The Human Condition

Environment and the surroundings can influence both the artists and model and the expressions they paint into the painting. The background of each artist can affect the way they paint and what they choose to paint. I chose to study major artists that influenced significantly the history of art like Rembrandt and Gustave Courbet, and more modern artists that were influenced in later stage like Daniel Barkley and JKB Fletcher. My theme in my A-Level project was the disguise people use to hide their emotions and characteristics. We live in a world where people want to hide their emotions so they won’t be vulnerable to their surrounding environment.

Recently, people from Madrid found another painting that an artist did of the Mona Lisa. They discovered that this artist was actually sitting right next to Leonardo and copying him stroke by stroke. The only difference in this painting is that it has brighter colors and takes on more of a feminine approach to the portrait. The Mona Lisa definitely shaped history and is known to everyone around the world! Although not as three-dimensional as the painting in the Sistine Chapel, but definitely one of the best when it comes to capturing every aspect of the story, is Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper.

In ‘Transfiguration’, Olivier de Sagazan builds an existential performance based on layers of clay that he paints onto his face and body to transform, disfigure and take apart his own figure from the physical world that constraints his emotions and passions. Jolting viewers out of ordinary patterns of thinking. Sagazan’s face test his viewers perceptions of the totemic face, the grotesque face, the face in performance, the violent face—all the while creating a dialogue between past, present, and what’s yet to come. His concern with the diversity of facial expression and with the expressiveness of body language is a conscious means of breaking taboos against what is ugly, absurd or instinctual. Sagazan’s performance explores extreme emotional states provoking more questions than answers.

Art is the expression or the application of human creative skills and imagination, such as painting or sculpture, that can definitely produce works to be a appreciated primarily for the viewer’s emotion, where art can easily influences our feelings and emotions or aspects in life. It visualize the form of expression that might be the feelings, emotions, imaginations, so that they can use their skills on how to draw, paint, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, video or filmmaking and also on how to be a creative. Most of visual art is term for a broad category of art which includes number of artistic disciplines from various sub-categories. Means, it contains the specific subjects, style and the colors tone or combination. Art influences

Moreover, the images presented in Gehrke’s collection are intertwined capturing the urgency to paint, the transcendence of the artist from their body, as painting is an out of body experience, but also maintains the humanity of the artist’s by examining the fascination of the human body, medical crises and emotional turmoil. Michelangelo’s Seizure by Steve Gehrke explores ekphrasis poetry through crisis, whether that be the medical ailments of the artists, or the psychological and emotional associations for the artist. The poems, specifically “Self-Portrait Monet” and “Late Self-Portrait Rembrandt” are presented through emotional terms, associated not only with the circumstances influencing each artist, but the internal crisis and life consuming desire to paint what they see, experience and felt, to echo back and remember things passed. In fact, the poems “Self-Portrait Monet” and “Late Self-Portrait Rembrandt” pay lyrical homage to artists’ work and biographies, the remembering of love, seeing their wives die and trying to catch their lost images on canvas. Gehrke as a poet tries to explain the thoughts of an old man reflecting on his life.

Caravaggio's uses of symbolism in his work helped him create a name for himself. The ability to read his paintings from so many angles, like in the Sick Bacchus, is what has helped keep Caravaggio and his art alive. His ability to incorporate so many aspects into his work through symbolism and indirtectness, in some cases can be noted a s ingenious. Much of Caravaggio’s is a dissection on the meaning and conditions of knowledge. He can be explained as a "phenomenon which his contemporaries feared, admired, and did not understand (Kitson 9)."

Through what we have studied of the artist, we know that he sees various things in his own painting. He sees some figures, along with a castle and somewhat of a landscape. The artist chooses these mediums to try and express to us what he is feeling. There are a lot of jumbled images in this painting, all of which have the power to symbolize to us, the viewer, of the painter’s own inner feelings and emotions. Kandinsky’s paintings often reflected the things that were going on in his own life at the time.

Da Vinci engaged in the use of natural colors throughout his painting. The Mona Lisa was painted during Da Vinci’s late years before moving to France, it remains a subject of inspiration for many artists worldwide. It is most likely that this painting made Leonardo da Vinci famous. The fine details make a unique depiction of Da Vinci’s talent, high Renaissance period styles, because you can see that he used sfumato and high contrast from light to dark. He painted with natural tones.

His unusual pictures made him one of the most publicized figures in modern art. Dali passed through many phases of art. He painted his art in Cubisim, Futurism and Metaphysical painting, and he joined the Surrealists in 1929. He had a great talent for self-publicity which made him very famous. Throughout his life he cultivated eccentricity and exhibitionism.

For some, a portrait may simply be a study of physical likeness whereas for others it may be a study of the sitter’s character, their inner personality. This distinction makes it a challenging task to compare photographic and painterly ideas of what a portrait consists of. I must also draw attention to the fact that photography has been caught up in an everlasting struggle to be recognised as a fine art in its own right. When first discovered, photography threw painted portraits to the sidelines of the art scene because of its obvious technological and economical advantages. Many people at the time thought nothing could exceed these imitations as portrayals of people.