Monday 13 August 2007
Scanning cyber land for Hopper exhibitions.
Through my daily wandering through cyber space i came across this old but most recent British Edward Hopper exhibition based at the Tate Modern.I don't know what i was doing in September 2004 .Probably just running around being a foolish 18 year old when i should have really been at this exhibition.When time travelling becomes a reasonably priced means of transport in london i shall go back to view the brush strokes of Hopper and save myself from going out with Wilson.
Until 5 September 2004
Final Days - now open every evening until 22.00
The Exhibition
Edward Hopper (1882-1967) is considered to be one of America's greatest modern painters. This retrospective exhibition is the first major Hopper show to take place in the UK for over twenty years and presents many of his most iconic images.
Hopper's enduring popularity stems from his ability to stage scenes from everyday life in a way which also addresses universal concerns. His contemplative studies of modern life, captured within the stark interiors of automats, motel rooms, diners and movie theatres have a timeless quality, transcending the hour and the place to become profound statements about the human condition. It is this quality which has inspired generations of artists, writers and film makers including David Hockney, Mark Rothko, Alfred Hitchcock, Todd Haynes and Norman Mailer.
Hopper believed that the artist's goal was to reveal the truth about the everyday and the interior life of ordinary people. His paintings are flooded with penetrating beams of sun or moonlight which expose isolated figures in sparsely furnished rooms, portraits of aloneness, absorbed in themselves and detached from their world. Another major theme of Hopper's work is the use of American venacular architecture, often cropped in a way to increase psychological tension and heighten the feeling of isolation.
This exhibition features seventy works ranging from his early Parisian subjects to the poignant portraits of American life created more than sixty years later. It also presents his iconic streetscapes of New York, including the much-loved paintings Nighthawks and Automat
Until 5 September 2004
Final Days - now open every evening until 22.00
The Exhibition
Edward Hopper (1882-1967) is considered to be one of America's greatest modern painters. This retrospective exhibition is the first major Hopper show to take place in the UK for over twenty years and presents many of his most iconic images.
Hopper's enduring popularity stems from his ability to stage scenes from everyday life in a way which also addresses universal concerns. His contemplative studies of modern life, captured within the stark interiors of automats, motel rooms, diners and movie theatres have a timeless quality, transcending the hour and the place to become profound statements about the human condition. It is this quality which has inspired generations of artists, writers and film makers including David Hockney, Mark Rothko, Alfred Hitchcock, Todd Haynes and Norman Mailer.
Hopper believed that the artist's goal was to reveal the truth about the everyday and the interior life of ordinary people. His paintings are flooded with penetrating beams of sun or moonlight which expose isolated figures in sparsely furnished rooms, portraits of aloneness, absorbed in themselves and detached from their world. Another major theme of Hopper's work is the use of American venacular architecture, often cropped in a way to increase psychological tension and heighten the feeling of isolation.
This exhibition features seventy works ranging from his early Parisian subjects to the poignant portraits of American life created more than sixty years later. It also presents his iconic streetscapes of New York, including the much-loved paintings Nighthawks and Automat
Sunday 22 July 2007
A Homage to Ana Rand
Through my reading of Terry Goodkind's works, i have recently come across Ana Rand.Her own work had influenced Goodkind,which further influenced the way i now see my life and my place in this world.
"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." Ana Rand.
Through embracing our own self worth.Experiencing and expressing what makes us feel happiness,we are then able to appriciate our life and how fortunate we are to grace these lands.
Commuication with one another via speech,words and the typing of keys can influences our future heroes.Therefore i shall make a small gathering of information i feel best captures the mind of Ana Rand.
Rand's writing (both fiction and non-fiction) emphasizes the philosophic concepts of objective reality in metaphysics, reason in epistemology, and rational egoism in ethics. In politics she was a proponent of laissez-faire capitalism and a staunch defender of individual rights, believing that the sole function of a proper government is protection of individual rights (including property rights).
She believed that individuals must choose their values and actions solely by reason, and that "Man — every man — is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others." According to Rand, the individual "must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life."
Rand decried the initiation of force and fraud, and held that government action should consist only in protecting citizens from criminal aggression (via the police) and foreign aggression (via the military) and in maintaining a system of courts to decide guilt or innocence and to objectively resolve disputes. Her politics are generally described as minarchist and libertarian, though she did not use the first term and disavowed any connection to the second.[2]
Rand, a self-described hero-worshiper, stated in her book The Romantic Manifesto that the goal of her writing was "the projection of an ideal man." In reference to her philosophy, Objectivism, she said: "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
Objectivism is a philosophy developed by Ayn Rand that encompasses positions on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics[3].
Objectivism holds that there is a mind-independent reality; that individuals are in contact with this reality through sensory perception; that humans gain objective knowledge from perception by measurement and form valid concepts by measurement omission; that the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness or "rational self-interest;" that the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual human rights, embodied in pure, consensual laissez-faire capitalism; and that the role of art in human life is to transform abstract knowledge, by selective reproduction of reality, into a physical form - a work of art - that one can comprehend and respond to with the whole of one's consciousness.
"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." Ana Rand.
Through embracing our own self worth.Experiencing and expressing what makes us feel happiness,we are then able to appriciate our life and how fortunate we are to grace these lands.
Commuication with one another via speech,words and the typing of keys can influences our future heroes.Therefore i shall make a small gathering of information i feel best captures the mind of Ana Rand.
Rand's writing (both fiction and non-fiction) emphasizes the philosophic concepts of objective reality in metaphysics, reason in epistemology, and rational egoism in ethics. In politics she was a proponent of laissez-faire capitalism and a staunch defender of individual rights, believing that the sole function of a proper government is protection of individual rights (including property rights).
She believed that individuals must choose their values and actions solely by reason, and that "Man — every man — is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others." According to Rand, the individual "must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life."
Rand decried the initiation of force and fraud, and held that government action should consist only in protecting citizens from criminal aggression (via the police) and foreign aggression (via the military) and in maintaining a system of courts to decide guilt or innocence and to objectively resolve disputes. Her politics are generally described as minarchist and libertarian, though she did not use the first term and disavowed any connection to the second.[2]
Rand, a self-described hero-worshiper, stated in her book The Romantic Manifesto that the goal of her writing was "the projection of an ideal man." In reference to her philosophy, Objectivism, she said: "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
Objectivism is a philosophy developed by Ayn Rand that encompasses positions on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics[3].
Objectivism holds that there is a mind-independent reality; that individuals are in contact with this reality through sensory perception; that humans gain objective knowledge from perception by measurement and form valid concepts by measurement omission; that the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness or "rational self-interest;" that the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual human rights, embodied in pure, consensual laissez-faire capitalism; and that the role of art in human life is to transform abstract knowledge, by selective reproduction of reality, into a physical form - a work of art - that one can comprehend and respond to with the whole of one's consciousness.
Thursday 19 July 2007
A selected review
On my escapades thoughout internet land i have found myself on most occasions accumilating a collection of reviews on Edward Hoppers works.I felt this abounding and ceasless mass of information rampaging through my mind too much for my brain to contend with.My eyes drift through cyber pages of words,critically analizing Hopper as a person a painter and an artist,but i cease to sometimes understand these sentences and short paragraphs of text.
So i succomb to the conclusion that i must provide myself with a focus.Selecting a review which i can in some way relate to,therefore i chose a piece written when Edward Hoppers works prevaded on these shores.
The exhibition situated within a gallery that i am very familiar with provides the words with more meaning for myself.I particually appreiciate how the Tate Modern has been conveyed here.The distibution and presentation of an artists work is vitally important for how an audience will understand and recognise you as an artist.You could say it is an art to creatively and seemingly effortlessly display these works of art.How the reviewer apprehends the anoymous minds,the nameless people behind this is rather interesting.
made anything reviews Exhibition Review, Edward Hopper, Tate Modern, London, May 27-September 5, 2004
Mark Rawlinson, University of Nottingham
As you enter the gallery holding the retrospective of Edward Hopper's work at Tate Modern you are confronted with a wall of welcoming text that begins: ‘More than any other artist, Edward Hopper has coloured our vision of America.’ The suggestion being that Hopper’s work is the axis on which our vision of America spins: no questions, just a statement of fact. It is difficult not to pause here, before one even begins looking at the paintings and drawings and ask; is this fanfare justified? Has Hopper really coloured out vision of America?The works on display at Tate Modern are culled from those regarded as Hopper's most significant and are arranged chronologically across twelve rooms whose aim, one assumes, is to chart the artist's aesthetic and intellectual development. I say 'assumes' because by Room 12 it becomes very difficult to identify what exactly changes in these paintings between 1905/6 and 1966: subject-matter, technique, form, none of them undergo paradigmatic shifts. So, in truth, this more an exhibition about recognition; recognising the importance and influence of Hopper in terms of his 'Americanness' but also the translatability of this Americanness to a transatlantic audience. But as to what Americanness might be and how its translates, this exhibition leaves to the audience. Two questions come to mind. Firstly, does Hopper's work deserve this level of recognition? And why, moreover, is it we seem to want Hopper’s America to be the real America?Such questions appear far from the minds of either the exhibition's curator or the multitudes of visitors milling around the exhibition. Instead questions have been fudged in favour of unsubstantiated assumptions but this will not diminish the exhibition's popularity. If the success of this exhibition is to be judged purely on the numbers of paying visitors, then this exhibition will surely exceed expectations. But then again, perhaps not. Hopper remains one of the most popular artists of recent times and one cannot help but think that an exhibition of his paintings at one of the nation’s most popular art galleries was always going to be a (financial) success. Therefore it is no surprise to find that the exhibition's exit leads visitors into what is best described as Room 13, where an extensive range of Hopper-ised products await mass consumption.Cynicism aside, seeing Hopper's work in the flesh allows us to explore the questions I posed earlier. This exhibition reminds us not only of how odd Hopper’s works actually are, in terms of their depiction of time, space and human relationships but how odd it is that people in their millions have hung these miserable pictures in their homes. The serial miserabilism that saturates these works has of course provided a rich buffet for critics of Hopper’s work to pick over—Hopper's strained relationship with his wife; his deliberate isolationism—but critique based purely on biography or artistic intentionality can only help us understand Hopper's vision to a degree. These images seem full of dead air and emotionally numb individuals. They are painted fragments of time, moments that seem beyond stillness, which are more than silence, because nothing can actually move and nothing can make noise. How Sundays used to sound. But, despite this other worldliness, Hopper’s paintings produce a feeling of the strangely familiar that Freud defined as Unheimlich: the uncanny. Freud’s uncanny, in many respects, accounts for the repetition of theme, form and content in the artist’s work, too. But do the artworks collected for the Tate exhibition support or contradict this conception of Hopper, an artist ignored in America by Americans for much of his career.Laid out from its beginnings to its end, one recognises a certain repetitive pulse in the work that echoes in practically every image on show. Although I do not believe it was the intention, the effect is to remind the viewer that Hopper lived through, and apparently, ignored, the advent and influence of Dada, Socialist Realism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop (to name a few) on wider American artistic sensibilities. In order to account for repetition, especially with reference to theme, the notion of alienation is scattered liberally across much of the critical literature on Hopper. But one has to ask what kind of alienation is Hopper painting? Surely, it is not enough to merely paint individuals staring out of windows to capture the social alienation of, say, poverty in America during the 1920s/1930s? When contrasted with the work of, say, Reginald Marsh, who captured more convincingly images of the alienated poor, Hopper's works are all stylised alienation; romanticised paintings of gloomy introspection which suggest but do not convey emotional depth. Where many scholars have seen this mono-thematicism as the dedication of the artist to his search for some kind quasi-divine vision, the truth is more mundane: Hopper had only a handful of ideas. The best of these is Hopper's stated intention to paint light, perhaps the most convincing aspect of his work. Looking at the paintings and drawings on show, it has to be said that Hopper's eye for light is delicate, knowing and convincing. He was not, however, the greatest painter of the human form. Hopper's men and women sit awkwardly on chairs and stoops, they lean against walls and counters in the most unnatural of ways; their faces and bodies are often vague, unfinished or just wrong, for example, see A Woman in the Sun (1961). When Hopper brings the elements of a picture together—whether an interior or exterior space, human form(s), perspective, etc.—things do not stand up to scrutiny; they become more like a plastic model formed by the impatient, gluey fingers of a child. Commentators take this awkwardness, this vagueness, this ungainliness as deliberate; these painterly aspects help convey exactly that emptiness, alienation at the heart of the American psyche; where the psyche of the individual and the crushing loneliness of the city converge. And I agree to an extent because bad painting does not necessarily equate with a bad artwork. But, there is more going on in Hopper's work than many have been prepared to admit: for example, Why does Hopper's work not 'work'? At only two points in the show are the more intriguing aspects of Hopper's practice put before the audience, aspects which might account for the unfinished quality in Hooper's work (that is, the abstraction of architectural details, not including text of shop signs, etc.). Both Nighthawks (1942) and Office at Night (1940) are accompanied by a series of preliminary sketches which spectators can then connect to the finished works. What one notices about these sketches is how much more competent and detailed they are in comparison to the finished paintings. But questions such as, 'what happens in the interim between sketching and painting, and is this deliberate?' or 'why the inclusion of inaccuracy?' fail to register because only these two works are contextualised in this way. An opportunity missed.For those of us who like Hopper but always felt the scholarship on his work too narrow in its analysis, too often an exceptionalist view of twentieth century American artistic tradition, this show is disappointing. This is because of a withdrawal on the part of the Tate Modern from posing difficult questions, either in relation to the work or in its own biases and presumptions. The circuitous path of the show is never under pressure to prove the opening statement; Hopper has coloured our vision of America because this exhibition says so; it is museum-sanctioned legitimacy. To be critical is not to be dismissive Hopper's work but subject the paintings to sustained critique because with Hopper it seems that what we cannot see is perhaps much more important and moving than what we can.
So i succomb to the conclusion that i must provide myself with a focus.Selecting a review which i can in some way relate to,therefore i chose a piece written when Edward Hoppers works prevaded on these shores.
The exhibition situated within a gallery that i am very familiar with provides the words with more meaning for myself.I particually appreiciate how the Tate Modern has been conveyed here.The distibution and presentation of an artists work is vitally important for how an audience will understand and recognise you as an artist.You could say it is an art to creatively and seemingly effortlessly display these works of art.How the reviewer apprehends the anoymous minds,the nameless people behind this is rather interesting.
made anything reviews Exhibition Review, Edward Hopper, Tate Modern, London, May 27-September 5, 2004
Mark Rawlinson, University of Nottingham
As you enter the gallery holding the retrospective of Edward Hopper's work at Tate Modern you are confronted with a wall of welcoming text that begins: ‘More than any other artist, Edward Hopper has coloured our vision of America.’ The suggestion being that Hopper’s work is the axis on which our vision of America spins: no questions, just a statement of fact. It is difficult not to pause here, before one even begins looking at the paintings and drawings and ask; is this fanfare justified? Has Hopper really coloured out vision of America?The works on display at Tate Modern are culled from those regarded as Hopper's most significant and are arranged chronologically across twelve rooms whose aim, one assumes, is to chart the artist's aesthetic and intellectual development. I say 'assumes' because by Room 12 it becomes very difficult to identify what exactly changes in these paintings between 1905/6 and 1966: subject-matter, technique, form, none of them undergo paradigmatic shifts. So, in truth, this more an exhibition about recognition; recognising the importance and influence of Hopper in terms of his 'Americanness' but also the translatability of this Americanness to a transatlantic audience. But as to what Americanness might be and how its translates, this exhibition leaves to the audience. Two questions come to mind. Firstly, does Hopper's work deserve this level of recognition? And why, moreover, is it we seem to want Hopper’s America to be the real America?Such questions appear far from the minds of either the exhibition's curator or the multitudes of visitors milling around the exhibition. Instead questions have been fudged in favour of unsubstantiated assumptions but this will not diminish the exhibition's popularity. If the success of this exhibition is to be judged purely on the numbers of paying visitors, then this exhibition will surely exceed expectations. But then again, perhaps not. Hopper remains one of the most popular artists of recent times and one cannot help but think that an exhibition of his paintings at one of the nation’s most popular art galleries was always going to be a (financial) success. Therefore it is no surprise to find that the exhibition's exit leads visitors into what is best described as Room 13, where an extensive range of Hopper-ised products await mass consumption.Cynicism aside, seeing Hopper's work in the flesh allows us to explore the questions I posed earlier. This exhibition reminds us not only of how odd Hopper’s works actually are, in terms of their depiction of time, space and human relationships but how odd it is that people in their millions have hung these miserable pictures in their homes. The serial miserabilism that saturates these works has of course provided a rich buffet for critics of Hopper’s work to pick over—Hopper's strained relationship with his wife; his deliberate isolationism—but critique based purely on biography or artistic intentionality can only help us understand Hopper's vision to a degree. These images seem full of dead air and emotionally numb individuals. They are painted fragments of time, moments that seem beyond stillness, which are more than silence, because nothing can actually move and nothing can make noise. How Sundays used to sound. But, despite this other worldliness, Hopper’s paintings produce a feeling of the strangely familiar that Freud defined as Unheimlich: the uncanny. Freud’s uncanny, in many respects, accounts for the repetition of theme, form and content in the artist’s work, too. But do the artworks collected for the Tate exhibition support or contradict this conception of Hopper, an artist ignored in America by Americans for much of his career.Laid out from its beginnings to its end, one recognises a certain repetitive pulse in the work that echoes in practically every image on show. Although I do not believe it was the intention, the effect is to remind the viewer that Hopper lived through, and apparently, ignored, the advent and influence of Dada, Socialist Realism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop (to name a few) on wider American artistic sensibilities. In order to account for repetition, especially with reference to theme, the notion of alienation is scattered liberally across much of the critical literature on Hopper. But one has to ask what kind of alienation is Hopper painting? Surely, it is not enough to merely paint individuals staring out of windows to capture the social alienation of, say, poverty in America during the 1920s/1930s? When contrasted with the work of, say, Reginald Marsh, who captured more convincingly images of the alienated poor, Hopper's works are all stylised alienation; romanticised paintings of gloomy introspection which suggest but do not convey emotional depth. Where many scholars have seen this mono-thematicism as the dedication of the artist to his search for some kind quasi-divine vision, the truth is more mundane: Hopper had only a handful of ideas. The best of these is Hopper's stated intention to paint light, perhaps the most convincing aspect of his work. Looking at the paintings and drawings on show, it has to be said that Hopper's eye for light is delicate, knowing and convincing. He was not, however, the greatest painter of the human form. Hopper's men and women sit awkwardly on chairs and stoops, they lean against walls and counters in the most unnatural of ways; their faces and bodies are often vague, unfinished or just wrong, for example, see A Woman in the Sun (1961). When Hopper brings the elements of a picture together—whether an interior or exterior space, human form(s), perspective, etc.—things do not stand up to scrutiny; they become more like a plastic model formed by the impatient, gluey fingers of a child. Commentators take this awkwardness, this vagueness, this ungainliness as deliberate; these painterly aspects help convey exactly that emptiness, alienation at the heart of the American psyche; where the psyche of the individual and the crushing loneliness of the city converge. And I agree to an extent because bad painting does not necessarily equate with a bad artwork. But, there is more going on in Hopper's work than many have been prepared to admit: for example, Why does Hopper's work not 'work'? At only two points in the show are the more intriguing aspects of Hopper's practice put before the audience, aspects which might account for the unfinished quality in Hooper's work (that is, the abstraction of architectural details, not including text of shop signs, etc.). Both Nighthawks (1942) and Office at Night (1940) are accompanied by a series of preliminary sketches which spectators can then connect to the finished works. What one notices about these sketches is how much more competent and detailed they are in comparison to the finished paintings. But questions such as, 'what happens in the interim between sketching and painting, and is this deliberate?' or 'why the inclusion of inaccuracy?' fail to register because only these two works are contextualised in this way. An opportunity missed.For those of us who like Hopper but always felt the scholarship on his work too narrow in its analysis, too often an exceptionalist view of twentieth century American artistic tradition, this show is disappointing. This is because of a withdrawal on the part of the Tate Modern from posing difficult questions, either in relation to the work or in its own biases and presumptions. The circuitous path of the show is never under pressure to prove the opening statement; Hopper has coloured our vision of America because this exhibition says so; it is museum-sanctioned legitimacy. To be critical is not to be dismissive Hopper's work but subject the paintings to sustained critique because with Hopper it seems that what we cannot see is perhaps much more important and moving than what we can.
Sunday 15 July 2007
A rich bubble
Walking through the fickle world of Bond Street, traversing through the stepping stones of the vain working suits whom tirelessly and sinfully climb towards a carnivourous intent to comply with their lusting, conceited desires.The never fufilling achievements and callously wanting more and most primarily craving and yearning for what others have. I can't help the streaming thoughts that trespass through me when I glimpse this breed of person and their beautifully designed and carefully manufactured, glossy magazine processed wife they choose to parade with in these golden streets.
My misguided analysis and examination of a person infuriates me, but the stereotype can't help but fester in my mind. I try not to brand a fellow human before I have taken the time to absorb whom they actually are under the mask they present to the world each day. This phantom semblence of how we think we should be.
This had been my first impression of Bond Street as I made my transgression and minscule imprint on these lands. My intention was to see how art is apprieciated and presented by these people. I found that my judgements intimidated me more then the people themselves. If you believe that something is exceptionally better then you, you will further be threatened and diminished by it, therefore making you feel somewhat bitter by its presence. All that is distinctly different about these indivduals is money. Once you strip away the sad materialistic culture you are left to contend with a very average human being. Once you strip away the money that surrounds the art you are left with the artist and the art work itself. I was left phased by the hazy money manifestation that surrounds the art work, not appreciating the actual work, but marvelling at the small price tag that rudely seizes your attention away from these beautiful works.
As I took my silent steps around these unwelcoming galleries, having to unfortunatly use my blondeness to stride passed the brawny, burly, sunglassed security. (This involved merely a smile, which saddens me as I would have liked to be challenged, though I suppose a 5'.1" blonde student doesn't particually appear remotely threatening). Well after being asked by the French Art curator if I was here to buy, which is complete madness as I was walking around Bond street with muddy trainers and a grey coat with a spaghetti stain vigourously smeared on the sleave due to my hard work of trying to remove it. Solely on my direful and dismal appearence he should have known I would never have £50,000 in my spaghetti stained pockets. I politely asked if it was okay if I could just view the Art work, or more so the art works price. I found myself peering at the price before my eye even considered to appreciate the work itself. Therefore my time spent at Bond Street was predominantly gorping at the exorbitant amount of money being exchanged for artworks which is rather sad as I feel art has become limited to a certain extent for the rich. I feel this intimidating cycle sadly enfringes others from appreciating art and therefore unfortunatly will never end as money and greed seems to always conquer all.
My misguided analysis and examination of a person infuriates me, but the stereotype can't help but fester in my mind. I try not to brand a fellow human before I have taken the time to absorb whom they actually are under the mask they present to the world each day. This phantom semblence of how we think we should be.
This had been my first impression of Bond Street as I made my transgression and minscule imprint on these lands. My intention was to see how art is apprieciated and presented by these people. I found that my judgements intimidated me more then the people themselves. If you believe that something is exceptionally better then you, you will further be threatened and diminished by it, therefore making you feel somewhat bitter by its presence. All that is distinctly different about these indivduals is money. Once you strip away the sad materialistic culture you are left to contend with a very average human being. Once you strip away the money that surrounds the art you are left with the artist and the art work itself. I was left phased by the hazy money manifestation that surrounds the art work, not appreciating the actual work, but marvelling at the small price tag that rudely seizes your attention away from these beautiful works.
As I took my silent steps around these unwelcoming galleries, having to unfortunatly use my blondeness to stride passed the brawny, burly, sunglassed security. (This involved merely a smile, which saddens me as I would have liked to be challenged, though I suppose a 5'.1" blonde student doesn't particually appear remotely threatening). Well after being asked by the French Art curator if I was here to buy, which is complete madness as I was walking around Bond street with muddy trainers and a grey coat with a spaghetti stain vigourously smeared on the sleave due to my hard work of trying to remove it. Solely on my direful and dismal appearence he should have known I would never have £50,000 in my spaghetti stained pockets. I politely asked if it was okay if I could just view the Art work, or more so the art works price. I found myself peering at the price before my eye even considered to appreciate the work itself. Therefore my time spent at Bond Street was predominantly gorping at the exorbitant amount of money being exchanged for artworks which is rather sad as I feel art has become limited to a certain extent for the rich. I feel this intimidating cycle sadly enfringes others from appreciating art and therefore unfortunatly will never end as money and greed seems to always conquer all.
Saturday 14 July 2007
A contrast of subjects is captured here.I am left pondering the dilemma behind this lonely soul.A single insignificant person she is in most peoples lives,as we all are in life.Though the lone usherette has been noticed.The loud expance of life and its surroundings have been dimmed,to bring forth light over this small essence of life.The subject,an absorbing film being viewed at the cinema,though we as an audience are being entranced by the lady whom we know nothing of,but left wanting to know more.This is what i love most of all in Hoppers works.The small and insignificant at first has been appraised and appriciated.
AN OPINION
ANOTHERS OPINION ENHANCES YOUR OWN. THEIR APPROACH TO A SUBJECT MAY NOT BE AGREEABLE TO YOU AND COULD POSSIBLY INFURIATE YOU. OR THEIR WORDS COULD STAY LINGERING WITH YOU FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. I BELIEVE FOR US TO DEVELOP IN THIS WORLD WE NEED TO APPRICIATE EACH OTHERS WORDS FOR US TO LISTEN,TO UNDERSTAND AND TAKE NOTE OF OUR FELLOW HUMAN. JUDGEMENT IS BASED ON AN INITIAL FIRST GLIMPSE OF A PERSONS PHYSICAL BEING,THE SHADOW OF WHAT WE ARE. JUDGEMENT NEVER WILL UNDERSTAND IF WE LET IT BE THE OVERPOWERING FORCE TO TAKE CREDENCE IN OUR EVERDAY OCCURANCES WITHOUT FELLOW SPEICES. WE ARE LOST IN THIS OVERWHELMING POOL OF EMOTIONS AND EVER SO COMPLICATED LIFE. WE ARE MORFING INTO A GLOSSY MEDIA POLLUTED,VAIN,DAVID AND VICTORIA BECKHAM FRENZY.WE MUST NOW TAKE NOTE OF ALL LIFE AROUND US. APPRICIATE THE ARTS,EDUCATION AND MOST IMPORTANTLY EACH OTHER, AND THE PEOPLE THAT ARE DEAR TO US IN OUR SHORT LIVES.
OUR IMPRINT ON THIS WORLD IS MINUSCULE,THEREFORE TIME IS PRECIOUS TO US ALL. DON'T WASTE YOUR STEPS WHILST YOU TREAD THROUGH THESE LANDS,AS WHEN YOUR TIME COMES TO AN END YOU SHALL FEEL DEEPLY WOUNDED BY SUCH A LOSS OF THIS CHERISHED THING THAT IS LIFE.
below is an art review of Edward Hoppers works.I have recently become interested in understanding others opinions of his art. This has greatly provided me with a broadened perception and knowledge of Hopper as an artist. Communication is vitally important with the broadcasting of any subject if we are to understand its true content in all its vast and possible forms. Every persons opinion brings forth a new exciting breath of life.
The Art World
Ordinary People
An Edward Hopper retrospective.
by Peter Schjeldahl
Why buck crowds to attend the big Edward Hopper retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston? Don’t we know this artist well enough by now? When I want to commune with “Nighthawks” (1942) again, I can do so quite satisfactorily at my dentist’s office, where, from a framed poster, the beaky dude and the bony dame at the wee-hours diner convey that root-canal surgery may not rate all that high on the scale of human tribulations. In fact, Hoppers in the flesh add remarkably small increments of pleasure and meaning to Hoppers in reproduction. The scale of the paintings is indifferent, in the way of graphic art. Their drawing is graceless, their colors acrid, and their brushstrokes numb. Anti-Baroque, they are the same thing when looked at up close and when seen from afar. I believe that Hopper painted with reproducibility on his mind, as a new function and fate of images in his time. This is part of what makes him modern—and persistently misunderstood, by detractors, as merely an illustrator. If “Nighthawks” is an illustration, a kick in the head is a lullaby.
A visual bard of ordinary life, Hopper imposed a thudding ordinariness on painting. The strangeness of this quality must be contemplated directly, and in quantity, for its radical character to register at full force. It is the basis of his universal accessibility. Laying the cards of his intention face up, it inspires rare trust, which steadies our minds to receive the living truths that the pictures tell. Hopper stands with two other American artists, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, whose likewise monumental styles also trashed prevailing conventions of good painting and have proved to be deathless.
The Boston show is so comprehensive a gathering of Hopper’s greatest hits—each a world, created ex nihilo—that it may best be described by what little it lacks, in that regard. I miss about a half-dozen favorites, including “Pennsylvania Coal Town” (1947)—a geeky-looking guy with a rake in late-afternoon sunlight between two old town houses, seemingly glimpsed from a passing car—and “Office in a Small City” (1953): a young man at a desk in a large-windowed corner office like an abstracted control tower, seen from an impossible point of view in the air outside. Both characters appear to daydream, absenting themselves from themselves, as people by Hopper do. Those are relatively late works, from the twenty-some ever less prolific and consistent (but underrated) years before the artist’s death, at the age of eighty-four, in 1967. One of the show’s curators, Carol Troyen, has deëmphasized that period as well as the busy phases, before the early nineteen-twenties, of Hopper’s long maturation, during which he practiced variants of Impressionism and, to support himself, worked unhappily as an illustrator. While including a great many of the watercolors, of New England places, at which he excelled—with light-struck, massy, hardly watery effects, even when they depict water—Troyen scants the revealing drawings with which he painstakingly evolved his painted compositions. This is an occasion for exploring not what Hopper was for himself but what he is for us.
There isn’t a lot to know about him, anyhow. Born in Nyack, New York, the son of a drygoods merchant, Hopper studied with Robert Henri and made three sojourns to Europe. He was almost six feet five, and taciturn. In 1924, when a show of watercolors brought him his first success, he married Josephine Verstille Nivison, a disappointed painter and his lively, obstreperous partner for life. She both resented and defended him. She insisted on being the model for nearly all his paintings of women. Childless, they lived on the top floor of a town house on Washington Square and, starting in 1934, spent nearly half their time in a starkly isolated house on Cape Cod. (Hopper seems to have liked places possessed of what might be termed negative feng-shui.) The couple read voraciously, often in French, and were compulsive moviegoers. Hopper portrayed himself and Jo in “Two Comedians” (1965-66), a late painting which is not in the show, as commedia-dell’arte clowns taking a farewell bow.
A good way to grasp Hopper paintings is to sketch them—never mind if, like me, you can’t draw. Just get the main shapes, including those of empty space, and how they nest together in the pictorial rectangle. Hopper bets everything on composition, which, in his work, is almost as tautly considered as in a Mondrian. (He didn’t so much hold back from modernism, from which he took what he needed, as see beyond it. He objected to abstraction only as Picasso did, for its limits on emotional engagement.) Hopper’s means are light and shadow, which establish the masses and the relative locations of forms. Raking light is the active element in static situations, as a stand-in for the artist, who inhabits his works everywhere and nowhere, like God. The light’s authority overrules worries about clotted textures and gawky contours. A wall or an arm is exactly as it is because the light, hitting it, says so.
Hopper’s is an art of illuminated outsides that bespeak important insides. He vivifies impenetrable privacies. Notice how seldom he gives houses visible or, if visible, usable-looking doors; but the windows are alive. His preoccupied people will neither confirm nor deny any fantasy they stir; their intensity of being defeats conjecture. Imputations, to them, of “loneliness” are sentimental projections by viewers who ought to look harder. They may not have lives you envy, but they live them without complaint. Another mistake that some observers make is to quibble with Hopper’s crudeness, notably in his renderings of flesh and foliage. His insults to taste are even instrumental to his art, focussing attention on what matters, which is drama. Clement Greenberg got it right when he remarked that if Hopper “were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist.”
There are Hoppers that don’t work, while others, in instructive ways, work somewhat too well. I have in mind “Office at Night” (1940), in which a preposterously voluptuous secretary at a filing cabinet eyes a piece of paper on the floor as her handsome boss reads a document at his desk. The light denotes sunset. A summer wind disturbs the shade at an open window. For me, the dancing pull cord of the shade is one of the choicest details in art history, as an objective correlative, in T. S. Eliot’s sense, of “memory and desire.” Seen from an elevated point of view, the wonderfully articulated lines and contents of the space cant toward the window. I just wish the office were empty. What will happen between the characters touched by the melancholy and erotic breeze? I don’t care. They are types from central casting in an overly explicit cinematic narrative, such as Hopper commonly subsumed to his vision.
Consider his second-most-powerful image, after “Nighthawks”: “New York Movie” (1939). In a corner of an ornate theatre, a pretty usherette leans back against a wall out of sight of a screen that displays an illegible fragment of black-and-white movie, watched by two solitary people. Dimmed, reddish lights oppose a russet cast to inky shadows. Parted red curtains frame a stairway to the balcony. The usherette’s reverie, if any (she may be dozing), centers our involvement. She has seen the film. Wanting to be elsewhere, she is elsewhere. Where are we? I think we are in Plato’s Cave, perceiving layered dispositions of reality—those of the movie, the audience, the usherette, the theatre, and the civilization that must have theatres. I comprehend the picture’s economy when I imagine something that is necessarily absent from it: noise, the clamor of a soundtrack that fills the space and assaults the usherette’s unwilling ears. Life goes on? No, it roars on, indifferent to all who have temporary shares in it. We exist in the middle of a rush so constant that it resembles stillness. ♦
OUR IMPRINT ON THIS WORLD IS MINUSCULE,THEREFORE TIME IS PRECIOUS TO US ALL. DON'T WASTE YOUR STEPS WHILST YOU TREAD THROUGH THESE LANDS,AS WHEN YOUR TIME COMES TO AN END YOU SHALL FEEL DEEPLY WOUNDED BY SUCH A LOSS OF THIS CHERISHED THING THAT IS LIFE.
below is an art review of Edward Hoppers works.I have recently become interested in understanding others opinions of his art. This has greatly provided me with a broadened perception and knowledge of Hopper as an artist. Communication is vitally important with the broadcasting of any subject if we are to understand its true content in all its vast and possible forms. Every persons opinion brings forth a new exciting breath of life.
The Art World
Ordinary People
An Edward Hopper retrospective.
by Peter Schjeldahl
Why buck crowds to attend the big Edward Hopper retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston? Don’t we know this artist well enough by now? When I want to commune with “Nighthawks” (1942) again, I can do so quite satisfactorily at my dentist’s office, where, from a framed poster, the beaky dude and the bony dame at the wee-hours diner convey that root-canal surgery may not rate all that high on the scale of human tribulations. In fact, Hoppers in the flesh add remarkably small increments of pleasure and meaning to Hoppers in reproduction. The scale of the paintings is indifferent, in the way of graphic art. Their drawing is graceless, their colors acrid, and their brushstrokes numb. Anti-Baroque, they are the same thing when looked at up close and when seen from afar. I believe that Hopper painted with reproducibility on his mind, as a new function and fate of images in his time. This is part of what makes him modern—and persistently misunderstood, by detractors, as merely an illustrator. If “Nighthawks” is an illustration, a kick in the head is a lullaby.
A visual bard of ordinary life, Hopper imposed a thudding ordinariness on painting. The strangeness of this quality must be contemplated directly, and in quantity, for its radical character to register at full force. It is the basis of his universal accessibility. Laying the cards of his intention face up, it inspires rare trust, which steadies our minds to receive the living truths that the pictures tell. Hopper stands with two other American artists, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, whose likewise monumental styles also trashed prevailing conventions of good painting and have proved to be deathless.
The Boston show is so comprehensive a gathering of Hopper’s greatest hits—each a world, created ex nihilo—that it may best be described by what little it lacks, in that regard. I miss about a half-dozen favorites, including “Pennsylvania Coal Town” (1947)—a geeky-looking guy with a rake in late-afternoon sunlight between two old town houses, seemingly glimpsed from a passing car—and “Office in a Small City” (1953): a young man at a desk in a large-windowed corner office like an abstracted control tower, seen from an impossible point of view in the air outside. Both characters appear to daydream, absenting themselves from themselves, as people by Hopper do. Those are relatively late works, from the twenty-some ever less prolific and consistent (but underrated) years before the artist’s death, at the age of eighty-four, in 1967. One of the show’s curators, Carol Troyen, has deëmphasized that period as well as the busy phases, before the early nineteen-twenties, of Hopper’s long maturation, during which he practiced variants of Impressionism and, to support himself, worked unhappily as an illustrator. While including a great many of the watercolors, of New England places, at which he excelled—with light-struck, massy, hardly watery effects, even when they depict water—Troyen scants the revealing drawings with which he painstakingly evolved his painted compositions. This is an occasion for exploring not what Hopper was for himself but what he is for us.
There isn’t a lot to know about him, anyhow. Born in Nyack, New York, the son of a drygoods merchant, Hopper studied with Robert Henri and made three sojourns to Europe. He was almost six feet five, and taciturn. In 1924, when a show of watercolors brought him his first success, he married Josephine Verstille Nivison, a disappointed painter and his lively, obstreperous partner for life. She both resented and defended him. She insisted on being the model for nearly all his paintings of women. Childless, they lived on the top floor of a town house on Washington Square and, starting in 1934, spent nearly half their time in a starkly isolated house on Cape Cod. (Hopper seems to have liked places possessed of what might be termed negative feng-shui.) The couple read voraciously, often in French, and were compulsive moviegoers. Hopper portrayed himself and Jo in “Two Comedians” (1965-66), a late painting which is not in the show, as commedia-dell’arte clowns taking a farewell bow.
A good way to grasp Hopper paintings is to sketch them—never mind if, like me, you can’t draw. Just get the main shapes, including those of empty space, and how they nest together in the pictorial rectangle. Hopper bets everything on composition, which, in his work, is almost as tautly considered as in a Mondrian. (He didn’t so much hold back from modernism, from which he took what he needed, as see beyond it. He objected to abstraction only as Picasso did, for its limits on emotional engagement.) Hopper’s means are light and shadow, which establish the masses and the relative locations of forms. Raking light is the active element in static situations, as a stand-in for the artist, who inhabits his works everywhere and nowhere, like God. The light’s authority overrules worries about clotted textures and gawky contours. A wall or an arm is exactly as it is because the light, hitting it, says so.
Hopper’s is an art of illuminated outsides that bespeak important insides. He vivifies impenetrable privacies. Notice how seldom he gives houses visible or, if visible, usable-looking doors; but the windows are alive. His preoccupied people will neither confirm nor deny any fantasy they stir; their intensity of being defeats conjecture. Imputations, to them, of “loneliness” are sentimental projections by viewers who ought to look harder. They may not have lives you envy, but they live them without complaint. Another mistake that some observers make is to quibble with Hopper’s crudeness, notably in his renderings of flesh and foliage. His insults to taste are even instrumental to his art, focussing attention on what matters, which is drama. Clement Greenberg got it right when he remarked that if Hopper “were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist.”
There are Hoppers that don’t work, while others, in instructive ways, work somewhat too well. I have in mind “Office at Night” (1940), in which a preposterously voluptuous secretary at a filing cabinet eyes a piece of paper on the floor as her handsome boss reads a document at his desk. The light denotes sunset. A summer wind disturbs the shade at an open window. For me, the dancing pull cord of the shade is one of the choicest details in art history, as an objective correlative, in T. S. Eliot’s sense, of “memory and desire.” Seen from an elevated point of view, the wonderfully articulated lines and contents of the space cant toward the window. I just wish the office were empty. What will happen between the characters touched by the melancholy and erotic breeze? I don’t care. They are types from central casting in an overly explicit cinematic narrative, such as Hopper commonly subsumed to his vision.
Consider his second-most-powerful image, after “Nighthawks”: “New York Movie” (1939). In a corner of an ornate theatre, a pretty usherette leans back against a wall out of sight of a screen that displays an illegible fragment of black-and-white movie, watched by two solitary people. Dimmed, reddish lights oppose a russet cast to inky shadows. Parted red curtains frame a stairway to the balcony. The usherette’s reverie, if any (she may be dozing), centers our involvement. She has seen the film. Wanting to be elsewhere, she is elsewhere. Where are we? I think we are in Plato’s Cave, perceiving layered dispositions of reality—those of the movie, the audience, the usherette, the theatre, and the civilization that must have theatres. I comprehend the picture’s economy when I imagine something that is necessarily absent from it: noise, the clamor of a soundtrack that fills the space and assaults the usherette’s unwilling ears. Life goes on? No, it roars on, indifferent to all who have temporary shares in it. We exist in the middle of a rush so constant that it resembles stillness. ♦
Monday 25 June 2007
ALEX ROSS WAS ONE OF THE FIRST ARTISTS I CAME ACROSS IN MY YOUTH WHO I JUST WAS COMPLETELY FASINATED BY.SIMILAR TO MY OBSESSION WITH EDWARD HOPPER,THOUGH NOT QUITE ON THAT SCALE.
WELL I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A FAN OF COMICS,ESPECIALLY THE SUPERHERO KIND.THEREFORE WHEN I FOUND ALEX ROSS I WAS COMPLETELY BLOWN AWAY BY HIS ACUTE TOUCH TO DETAIL AND REALISM OF THE COMIC BOOK SUPER HERO.I LOVED THE WAY IN WHICH HE COULD SO EASILY BRING SOMETHING THAT SEEMINGLY IS COMPLETELY UNREAL TO LIFE.
ONE SUMMER HIS WORK GOT THE BETTER OF ME THEREFORE I JUST HAD TO TRY AND MIMIC HIS FINE EYE TO DETAIL.
HERE ARE A FEW STOLEN IMAGES I DREW OF HIS WORK.
My own Hopper inspired artwork
HERE ARE A SERIES OF NIGHTTIME CHARCOAL AND CHALK IMAGES I HAVE RECENTLY BEEN WORKING ON,AS YOU CAN SEE CLEARLY EDWARD HOPPER INSPIRED.AS I HAVE BEEN LOOKING THROUGH HIS WORK OVER THE PAST FEW MONTHS,MY OWN WORK HAS TAKEN ON A FORM SIMILAR TO HIS OWN.I FEEL THAT MY WORK HAS MORE OF A DIRECTION AND CONSISTANT PURPOSE AT THE MOMENT.THEREFORE FOR THE FIRST TIME I AM VERY COMFORTABLE WITH WHERE MY OWN ART IS TAKEN ME.
THIS NEW AND EXCITING APPROACH HAS LEFT ME WANTING TO SEE HOW FAR I CAN TAKE THIS CHOICE OF MEDIA AND SUBJECT RIGHT NOW.I WISH TO FURTHER THIS
CREATION OF NIGHTLIFE ONTO A BROADER SCALE,BY TAKING MY FOCUS TO OTHER AREAS OF NIGHT THAT INTRIGUE ME.THE SOLITUED AND ISOLATION ASPECTS THAT INTEREST ME NEED TO TAKE UPON A MORE PERMANENT AND KEY ROLE WITHIN MY PIECES.
I HOPE TO START PRODUCING SOME MORE IMAGES WITH THIS IDEA IN MIND THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER.
THIS NEW AND EXCITING APPROACH HAS LEFT ME WANTING TO SEE HOW FAR I CAN TAKE THIS CHOICE OF MEDIA AND SUBJECT RIGHT NOW.I WISH TO FURTHER THIS
CREATION OF NIGHTLIFE ONTO A BROADER SCALE,BY TAKING MY FOCUS TO OTHER AREAS OF NIGHT THAT INTRIGUE ME.THE SOLITUED AND ISOLATION ASPECTS THAT INTEREST ME NEED TO TAKE UPON A MORE PERMANENT AND KEY ROLE WITHIN MY PIECES.
ROMANTIC NAFFNESS
What makes romance Naff? Or are all romantic gestures considered naff in this new age.
Have we, as a society over used the word 'Love', making ourselves over familiarised with romance.
Has our over use of romantic candle lit dinners, bouquets of flowers sent to the office and proposals in Paris, been ruined and are now considered naff, and unoriginal ?
My research has led me from love quotations, mastered by Albert Einstein and George Elliott.
To quotes drunkenly slurped by men, attempting to chat up women in a bar.
So when do these quotes become naff?, and does the meaning change, with whom relates them?
I personally feel that romance today has become cliché. Couples, novelists, artists, and poets
exaggerated emphasis on what is romantic, has become unoriginal, and tainted with its overuse.
A spontaneous romantic poem, is neither spontaneous nor romantic anymore.
With its words, sentences and structure seeming far too familiar and leaving you thinking
"Have I heard that somewhere before".
And unfortunately it was probably, an unintentional plagiarism of 'A red red rose' by Robert Burns,
or one of the 154 sonnets, crafted by William Shakespeare.
So does that mean the overuse of others romantic ideas, the stolen personal touches of romantic paintings, mimicked by another, have made this uncontrollable desire, this powerful emotion naff?
I believe that the constant mass produced and recycled romantic ideas, which have been used and re used over decades and even centuries., has tarnished romance, but was it always like this?.
When did romance actually become naff, and what is now considered romantic?.
Whilst researching romantic art ,I came across William Blake, John Constable and J. M. W Turner, the romantics of the painting world. Their works emphasized imagination, and feeling.
So did this freedom of painting bring upon the naffness that is now romance?.
I personally don't feel that their work is tasteless or naff . Or that it even holds a tacky aspect ,to its subject or appearance, but their technique of letting the imagination and emotions, take control of there art, could influence future artists and their work. Which I believe it has.
There are a new generation of artist, that have solely used the subject of romance to influence their works. Artist such as Thierry Bisch, Keith Haring, Raymond Leech, Paul Milner, Romero Britto and
Migdalia Arellano, whom play with the idea of romance, play with the familiar, the cultural acceptance of what is considered romantic. Create perfect and beautifully painted imagery, that we as a viewer, automatically envision as romantic. These artists use the idyllic aspect of romance, the vision that we all want and crave for in life, and use there craft, to manipulating the subject, enticing us into their paintings, their subject, our romance.
An alluring, flawless, immaculate couple, embracing one another , amid a backdrop of Paris.
This painting by Migdalia Arellano is sickeningly cliché, but an image like this is now considered romantic.
And even when I think of romance, I also see something similar to this ,but in reality it holds little romance, or emotion, it is the cultural ideal of what love now is.
And as we see this type of image so much, in our everyday existence, it makes the subject itself, completely unreal. We can't escape its alluring claws, following us around like a thick fog. Changing its form from film, to song, to painting, to poem, to a single day devoted to romance, at its pure naffness '' ST Valentines Day''.
It's canned, pre-packaged, processed, unhealthy convenience romance.
And if we pay too much attention to this artificial vision, this deluded, bewitching but enticing naff romance. Our idea of love will be confined, and restricted to what we see in this '' romantic art''. We will want too much from love, never valuing what we have. A romantic gesture will have to become more ambitious and aspiring, for it to be acknowledged and cherished by a loved one.
Society is easily manipulated by art, weather you know it or not, everything we see is art in some form. Subconsciously we take what we see, and either re create it in some ways, or crave it. I personally feel that its unhealthy to loose the reality of a subject, and in this case its romance. We want perfection, and have created a naff perfection of romance. Its fine to be absorbed within its warmth and comfortable grasp occasionally, but don't get tangled in its claws too long., as its sickly sweet visage soon will crack, pushing you back into reality, back in to the real world.
What makes romance Naff? Or are all romantic gestures considered naff in this new age.
Have we, as a society over used the word 'Love', making ourselves over familiarised with romance.
Has our over use of romantic candle lit dinners, bouquets of flowers sent to the office and proposals in Paris, been ruined and are now considered naff, and unoriginal ?
My research has led me from love quotations, mastered by Albert Einstein and George Elliott.
To quotes drunkenly slurped by men, attempting to chat up women in a bar.
So when do these quotes become naff?, and does the meaning change, with whom relates them?
I personally feel that romance today has become cliché. Couples, novelists, artists, and poets
exaggerated emphasis on what is romantic, has become unoriginal, and tainted with its overuse.
A spontaneous romantic poem, is neither spontaneous nor romantic anymore.
With its words, sentences and structure seeming far too familiar and leaving you thinking
"Have I heard that somewhere before".
And unfortunately it was probably, an unintentional plagiarism of 'A red red rose' by Robert Burns,
or one of the 154 sonnets, crafted by William Shakespeare.
So does that mean the overuse of others romantic ideas, the stolen personal touches of romantic paintings, mimicked by another, have made this uncontrollable desire, this powerful emotion naff?
I believe that the constant mass produced and recycled romantic ideas, which have been used and re used over decades and even centuries., has tarnished romance, but was it always like this?.
When did romance actually become naff, and what is now considered romantic?.
Whilst researching romantic art ,I came across William Blake, John Constable and J. M. W Turner, the romantics of the painting world. Their works emphasized imagination, and feeling.
So did this freedom of painting bring upon the naffness that is now romance?.
I personally don't feel that their work is tasteless or naff . Or that it even holds a tacky aspect ,to its subject or appearance, but their technique of letting the imagination and emotions, take control of there art, could influence future artists and their work. Which I believe it has.
There are a new generation of artist, that have solely used the subject of romance to influence their works. Artist such as Thierry Bisch, Keith Haring, Raymond Leech, Paul Milner, Romero Britto and
Migdalia Arellano, whom play with the idea of romance, play with the familiar, the cultural acceptance of what is considered romantic. Create perfect and beautifully painted imagery, that we as a viewer, automatically envision as romantic. These artists use the idyllic aspect of romance, the vision that we all want and crave for in life, and use there craft, to manipulating the subject, enticing us into their paintings, their subject, our romance.
An alluring, flawless, immaculate couple, embracing one another , amid a backdrop of Paris.
This painting by Migdalia Arellano is sickeningly cliché, but an image like this is now considered romantic.
And even when I think of romance, I also see something similar to this ,but in reality it holds little romance, or emotion, it is the cultural ideal of what love now is.
And as we see this type of image so much, in our everyday existence, it makes the subject itself, completely unreal. We can't escape its alluring claws, following us around like a thick fog. Changing its form from film, to song, to painting, to poem, to a single day devoted to romance, at its pure naffness '' ST Valentines Day''.
It's canned, pre-packaged, processed, unhealthy convenience romance.
And if we pay too much attention to this artificial vision, this deluded, bewitching but enticing naff romance. Our idea of love will be confined, and restricted to what we see in this '' romantic art''. We will want too much from love, never valuing what we have. A romantic gesture will have to become more ambitious and aspiring, for it to be acknowledged and cherished by a loved one.
Society is easily manipulated by art, weather you know it or not, everything we see is art in some form. Subconsciously we take what we see, and either re create it in some ways, or crave it. I personally feel that its unhealthy to loose the reality of a subject, and in this case its romance. We want perfection, and have created a naff perfection of romance. Its fine to be absorbed within its warmth and comfortable grasp occasionally, but don't get tangled in its claws too long., as its sickly sweet visage soon will crack, pushing you back into reality, back in to the real world.
Friday 4 May 2007
January 2007, The Month my Edward Hopper fasination began.
It was a saturday afternoon at work.I was on a much loved and needed lunch break.Time always seems to move at a distubing rate whilst pondering life and the lunch menu, in the form of the glorious and full of Omega 3 tuna and sweetcorn jacket potato or play it safe cheese .So as i plod along the lunch cue,gradually feeling that Pearsons Department store has got the better of me,and as always feared morfed me into one of their robotic customer assistant creatures.My eye captures this image,or should i say the image captured my eye.Saving me from this grey,colouless nightmere of work and jacket potatos.
What captivated me formost,is how very accurate the mood and expression mirrors the Pearsons employee whom walks through these lonely corridors each day.I saw myself in her isolated solitude,with her hazy focus engrossed on a cup of coffee,though her mind is dreaming of another place,or another worry.
The lonelyness is echoed through the isolation surrounding her,especially the dark,threatening chair,which looms ahead of her.The lights behind seemingly represent a way out,or a gateway to something more,though she has her back to the window,possibly to her way out of this sad isolated state which is ever so suffocating.I what her to peer round,and light the way to what lies beyond this bleak and utter darkness.You fear that she isn't ready as yet to lieve behind what has consumed her thoughts,her nightmeres,though i feel that one day the lady in green will peer round, showing us and herself what is beyond them lights.
Tuesday 1 May 2007
It has taken me 9 weeks to get this blog up and running,it wasn't due to complete bone idle laziness(well actually it was small part lazyness big part computer illiterate).The computer and i have not been getting along as of late.It all started on one cold, stormy night in December,when i was watching The Wizard of Oz for the 172nd time.My Mother arrived home from work with a brand new shiney laptop for myself and my brother John.Well since this laptop arrived the main computer that i use has refused to work.Why this is i cannot say,but i assume jealously is involved here.I can understand why the computer would be deeply offended by this younger,thinner ,faster and more attractive model,but surely that doesn't give it the right to delete all of my art work,essays,photos and various other personal items that i would have liked to place onto my blog.
This left me hurt and rather sad,therefore i banned myself from the cyber world for awhile to give myself time to reflect over the loss of my work and the rejection of my computer.We had spent many years together,and i just don't know if i can create the same deep and meaningful relationship with this new laptop.Well I suppose only time will tell.
This left me hurt and rather sad,therefore i banned myself from the cyber world for awhile to give myself time to reflect over the loss of my work and the rejection of my computer.We had spent many years together,and i just don't know if i can create the same deep and meaningful relationship with this new laptop.Well I suppose only time will tell.
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