Throughout the art community, there are many different forms and techniques classed as art. In the recent attack on the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG), many of the public hastily judged the abstract art exhibition by stating ‘Abstract art is not really art’. Some of the reluctant public continue to say ‘Abstract painters are sloppy, reckless, renegades with no regard for rules for formalities.’ It is in my opinion that abstract art is can be classed as art because it incorporates the basic concepts and techniques of art. Abstract art, on dictionary.com, can be defined as a trend in painting and sculpture in the twentieth century. Abstract art seeks to separate from traditional representation of physical objects. Abstract art explores the relationships of forms and colours, whereas more traditional art symbolizes the world in familiar images. In the words of Pablo Picasso ‘The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?’ Although countless of mind-blowing abstract artists, two whom fully capture the essence of abstract is Jackson Pollock and Yasko Yokoyama.
Paul Jackson Pollock, born on the 28th January 1912, grew up in the small town of Cody, Wyoming, United States of America. Born to Stella McClure and LeRoy McCoy Pollock, Jackson Pollock was the fifth and youngest son. Throughout his early days, Pollock was exposed to many different artists affecting his style of work. These ranging from Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco to David Alfaro Siquieros. Their experimental techniques and large scale art had a lasting impact on Pollock. Pollock was an artist that “lived hard and died young”. Throughout his life, Pollock struggled heavily with alcohol. Pollock was a major player in the Abstract Expression...
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Works Cited
1. Boddy-Evans, M. ©2011 Abstract Art: An Introduction
2. Dictionary.com, LLC. Copyright © 2011 Abstract Art Definition
3. Author Unknown, © paintings. Name, Abstract art paintings, viewed on the 6th April, 2011.
4. Last modified on the 7th September 2010, © Yasko Yokoyama, viewed on the 28th march, 2011.
5. Author Unknown, ©2011 About.com, Quotes from Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), viewed on the 1st April, 2011.
6. Author Unknown,© 2001 - 2011 BrainyQuote, Pablo Picasso Quotes, viewed on the 18th March 2011.
January 28, 1912, Paul Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming. He was the youngest of five boys, and began taking an interest in art after his oldest brother, Charles Pollock. He later enrolled at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, first doing sculptures, and then later doing paintings. After getting kicked out for starting fights, he moved to New York and shadowed Thomas Hart Benton, attending the Art Students League. Benton’s family took Jackson under their wing. But after his father died suddenly, Pollock became depressed. This lead to excessive drinking and the threatening of Charles’ wife with an ax that he threw at one of Charles’ paintings scheduled for an upcoming exhibition. He was then kicked out, and the Great Depression started to take place.
Rathnasambhava, the Transcendent Buddha of the South and Madonna Enthroned are very similar images that were produced by very different cultures. Both images were produced during the 13th Century. The image of Rathnasambhava, the Transcendent Buddha of the South was produced in Tibet during an interesting period of the country’s religious history. The branch of Tibetan Buddhism is led by a religious and sometimes political leader called the Dalai Lama. It was during the 13th Century during the reign of Kublai Khan, around the time of the production of this painting, that Tibet experienced the first incarnation of the Dalai Lama. One has to wonder if this painting is somehow related to that occurrence. According to one source, the reincarnation system for the Living Buddhas is the main point distinguishing Tibetan Buddhism from other forms of Buddhism.
Visually, both Wassily Kandinsky’s Composition VII and Jackson Pollock’s No. 2 constitute a chaotic arrangement of colors and images with no apparent relation to one another. The randomly scattered paint, large canvas, and over-clamped figures all build a similar visual chaos in both paintings. Despite the mayhem, the two paintings differ in the inner emotions each artist wanted to express and the nature of the “chaos.” While for Kandinsky the chaos represents the smooth and melodic sentiments raised by music, for Pollock the chaos depicts the more spontaneous and impulsive emotions. The authors’ differing goals lead Kandinsky to ponder and refine his painting to capture a more universal theme and Pollock to develop his “drip” painting method
References 2, 7, 8- "Vincent Van Gogh- Portrait of an Artist" Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, pages 7, 85, and 86. Published in 2001.
Crooked Beak of Heaven Mask is a big bird-figure mask from late nineteenth century made by Kwakwaka’wakw tribe. Black is a broad color over the entire mask. Red and white are used partially around its eyes, mouth, nose, and beak. Its beak and mouth are made to be opened, and this leads us to the important fact in both formal analysis and historical or cultural understanding: Transformation theme. Keeping that in mind, I would like to state formal analysis that I concluded from the artwork itself without connecting to cultural background. Then I would go further analysis relating artistic features to social, historical, and cultural background and figure out what this art meant to those people.
Jackson Pollock was an American abstract artist born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912. He was the youngest of his five brothers. Even though he was born on a farm, he never milked a cow and he was terrified of horses because he grew up in California. He dropped out of high school at the age of seventeen and proceeded to move to New York City with his older brother, Charles, and studied with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. Thomas Benton was already a great artist at the time in which Pollock studied with him. Benton acted like the father figure in Pollock’s life to replace the original that wasn’t there. Benton was known for his large murals that appear on ceilings or walls. “Jack was a rebellious sort at all times,” recalls his classmate and friend, artist Harold Lehman. He grew his hair long and helped pen a manifesto denouncing athletics, even though “he had a muscular build and the school wanted to put him on the football team,” says former teacher Doug Lemon. Pollock always was upset with himself in his studies because he had troubles drawing things like they were supposed to look. From 1938 to 1942, Jackson joined a Mexican workshop of people with a painter named David Siqueiros. This workshop painted the murals for the WPA Federal Art Projects. This new group of people started experimenting with new types of paint and new ways of applying it to large canvas. People say that this time period was when Jackson was stimulated with ideas from looking at the Mexican or WPA murals. Looking at paintings from Picasso and the surrealists also inspired Jackson at this time. The type of paint they used was mixing oil colors with paint used for painting cars. Jackson noticed that the shapes and colors they created were just as beautiful as anything else was. Jackson realized that you didn’t have to be able to draw perfect to make beautiful paintings. Jackson started developing a whole new way of painting that he had never tried before and his paintings were starting to look totally different from before.
Pablo Picasso was fostered for creation, his love for the work he did and for the people he shared it with led him to be the most dominant artist of the 20th century. The foundation for Picasso’s successful life was set early on. He was brought into this world by mother, Maria Picasso Lopez (Bernadac and Bouchet 18), and father, Don Jose Ruiz Blasco (Cabanne 1), on October 25th in 1881, at 11:15 p.m. (Bernadac and Bouchet 17). It was a difficult birth and Pablo was a weak baby, so weak the midwife believed he was a stillborn (Pablo Picasso Biography 8). It was his uncle who realized he was alive, he blew cigar smoke in Pablo’s face to see if the baby would react; when he scowled they all knew Pablo was alive (Pablo Picasso Biography 8). Pablo
Mark Rothko, born as Marcus Rothkowitz, was born September 25, 1903 in Gvinsk, Russia and by the age of ten had emigrated to the United States with his parents. He attended Yale University in the early 1920's, but never completed his formal education there. In 1925 he entered studies at the Art Students League in New York City where he started painting under the instruction of Max Weber. Although he studied under Max Weber he still considered himself as basically a self-taught painter. In the 1930's and 1940's he went through phases influenced by Expressionism and Surrealism, but from about 1947 he began to develop his own distinctive style for which he is known for today. Critics labeled Mark Rothko as an Abstract Expressionist, but defiantly he argued this association by his peers, because he did not want to be known for a certain style. When Rothko started painting, his work was more symbolic than...
Pablo Ruiz y Picasso was born on October 25, 1881to Maria Picasso Lopez and father Jose Ruiz Blasco in Malaga, Spain. He was influenced in his early days by his father who was a painter and an art teacher. His first lesson was in 1888 and his drawing reflects a passion of his father, a fascination with bullfights. In 1891, Picasso moved with his family to Coruna where he enrolled in his father’s classes in ornamental drawing at the Escuela de Bellas Artes before progressing to drawing from figures and plaster casts and to painting from nature. In 1894, he experimented with more biting caricatures and satirical sketches in manuscript newspaper variously titled “Azul y blanco and La Coruna.” When he was 14 years, he began to study at the School of Fine Art in La Coruna. In 1895, he produced about 15 oil portraits (Petersen, 2005).
Introduction Upon my first encounter with Kandinsky's painting, my eyes and indeed my mind were overcome with a sense of puzzlement, as it seemed impossible to decipher what lay beneath his passionate use of colour and distorted forms. Kandinsky hoped by freeing colour from its representational restrictions, it, like music could conjure up a series of emotions in the soul of viewer, reinforced by corresponding forms. Throughout this essay, I will follow Kandinsky's quest for a pure, abstract art and attempt to determine whether his passionate belief in this spiritual art and his theories on its effects on the soul, can truly be felt and appreciated by the average viewer, who at first glance would most likely view Kandinsky's paintings as simply abstract. Kandinsky was indeed a visionary, an artist who through his theoretical ideas of creating a new pictorial language sought to revolutionize the art of the twentieth-century. Regarded as the founder of abstract painting, he broke free from arts traditional limitations and invented the first painting for paintings sake, whereby the dissolution of the object and subsequent promotion of colour and form became means of expression in their own right.
Pablo Picasso was born into a poor family in southern Spain in 1881. He started as a child prodigy and ended as the greatest painter of his time. Picasso received early training with his father, a small-town drawing teacher. Picasso showed that he had natural talent and had taken his father’s teaching to a new level. After some time in and out of sessions at art school in Madrid and Barcelona, Picasso spent the rest of his adolescence associating with a group of Catalan modernists who met and worked together at Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona. After some time there, he moved to Paris, where he quickly found of like-minded poets and painters. His work during that time began to attract serious critical attention and acclaim by the time he was twenty.
This quote is embedded in my mind as I think of Rodchenko’s line of work and how he was against the painterly aesthetic but managed to undertake painting once again in the last years of his career. A medium that he left forgotten throughout his work describes both the start and end of his career.
"Quotations by Subject: Art." The Quotation Page. QuotationsPage.com and Michael Moncur. Web. 23 Feb. 2015. .
Throughout the ages art has played a crucial role in life. Art is universal and because art is everywhere, we experience it on a daily basis. From the houses we live in (architecture) to the movies we see (theatre) to the books that we read (literature). Even in ancient culture art has played a crucial role. In prehistoric times cave dwellers drew on the wall of caves to record history. In biblical times paintings recorded the life and death of Christ. Throughout time art has recorded history. Most art is created for a specific reason or purpose, it has a way of expressing ideas and beliefs, and it can record the experiences of all people.
Art can be defined in many ways by an individual. One can say that any creative output by a person is considered art. Others contend that art must conform to a societal standard and the basis of the creation should be understood by most intellectual people. For example, some contend that computer-generated images, such as fractals, are not art due to the large role played by a computer. E.O. Wilson states “the exclusive role of the arts is to intensify aesthetic and emotional response. Works of art communicate feeling directly from mind to mind, with no intent to explain why the impact occurs” (218). A simple definition may be that art is the physical expression of the ideals formed by the mind.