. And all three—whatever the subject of each individual work of art—convey an underlying social commentary about human identity seen through the prism of race and class. Again, Lawrence sums up a more global expression in commenting that: "Most of my work depicts events from the many Harlems that exist throughout the United States. This is my genre. My surroundings. The people I know … the happiness, tragedies, and the sorrows of mankind … I am part of the Black community, so I am the Black community speaking."
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The styles of Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden and Faith Ringgold
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Subjects
The subjects these artists explore have incredible range, from the heroic to the mundane. Early on, Lawrence created several sweeping historical narratives in the form of extensive series of paintings. As young men, both Lawrence and Bearden had participated in lectures and classes by Charles Seifert. This carpenter-turned-teacher immersed the artists in African and African-American history and literature. He freely shared his own extensive library, and he encouraged young students to use the resources at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture). Lawrence steeped himself in historical research. In 1937, he painted a series of forty-one panels, The Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture (Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, Aaron Douglas Collection), depicting seminal moments in the life of this leader of the Haitian independence movement. Other series focused on a diverse array of major historical figures in the antislavery movement, including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown. Lawrence's The Migration of the Negro (1940–41; jointly owned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.) evokes the migration of more than a million African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North between 1910 and 1940. The work is conceived as an epic, and it unfolds over sixty panels. Even after he turned from history painting to the daily life of Harlem as his subject in 1942, Lawrence investigated the most significant social issues of his community: family values, the plight of the poor, and especially the role of the manual laborer. Pool Parlor (42.167), The Photographer (2001.205), and The Shoemaker (46.73.2) represent this compelling investigation.
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Romare Bearden Tied His Work to Race, But Was a Cubist
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With certain exhibitions, this writer finds himself in a position not so much to “review” them as to recall his previous critical encounters with an oeuvre to which he paid close attention in the halcyon years of the artist’s production. This is the case with the large retrospective exhibition that Ruth Fine and her colleagues at the National Gallery of Art in Washington have devoted to Romare Bearden (1911-1988). Certainly the most comprehensive survey ever attempted of this artist’s development, The Art of Romare Bearden brings together 130 items, ranging in size and importance from mural compositions to magazine covers and other marginal and ephemeral endeavors. As far as I’ve been able to determine, nothing in either the artist’s life or his work has been overlooked, and the abundantly illustrated and annotated 334-page catalog is likely to serve as the definitive guide to Bearden’s achievement for many years to come.
What’s new to me in this exhibition is some of the early work from the 1940′s, executed in the vernacular expressionistic style that was then a common pictorial idiom for painters attempting to align themselves with the politics of social protest. As an African-American, born in North Carolina and raised in Harlem in the Jim Crow era, it was all but inevitable that Bearden would ally himself with that imperative. As early as 1934, in an essay called “The Negro Artist and Modern Art,” Bearden affirmed that alliance in declaring that “An intense, eager devotion to present-day life, to study it, to help relieve it, this is the calling of the Negro artist.”
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Life's Abundance, Captured in a Collage
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N July 1963, a month before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington, Romare Bearden met with a group of other black artists in his studio on Canal Street to talk about what they should do for civil rights. "Western society, and particularly that of America, is gravely ill, and a major symptom is the American treatment of the Negro," Bearden said. "The artistic expression of this culture concentrates on themes of `absurdity' and `anti-art,' which provide further evidence of its ill-health."
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This folder contains articles, videos, and papers relevant to Full Sail's "Fundamental in Art 1" course.
Updated on Oct 24, 13
Created on Oct 01, 13
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