Category: Passion

Art:

I’ve always been captivated by the expression of ideas through art. Some of my favorite hobbies include drawing and painting. I took art classes through middle and high school, which helped me refine my skills and learn new techniques.

As a psych/pre-med major, I find it difficult to set time aside to paint. I plan to continue pursuing art by joining clubs at PSU and drawing whenever I get free time. If I choose to blog about art, I will talk about my inspirations and my attempt at continuing my hobby despite my busy schedule.

Guitar:

Although I grew up playing the piano and the sitar, I never stuck with any of these instruments. A couple of years ago, my friend gifted me a guitar.

Since then, I’ve been teaching myself to play easy songs and eventually moved up to more complicated ones. I found self-teaching to be frustrating, yet fulfilling. Playing the guitar soon became my stress relief, which would come in handy during finals season.

The guitar showed me that I love learning new things and challenging myself. It also makes me realize how nothing can be perfected without practice.

I aspire to learn more complicated songs, and to improve my picking techniques.

If I choose to blog about this experience, I would emphasize the value in self-teaching. We learn best when we pursue something that is truly an interest of ours, rather than forcing ourselves to like something we are not even positive we like completely.

My fourth grade home room teacher asked us to create Christmas themed decor for the class room. Although this sounded like a fairly easy ask, my perfectionism made it much more stress inducing than it had to be. I put in hours of research and preparation into completing this seemingly simple task. I wanted my elf to be perfect and unique.

Striving for perfection can be detrimental to the creative process. This was a mindset that I knew I had to break out of but would struggle to do so for years to come.

Everything that is created could always be improved. Art is never finished. The more you try to strive for perfection, the more disappointed you become with your end product.

Over the years, I have learned the value in being flexible and improvising. I noticed that I was more satisfied with my work when I trusted my gut on edits that I would make to my drafts. I learned that I have to be able to let my drafts die over and over so that I could create a final product that I was much more happy with.

Creating has taught me the value in being open minded. When you set a “perfect” goal you want to achieve, it is so common for us to develop tunnel vision. This impedes our ability to create something that would end up way better than what we set out to create.

It was hard for me to break my tunnel vision. My high school art teacher put blank canvas’s in front of our faces and asked us to just draw.

“Just draw.”

These words terrified me. I required a reference to create a piece. I was too scared to let my mind wander. It was my weakness at the time.

My high school teacher taught me to go beyond just what I saw. A key to creating art is to personalize it. This is how artists develop their own styles and genres.

After I had completed my elf and gave it in, I received so many compliments and words of encouragement. I would like to think that this was when I picked up art as a hobby. I realized how planning a project and executing it in a way that pleased me was so rewarding.

Art does not have boundaries or rules. This is one of the reasons why it has stuck with me for this long. I realized how I was totally absorbed into the process of creating the elf that the hours I spent on it felt like minutes. This was one of the moments when I realized the captivating power of creating.

Art is expressed in many different forms. Although it may not be explicit, architecture is also a form of art. Architecture is the process of planning, designing, and constructing buildings.

Sir John Soane is an English Neo-classical architect who recently decided to open up his country estate to the public after a 12 million euro conservation project. He built Pitzhanger Manor in the early 1800s in Ealing, the west London suburb to host his growing art collection and to entertain friends and clients. However, he was forced to sell it less than a decade after because of family difficulties. The architect’s “jewel box” weekend retreat served for much of the 20th century as a local library.

The Ealing Council took charge of the property and the twenty eight acres of surrounding parkland in 1900. They established a trust to oversee its restoration in 2012. However, the “Soanian” details of the building were hidden by Victorian and Edwardian additions according to the director of the Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery Trust. While part of the site was open as a museum between the mid-1980s and 2015, “the joy of the conservation project has been to take it back to the original Soane building”, Gough says. From 16 March 2019, visitors will be able to explore “every bit of the house” for the first time.

I have had mixed feelings about the renovation of historical sites and objects. I believe that these renovation can be greatly damaging to the authenticity of the object. However, it is an understandable course of action since a lot of renovation includes actions to preserve old materials. No piece of history is going to be able to be kept as it was. Damage is inevitable. But what worries me is the alterations that are made to older sites and objects. Alterations, as seen in Sir Soane’s estate, remove his personal style and atmosphere. It also rewrites the history and meaning of the original estate.

Architects Jestico and Whiles, with the support of heritage specialist Julian Harrap Architects, have guided a three-year project in which they attempted to reinstated “three key elements” of Soane’s design. These elements include a conservatory overlooking the park, a modern roof light over the centre of the building and a colonnade that linked the manor with a kitchen block. The team researched Soane’s architectural plans and drawings in various archives, as well as studying the fabric of the building itself. Detective work was also required to recreate the interiors. The upper drawing room has now been redecorated with Chinese wallpaper based on snippets that remained underneath the panelling. Watercoloring of the original room and surviving period wallpapers also aided in this process. Although they attempted to reinstate Soane’s style, I feel that it will never be as authentic as it once was. It will just be renditions of what they can understand from his portrayed style.

Pitzhanger Manor was essentially Soane’s architectural laboratory. This piece of history should not have been allowed to be modified.

While the museum holds the entirety of Soane’s eclectic collection and research library, Pitzhanger will have new life as a gallery for contemporary artists, architects and designers.

When creating an exhibition, a theme is a necessity that essentially pull together the variety of pieces created. However, in the fourth iteration of the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. exhibit, a theme was far from display.

Instead of imposing a framework, creators Anne Ellegood and Erin Cristovale have thoughtfully presented a wide-ranging selection of works by a group of artists varied in age, gender, and racial and ethnic backgrounds. Notably, a majority of the artists are women, queer, and/or people of color. Collectively, the artworks offer a multiplicity of perspectives while also sharing broader, often overlapping interests and issues, including the representation of bodies and bodily experience; environmental destruction and ecological concerns; the unearthing of repressed histories on local and global levels; and engagement with specific sites and locales in and around the city. The exhibition’s most significant takeaway was that issues regarding social identity cannot easily be isolated from considerations of lived experience, climate change, histories and mythologies, and spatial politics.

For instance, there were exhibitions that varied so drastically from each other.

In a moving display of persistence, endurance, and resilience, E. J. Hill stood stoically on a podium every day during the museum’s opening hours for his work, Excellentia, Mollitia, Victoria, for the entire three-month run of the exhibition. Surrounding him were a makeshift running track around the vault gallery’s perimeter and photographs of him (taken by fellow artist Texas Isaiah) running a “victory lap” around the schools he attended but felt excluded from in Los Angeles as a child and, later, as a queer, black adolescent and young adult. Although Hill remained silent as he stood on the podium, a neon sign that backlit his body asked viewers a powerful rhetorical question: “Where on earth, in which soils and under what conditions will we bloom brilliantly and violently?”

A number of artists responded to ecological concerns and environmental devastation, especially those wrought by the forces of capitalism, in their respective works. Carolina Caycedo suspended a series of large-scale fishing nets in a kaleidoscope of colors in the Hammer’s courtyard. Part of her ongoing Be Damnedproject, the nets were acquired during the artist’s time spent in communities affected by the building of dams and privatization of waterways in Latin America, and hung with objects collected during her field work to represent resistance fighters and inspiring people she met along the way. Littered riverbanks and smog-filled cityscapes appeared in Neha Choksi’s multichannel video Everything sunbright, a poignant rumination on mortality and the human life cycle, as well as the sun’s eventual expiration. Charles Long filled a room with papier-mâché tree stumps and sliced logs that resembled cross-sections of oversize penises, in a fantastical and biting vision of a castrated forest—and patriarchy.

The British street artist Banksy pulled off one of his most spectacular pranks during an art auction on October 6th. His painting titled “Girl With Balloon” appeared to self-destruct at Sotheby’s in London after selling for $1.4 million at auction. The work is a 2006 spray paint on canvas which was the last piece of Sotheby’s “Frieze Week” evening contemporary art sale that was being presented. After competition between two telephone bidders, it was hammered down by the auctioneer Oliver Barker for 1 million pounds, more than three times the estimate and a new auction high for a work solely by the artist.

As soon as the bid was confirmed, the audience heard an alarm go off. According to Morgan Long, the head of art investment at the London-based advisory firm Fine Art Group, who was sitting in the front row of the room, said in an interview on Saturday. “Everyone turned round, and the picture had slipped through its frame.” The painting, mounted on a wall close to a row of Sotheby’s staff members, had been shredded, or at least partially shredded, by a remote-control mechanism on the back of the frame. Banksy later admitted that “a few years ago I secretly built a shredder into a painting,”

Picasso once said that “the urge to destroy is also a creative urge.” This was the motivation behind Banksy’s bold move. It makes me think about the fluidity in art. What is the boundary for art? Are there any boundaries at all?

There is no doubt about the grand influence the internet has had on our lives. In ways that are obvious and not so much, the digital age has also impacted art and creativity. This was evident in an exhibition in Boston.

“Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today” at the Institute of Contemporary Art was an exhibition held in Boston that highlighted the impacts of the digital age. In the past few years, there has been a slew of far-reaching surveys exploring the internet’s effects on art, including “Electronic Superhighway (2016–1966)” at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and “Art Post-Internet” at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing; there’s also the website Rhizome, which updates its Net Art Anthology weekly with new entries. Curated by Eva Respini and Jeffrey De Blois, the ICA show shared artists with these exhibitions, and offered few new discoveries to those who closely follow this type of art. Instead, it was a wide-ranging greatest-hits collection that drew a line from yesterday’s internet pioneers to today’s.

This was not a straight line. Dispensing with chronology, “Art in the Age of the Internet” instead interspersed displays of so-called post-internet works with early experiments and net.art pieces. This made for some evocative, and instructive, juxtapositions. In the first gallery, a Nam June Paik video sculpture from 1994 was shown facing the HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican? piece thewayblackmachine.net (2014–), which brought together content related to the Black Lives Matter movement—tweets, YouTube videos, low-res news broadcasts, computer-generated reenactments of police shootings—that had been lifted by an algorithm from the internet. Further on, Judith Barry’s video installation Imagination, dead imagine (1991), in which a woman’s face appears on a 10-foot-high, internal projection video cube and gets slathered in goo, was linked with Sondra Perry’s recent works about avatars; Lynn Hershman Leeson’s dolls from the mid-’90s, equipped with hidden cameras, shared space with Jill Magid’s paranoid performances from the early 2000s about women under surveillance.

“Art in the Age of the Internet” captured the full range of the online experience, from the sublime (Camille Henrot’s 2013 video Grosse Fatigue, which portrays the creation of the universe through a series of superimposed browser windows) to the terrifying (Rabih Mroué’s Fall of a Hair: Blow-Ups, a 2012 series of pixelated photographs—each showing a sniper’s gun aimed at the camera—made from zoomed-in pictures posted online by Syrian protesters in the seconds before they were gunned down). The internet is a strange, beautiful, and scary place, and this show accurately portrayed just how much one can expect to feel within a single browsing session.

Andy Thomas, a painter based in Missouri, painted an abstract gathering which included current president, Donald Trump, leaning against his chair, having a drink with former presidents Abraham Lincoln, Richard Nixon, Teddy Roosevelt and so on. “The Republican Club” caught Trumps eyes even though he admitted to not liking most portraits that are drawn of him.

Thomas’s painting first came into notice when Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California approved of the picture and let Thomas know that he will be showing it to the president. Thinking nothing of it, Thomas continued with his daily life. Just a few weeks later, he received a call from the president himself. As the president typically does, he sparked up a conversation about politics and even asked Thomas what Trump’s reputation was in his town.

For someone who never expected any kind of recognition, Thomas was extremely pleased to have heard from one of his painting subjects. Being recognized for their hard work is definitely a great reward for any artist.

Thomas claimed that one of the hardest parts about creating the painting were the smiles. According to Thomas, some subjects have natural smiles that are easy to replicate in a painting. However, some have more of a forced smile that would not look natural in a realistic painting. According to Thomas, he had to scavenge through thousand’s of Trump photos in order to put together a smile that would be appealing in the painting. He also mentioned that he had the same problem with Nixon’z smile as well.

It was not until Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes on CBS, that Thomas found out his painting had been put up on the white house wall. During his interview with Lesley Stahl, the camera caught a glimpse of this new piece on the wall. As soon as the image was noticeable, social media websites such as twitter, worked its magic of creating a news headline of this event.

Although “The Republican Club” seems to be shining a limelight on past republican presidents and seems to be avoiding any mentions of the democratic party, Thomas did not completely turn his back to the democratic party. “The Democratic Club” parallels “The Republican Club” with the inclusion of past democratic presidents. Of course this would mean a favorable cameo by former president Barack Obama.

In this image, Obama is seen enjoying a get together with his democratic predecessors.

Thomas says that he had always wondered what past presidents would think of the current president. These paintings are meant to signify this thought process.

Vincent Van Gogh is no stranger to the world of art. In fact, if I were to ask a random passerby, they would at least be able to say that he was known for his art. However, how many people would know what Vincent Van Gogh looked like?

For several years, only two explicit photographs of Van Gogh were known to exist. That is, until the second picture was proven by researchers to be his brother Theo. Van Gogh is seen in the image above. This remaining photographic, that experts believe is the artist, is one taken when he was 19 at a photo studio in The Hague. Aside from his own interpretations of himself, portrayed through various styles of painting, no other accurate picture of him exists.

The photograph that was mistaken to be Van Gogh was taken in a studio in Brussels in the 1870s. It was thought to be an image of the artist at 13. It has been displayed and mentioned throughout history, since it was first publicized in 1957. But a recent investigation by the museum which owns the photograph, and a forensic scientist at the University of Amsterdam, found that it could not have been Vincent. 

The museum’s researchers decided to explore the history of the photo, and found that it was shot by a photographer named B. Schwarz, who moved to Brussels and set up a studio there in 1870. At that point, Vincent was already 17 and living in The Hague, so it was unlikely that the photo could be Vincent at 13.

Additionally, a Dutch television program tried to use experimental imaging technologies to age-morph the image of a 13 year old Vincent to the 19 year old Vincent. However, the technology seemed to be having trouble finding connections between the two photographs. This suggested that the two photographs were of two different people.

Mr. Teio Meedendorp, a senior researcher at the Van Gogh Museum, stated that Van Gogh was not very keen on photography or having his photo taken. He avoided it whenever it was possible. Theo, on the other hand, had several photos of himself. Hence, it is a reasonable to assume that this photograph was Theo, rather than Van Gogh.

Despite this misunderstanding, the Van Gogh museum keeps the original photograph in storage, because of its fragility and light sensitivity. It also displays a copy of the image in a section dedicated to Van Gogh’s biography. Mr. Meedendorp had recently stated that the photograph will be identified as Theo from here on out.

Van Gogh only became popular after he passed away by committing suicide. He became known as an artist who showed “where discourses on madness and creativity converge.” He was extremely lonely and depressed his entire life. This can explain some reasons as to why he would have hated having his pictures taken. He only attained widespread critical, commercial and popular success after his death, and is remembered as an important but tragic painter. Many artists are know to be just like Van Gogh, who were stripped of any recognition during their life time. This shows that anyone could be creating revolutionary idea, but would not know it because the world is not ready for that change.

Makota Azuma is the master mind behind AMKK, a Japanese floral art collective that has become globally popular for its experimental work with plants. I have always been astonished by the beauty seen in flowers, but Azuma highlights the beauty in ways that are unimaginable. For instance, Azuma launched a 50-year-old bonsai tree into space, and in another instance sent a colorful bouquet of flowers into the deep sea. These are forms of art that are beyond my expectations. He literally sent his art into outer space. These projects show that art can exist anywhere and defeat any boundaries.

Azuma’s creates a  dizzying range floral art, such as, Persian buttercup, hydrangea, cat’s tail lily, dahlia, Chinese peony, witchgrass and the flamingo flower. Even the blue throatwort and crucifix orchid make an appearance. He gives so much thought and attention to his work that amazes me. He does not stop at mainstream and well known flowers. He goes above and beyond.

“When I create a piece, I like to include the roots and bulbs, stems and dead flowers that are not usually used in arrangements,” he wrote in his book, “Flora Magnifica: The Art of Flowers in Four Seasons,” which was published earlier this year. “My goal is to work with every aspect of a plant, every moment, in order to discover the beauty of life.” Azuma focuses on all aspect of a plant, not just the flowers that are usually appreciated. He introduces the idea of appreciating things as a whole, rather than just the parts. By including parts of the plant that are usually ignored, such as, the root, Azuma highlights that there is beauty in everything.

Azuma’s process of converting plants into art is very intricate. The first order of the day’s business is to “wake up” specimens. With a pair of shears, Azuma cuts stems off every flower bunch and sprays them with water. He then begins assembling them into “botanical sculptures,” where flowers with different lifespans and blooming patterns are combined with both surgical precision and a profound reverence.

“We understand how important it is to approach flowers with humility, because the act of killing flowers is so selfish,” he says.

His shop fills orders for bouquets and larger arrangements for both Japanese and foreign clients, including the fashion designer Dries Van Noten. The collective’s works have also been exhibited worldwide and on fashion week runways.

A crucial part of Azuma’s work is also the photography that is involved in capturing his work. He creates dramatic backdrops that would enhance his work even more. He realizes that he cannot just focus on the main subject itself, but also its surroundings.

The uniqueness of his exhibits is what grabbed my attention. I have heard of sending humans, and even dogs, into outer space, but never flowers. He did this for the sake of art as well. To me, this is another level of thinking outside the box. Azuma is an inspiration to me because I tend to stick to realistic drawings of predictable objects. I have always wanted to be more abstract with my art. Although Azuma deals with real object and I mostly work with paint medias, his ideas show me that i can go beyond what is imaginable.

Ten French museums and their national scientific laboratory have begun a two-year forensic examination of all the Amedeo Modigliani works in French public collections. This is leaving scholars divided over how it might affect the forgery epidemic controlling the artist’s market. The project, known as Modigliani and his Secrets, will examine 29 pieces: three sculptures and 26 paintings. One of these paintings is a portrait of a brunette owned by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy and it is no longer considered authentic.

This is the first complete study on an artist in French collections since a project dedicated to Van Gogh was taken in 1999. The La M has 14 Modigliani portraits, which is the highest number in any French museum. This is because the uncle of founding donor Jean Masurel began collecting the artist’s work in 1917. This group of works was the core of a 2016 Modigliani survey which prompted the scientific initiative.

The Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France began examining the first works in May. Many museums such as, The Centre Pompidou, the Musée Picasso and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris are all submitting pieces to be examined. The national laboratory at the Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France will conduct scientific imaging and the chemical study of synthetic pigments. In Lille, the laboratory of the National Centre for Scientific Research will examine the organic materials. The study is said to be done in December 2019, with a publication and symposium expected to follow in 2020. This is the 100th anniversary of the artist’s death.

“Better knowledge is the best weapon against forgery”, believes Michel Menu, the head of the Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France research department. “Naturally, forgers try to update their techniques and it makes our work much more delicate,” Menu says. Initiatives like this will prevent the forging of art that was once created. It is not fair to the original artist when they do not get credit for the hard work and time they put into their pieces. “These are public works, by an artist who is very popular, so we have an obligation to present the results to a wide audience.” says Senot.

Forensic examination of paintings can be done in several ways. In general, scientists look at the appearance of the sample, which include its color, thickness and texture. Then they examine the sample under a polarized light microscope to view its different layers. Finally, they can use one of several tests to analyze the sample. These tests include fourier transform infrared spectrometry, solvent tests, and pyrolysis gas chromatography or mass spectrometry. These tests can determine the type of paint used for the painting, tests the paint to see if it swells, softens, curls, or changes color, and they can help distinguish paints that have the same color, but a different chemical composition. These techniques will help them identify any form of forgery that is created from the original artwork.