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Graffiti introduction
Graffiti introduction
Perspectives on graffiti
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Question: Investigate how Basquiat uses visual codes and symbols to communicate his intentions in a visual language. Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist who was born in brooklyn and died in NoHo. He emerged in New York as a gritty, street-smart graffiti artist crossing over from downtown beginnings to art gallery fame. Basquiat's form of art is painting, his artworks link to street art and include graffiti, racial inequalities and the fast-paced inner city lifestyle. He use visual codes and symbols represent society, the economy, politics, gender, and culture.
Basquiat’s artwork notary (1983) is full of symbolic text, codes and figurative elements that create a sense of rhythm that work on various levels to create meaning. In notary you can see American symbolism and Street slang mixed with references to history. the copyright symbol for instance is symbolic and links it back to his graffiti days. You can see the confidence in basquiat's work with the apparent random layers of the expressive spontaneous yet naive quality of the line of work. Notary draws us in with the scribbled words all over the artwork and leaves us guessing what the words means. The colours in basquiat's artwork represent anger, terror, fury and fear but there's also that slight element of hopefulness in his work.
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Even though it has eyes, a nose, and teeth, the painting gives us the illusion and feeling that the face is incomplete, and the bones are the coming through the surface from underneath. The head is filled with Basquiat’s graffiti, giving the impression there are figures and forms within the face, but when you look closer the face is just a lot of abstract lines and shapes. In his work you can see the anger and intense emotion he had from past experiences, this is what drove his art and reason why he was accepted in to the artworld and why his work is being displayed galleries across the
Vincent Van Gogh is one of the world’s greatest and most well-known artists, but when he was alive he considered himself to be a complete failure. It was not until after he died that Van Gogh’s paintings received the recognition they deserved. Today he is thought to be the second best Dutch artist, after Rembrandt. Born in 1853, he was one of the biggest artistic influences of the 19th century. Vincent Van Gogh created a new era of art, he learned to use art to escape his mental illness, and he still continues to inspire artists over 100 years later.
“A picture is a poem without words” – Horace, the purpose of art is to reveal the sensations of life but also allows humans to express their emotions and views on certain aspects. Jean-Michel Basquiat was a Neo-Expressionist painter throughout the 1980’s who was known for his style. He was African American artist and musician that was part of the SAMO. The SAMO was a graffiti group that wrote epigrams. While growing up, one of Basquiat inspirations that encouraged him to paint was his diverse cultural heritage. Basquiat was a creative self-taught artist who thought outside of the box when it came to painting. Most of the pieces he made were a collaboration of different ideas and constructed them together into a collage. During the 1980’s Basquiat’s art used the human figure to portray Minimalism and Conceptualism. His target market that were in many of his pieces was on suggestive dichotomies that focused on the lower class versus the higher class. Even though Basquiat work was remarkable, he was criticized and faced some challenges among his journey because of the symbols and words that were used his paintings. Despite the criticism,
The mixed reaction I have towards the painting is because, first off, I still wouldn’t know what is really behind it or what it’s trying to tell us without looking at it from a distance. When I looked at it from a computer desktop I could see a shoe, a mountai...
The composition of this painting forces the eye to the woman, and specifically to her face. Although the white wedding dress is large and takes up most of the woman’s figure, the white contrasts with her face and dark hair, forcing the viewer to look more closely into the woman’s face. She smokes a cigarette and rests her chin on her hands. She does not appear to be a very young woman and her eyes are cast down and seem sad. In general, her face appears to show a sense of disillusionment with life and specifically with her own life. Although this is apparently her wedding day, she does not seem to be happy.
Georges Seurat used the pointillism approach and the use of color to make his painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, be as lifelike as possible. Seurat worked two years on this painting, preparing it woth at least twenty drawings and forty color sketched. In these preliminary drawings he analyzed, in detail every color relationship and every aspect of pictorial space. La Grande Jatte was like an experiment that involved perspective depth, the broad landscape planes of color and light, and the way shadows were used. Everything tends to come back to the surface of the picture, to emphasize and reiterate the two dimensional plane of which it was painted on. Also important worth mentioning is the way Seurat used and created the figures in the painting.
As far as the human body is on the real and the anatomical features it fails to give an Idea of the human body in depth but an idea nonetheless. The painting in general is very proportional and in a way the people are proportional as a whole to the center; Jesus Christ. The main body part that seems to alwa...
The first thing to notice about this painting is how incredibly involved and realistic the brushwork is. The couple’s faces are so delicately rendered. Every wrinkle is visible and every hair strand is in it’s place. The soft folds and patterns of their clothing, and the grain of the vertical boards on the house, are highly developed and reveal Wood’s incredible attention to detail. The man, especially, appears to be nearly photorealistic.
If one came close to the figure’s stomach where there’s the seafoam green, one can see the strong mark makings of the paint brushes and knife strokes, making the paint come out of the canvas. Similarly, Brown also uses big paint strokes of different colors to direct viewer’s eyes around the artwork. For instance, on the left side of the figure, there is a big vertical downward motion of a brush stroke in maroon, that connects to a green streak that goes up and encompasses the figure’s head and then downward to the body of the figure, which outlines and pushes the figure to stand out. And to make our eyes go back to the figure, Brown paints a blue triangle on the chest, making it a focal point due to it’s dark color that stands out of the light colors. And if someone stood facing the side of the painting, one can see the thick globs of paint that would make the viewer take a double glance to see if it was either a painting or a sculpture, which reinforces the idea that the painting is coming alive and making one feel
Throughout the 1980’s, the graffiti scene was very familiar with the name “Basquiat.” Jean-Michel Basquiat is an American graffiti artist who was born in Brooklyn, New York. His artwork is mostly defined as neo-expressionism with a bit of primitivism. His medium was usually a combination of oils, acrylics and spray cans. One could look at Basquiat’s pieces and say they are as if a child scribbled on a canvas, but to me, there is more than that. I admire Basquiat not for what he is, but for what he is not. I believe it requires a lot of bravery to showcase your art that is less than perfect as in the social standards for fine art. Basquiat did just that and was still well respected for it. I feel as if he conquered in keeping his childhood creativity
“Speechless” is a black and white photo. To me the choice of colors from the artist already shows the type of tone that they want to set. Typically black and white photos set a more dramatic serious tone to me. The photo appears to be very heavy. The photo has Farsi text written all over the woman 's face along with a gun to the side of her face. The setting in “Speechless” by Shirin Neshat is effective an plays a very important role in creating the atmosphere and theme of the artwork. Without knowing the background of the artwork the person viewing it from the outside perspective might be a little confused with whats going on. The artist however has incorporated cultural aspects and cues to make the audience more aware of what is going on. In the artwork there is a woman covered with a veil. You can see half of her face and see that she has distinct characteristics that can lead the audience to interfere she is of middle eastern descent. Dark hair, dark eyes, thick dark eyebrows. She is also covered in various amounts of Farsi/Arabic text that also give cultural cues to the overall message that the artist is trying to convey. Giving these cultural cues to the audience give the audience context to the overall message of the piece. The character of this piece is the woman portrayed in the piece. She is the main part of the artwork as everything else surrounds her. The symbols in the piece extend
Georges Seurat was a French born artist born on December 2nd 1859 in Paris, Frrance. He study at École des Beaux-Art, which was one of the most prestige art schools in the world, which is also known for training many of the renounced artist we know. George Seurat left the École des Beaux-Art and began to work on his own; he began to visit impressionist exhibitions, where he gained inspiration from the impressionist painters, such as Claude Monet. Seurat also was interested in the science of art; he explored perception, color theory and the psychological effect of line and form. Seurat experimented with all the ideas he had gained, he felt the need to go beyond the impressionist style, he started to focus on the permanence of paintin...
images in this painting, all of which have the power to symbolize to us, the viewer, of the painter’s
The above painting is titled “Baluster and Skull,” and is a Cubism piece painted by Georges Braque. Like most of Braque’s work, it is painted with oil on canvas. The painting was created in 1938 just before the start of the Second World War. The overall painting appears to be a table, with obviously a “Baluster and Skull,” a glass, and a decorative wall. The baluster represents support, but what he is supporting is unclear to me. The skull could represent death, in which he could be influenced by the current events happening in Europe during 1938. The fact that the skull in one solid piece intrigues me the most. Everything else in the piece of artwork is put together by multiple shapes and piece, with the exception of the skull, in which it
The face is a central organ to personal identity. With it we can communicate human expression, feelings and characters with as little as the blink of an eye. On a deeper level, the face can be an art form that speaks to a universal understanding of the mind. Olivier De Sagazan uses the face to challenge conventions. He exposes human rawness and looks at cultural taboos. Sagazan’s artwork cannot be pinned down by language but by raw emotion. His unsettling performances represent visions of primitivism, agony, occult and other ancient cultural art forms that cover or deform the face in ways that can be both beautiful and confronting. Leading us to question, “What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?
The large body of the character in this painting is very significant. Just that detail alone shows that Basquait wanted to portrait strength through this painting. This painting was sold at auction for 13.5 million dollars in 2008. It had been held as part of the private collection of Lars Ulrich, the drummer for the heavy metal band Metallica, who decided to sell this painting along with Basquiat’s other masterpiece Profit I in order to raise funds to build a house for his family.He viewed himself as tough since he grew up on the streets and was homeless for years. Basquait once said he thought that he was going to be a bum the rest of his life, and by going through all that he did it made him a stronger person. “He was a street kid, true, a teen runaway who had slept on benches in Tompkins Square Park, but he was also a handsome privileged boy from a Park Slope brownstone who had gone to private school, followed by a stint at City-As-School, a destination for gifted children. Though he didn’t have a formal art education, he and his mother Matilde had been visiting museums since he was a toddler.” (Laing). Maybe