Framing, Hierarchy, Roy DeCarava

Roy DeCarava, Graduation, 1949

Without the two main subjects, the girl in the formal dress and the Chevrolet billboard, this would be a very conventionally framed photograph of an empty lot. This balance creates a solid stage for these two unrelated elements to interact. Our eye is first drawn to the figure in the striking dress, contrasting with its murky, unglamorous surroundings. The girl’s posture leads us to the advertisement, which because of the way it’s cropped into, weirdly maintains its original graphic hierarchy, which emphasizes the text. Had the entire frame of the billboard been included it would become more objectified and less communicative. This relationship between figure and ad copy is further strengthened by scale, the billboard being at a distance which makes the car in close proportion to the girl. A generation before, during the great depression, it was a photographic cliché to show looming advertisements above soup kitchen lines. Here a relationship is established that is more complex and open to interpretation.

Roy DeCarava, Sun and Shade

 "A photograph is a photograph, a picture, an image, an illusion complete within itself, depending neither on words, reproductive processes or anything else for its life, its reason for being."

Roy DeCarava

Roy DeCarava, from the series The Sound I Saw

How to Make a Link 'Live' on Blogger

ART 125/FIST 318 Hannah Hoch's Gestalt Effects

 

Hannah Höch, Grotesk, 1963, photomontage, 9 7⁄8 x 6 5⁄8".

 

The principal of Gestalt, defined as 'an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts', was a popular concept used to better understand how humans perceive environments in the early twentieth century. Hannah Hoch (1889 – 1978) was a queer German Dada artist who used this idea to create collages that often create ambiguous juxtapositions.  Höch, has been identified by art historians as one of the most under recognized and under-rated female artists of the 20th century.  

Hannah Höch, Watched, 1925.

 

 Here we have an armed guard, whose head appears to be a simple egg, watching over an abstracted fabric flower, that looks a bit like a giant brain. Certainly we can speculate on what this combination of visual elements may imply, but the artist's intent isn't entirely obvious, and the viewer has to resort to associative logic to see, or feel, what this really may be.

Even when the artist's message has clear intent we are left with much to decode...

Hannah Höch,  

Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimer Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919-1920

Höch's most well-known artwork, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimer Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919-1920, uses the medium of collage to critique the political chaos in Europe After WWI.  The video below explains the social and political context behind this iconic Dadaist work. It also identifies the various figures in the composition and decodes a lot of the meaning behind the imagery Höch uses.  It is important to think about how this collage was constructed from commonly available printed materials which were then manipulated in a way that transcends each individual piece itself and exemplifies the fragmented political moment in which Höch lived.

An additional layer of meaning is evident in the title of the piece, Cut with the Kitchen Knife... The use of a kitchen knife as art-making tool is a purposeful statement critiquing the marginalized role of women in art and in society at the time.  Many men involved in the Dada movement at the time often expressed opinions about gender equality in theory, but in practice actually did nothing to support or promote the women artists associated with the male-dominated group.  

ART/FIST 240 Jeff Koons Doc

 

 

Most of the music is dropped-out of this rip, but you can imagine the original Led Zeppelin tunes they used. The Zep does appear when they cover southern blues...let's think about that. 

Everybody seems to have an opinion about this guy. It's my guess that any curators who would believe that the idea of 'avant-garde' has lingered beyond the beatnik age would consider Koons the last gasp of avant-garde in visual art.

ART 125/FIST 318 Georgia O'Keeffe's Colors

 

Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow, c. 1923, Georgia O’Keeffe.

 

Georgia O'Keeffe titled this work with the names of some of the prominent colors. The title here may become more of a poem than a description, alluding to the colors of a bruise and neglecting that it's largely a shade of lavender. It's a hint that this image may elude to a form of psychic distress, and the colors can take us there. Colors can be the ultimate subject of a painting, as mid-20th century artists who have painted monochromes have shown;

Yves Klein   Untitled Blue Monochrome (IKB 322)  1959

Pigment and synthetic resin on cardboard laid on gauze

8 3/10 × 6 9/10 in

O' Keeffe's paintings are my absolute favorite thing to run across in a museum. Her work often does not translate well in reproduction. It also doesn't really fall into some trend-of-past 'art movement' outside of a very organic form of abstraction.

Ends of Barns   Georgia O' Keeffe   1922

Sometimes it even veers towards a streamlined realism, especially in the more sentimental subjects of landscapes and buildings. But maybe this painting is ultimately more just about 'red' ? O'Keeffe grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm and quite a few barn paintings appear in her early work. 

 

The sign on the left marks the Georgia O'Keefe childhood home.

 

What's she's best known for of course are her enlarged flowers, her most accessible works.

Jimson Weed, White Flower No. 1 (1936) on view at the Tate Modern

In 2014 her Jimson Weed, White Flower No. 1 (1936) sold for $44.4 million, and O’Keefe became the most highly valued female artist ever.

ART 125/FIST 340 Frida Kahlo's 'Disrupted Symmetery'

Frida Kahlo’s 1939 oil painting “The Two Fridas.”

Between 1925 and 1954 Frida Kahlo painted 55 self-portraits. In most of these she confronts the viewer in a full-frontal, straight-on manner. This helps her bring you into her world. She wants you to feel her pain, and her passion.

'The Broken column' painted in 1944

Much of her pain was physical. Her health problems began when she contracted Polio at age 6. At age 18 a bus she was riding in was struck by a streetcar and she was impaled by a handrail and her pelvis, spine and leg received multiple fractures. It was during this bedridden recovery period when she began painting seriously. But she never did really recover. In her lifetime she would have 35 surgeries and would wear 50 different supportive corsets and a prosthetic leg.

'Self-Portrait with Monkeys' painted in 1943

Her damaged body did nothing to suppress the power that emanates from the inner self here. We are left to wonder what her understanding of 'self' really was and how she was able to so directly communicate something so intangible.

Much of the lore of her life surrounds her long, disrupted marriage to Mexican painter Diego Rivera. The well-known biographical movie, Frida (2002), is no exception;

ART/FIST 240 Printing in the Wriston Art Center Digital Lab

 The Wriston digital lab is in the lower level of the Wriston Art Center, in the near West portion of the building. Your LU ID will buzz you into the building and the room. Currently only one student can occupy the lab at a time. There is a sign-up sheet on the door if you wish to reserve time, and an 'un/occupied' sign on the doorknob. Only the back computer is hooked-up to the printer. Open your image in photoshop. If you set the screen brightness to 3 suns it will give you a good idea of what it may look like printed...most images need to be brightened up a bit. Check that the printer is powered-up. Insert an 8.5 by 11 sheet of the luster photo paper into the printer vertically with the shiny-ish side up, to the far right part of the paper slot. Make sure the printer dialog is set to 'professional'. Use this video to help navigate the printer dialog;

Most of these settings will not need to be changed. It is important to size your image so it is nicely placed on the sheet, as when we frame the 11x14s the amount of border, or bleed-off, is critical to the look of the framed image.