Easy Pictorialism Photo

Instead of posting a blog about a contemporary artist, I thought it would be interesting to talk about Instagram. And I am sure everyone is familiar with Instagram, a photo-sharing program. It is very popular where people share their digitally filtered photos with their friends (I use this too!) Recently, Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion! This shows that Instagram is just as popular as Facebook! I thought Instagram would be an interesting topic to discuss in this blog because it is photography-based program. However, this program uses filtering program like Photoshop, but creates ‘vintage’ touch for a nice quality touch. As I was taking this class, it reminded me of Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs. As we have already discussed in class and museum, Stieglitz’s filtered photographs are cropped images with ambience with painterly aesthetics. His photographs fall into the Pictorialism movement by manipulating the photo. Now, in the 21st century, with the advanced technology and Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the founders of Instagram, everyone can create personalized Pictorialism photo.

When I use one photo from my iPhone to create an Instagram phto, there is one process where the users ‘move and scale’ the image, which is relevant to cropping the image. This simple process is reminiscient of cropping the image we have discussed in class. To me, I have mixed feelings about Instagram. Since anybody with smart phone can create a pictorialism photo, the value of Stieglitz’s work goes down and people would not be able to appreciate Pictorialism photographs. And now, Instagram creates a

Tehching Hsieh

This has nothing to do with painting. :)

 I accompanied a friend to the Tehching Hsieh lecture a couple of days ago, being only vaguely familiar with his art beforehand. In case you don't know, Hsieh's body of work is mostly comprised of year-long performance pieces, spanning from the late seventies to the year 1999. These include: locking himself in a jail cell in his studio for one year and depriving himself of human interaction (a friend brought him meals and cleaned up after him, but they weren't allowed to speak), tying himself to another artist with a five-foot rope for one year but not allowing them to make physical contact, living on the streets for a year without being able to go inside any buildings, not being able to talk about, write about, or make any art for a year, and making art for thirteen years, but not talking about it or showing it to anyone.

The Rope Piece

 In order to verify the authenticity of these feats, Hsieh's work relies on a couple of things: a signed legal document stating that a lawyer was present/documentary evidence hasn't been tampered with, etc., and often, photography to document the process. I'm thinking, in particular, of a work he completed in '80-'81 called the "Time Clock Piece" in which he punches a time clock in his studio every hour for a year. He wears a laborer's outfit, and photographs himself immediately after punching the clock. In the lecture we viewed a video that had complied all of the photos. I believe it was about five or six minutes long, but it felt like an inffffinityyyy.

The Time Clock installation

I found a little chunk of the photo-compilation here:
 http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/one-year-performance/video/1/

Charles Sheeler's Flower Forms _Emily Song

Charles Sheeler’s Flower forms (former title) Forms-Flowers

Oil on canvas

Known as one of his series of botanical studies, Flower Forms is an oil painting done by Charles Sheeler in the year of 1919. Although few colors are used in this painting, the painting still shows dynamic energy that artist owns. Thus, the dramatic lighting and absurd curves of the forms clearly show Sheeler’s interest in abstraction and modernism. Furthermore, this painting is actually meant to be an extreme close up of a lily, although the painting lacks details about the subject. These arbitrary colors and shapes show his ways of looking at nature and how he applied cubistic ideas. As Sheeler avoided to comment on the direction of source of light on the objects, I love how the shapes and forms are lighted in various directions, as if they are displayed in a dark studio with hard lights.

On the other hand, while the subject was a lily, this painting was actually inspired by one of his nude photographs he had done in the same year, which was 1919. While we all know that Sheeler worked with photography as a source for his paintings, the model was actually his wife. After doing some research about this work, I started to view this more as a woman’s body. The big curves on each side seemed to represent woman’s body parts.  It seemed to me that this painting really becomes the artist’s portrayal of beauty. Overall, the abstracted forms and color really guide viewers to fantasize about different ideas and definitely serve the artist’s purpose.

Sophie kahn

Sophie kahn

‘Sophie Kahn’ used high-end 3d scanners, and uses the data to create analog outputs: digital prints photography. Her background is photography, and developed the application of new imaging technologies to the body. The idea of her work is making the image as trace; the residue trailed by a body or place as it moves through time.

The precisely engineered 3d laser scanners she uses were never designed to represent the body, which is always in flux. When confronted with a moving figure, they receive conflicting spatial coordinates and generate fragmentary results: a 3d ‘motion blur’.

Her work is good way to show how scientific image and technology cooperated and represented into created their own art. Her works are shows explore the impossibility of capturing as a new media of art more than a trace of the past usually photography did. As virtual image of her work, it represented human’s body into digital space, no matter time and light. Using human body, not only observing body shape, but also use organic object as subject and expressed abstract illustration to trace not only human’s body but also other nature object as her subject.

Artist Recreates 15th Century Portraits in Airplane Lavatory

http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/photography/sa-flemish.php


This artist found an inventive way to make art while in an airplane restroom. Obviously her means were limited by her situation, making the camera the most practical tool for creating these images. The huge disparity between the time periods and the means of production of the centuries old form of painting/portraiture she's emulating only adds to the project's totally delightful weirdness..I'm especially impressed with the creative and totally effective use of the flotation device.  From her website:

While in the lavatory on a domestic flight in March 2010, I spontaneously put a tissue paper toilet cover seat cover over my head and took a picture in the mirror. The image evoked 15th-century Flemish portraiture. I decided to add more images made in this mode and planned to take advantage of a long-haul flight from San Francisco to Auckland, guessing that there were likely to be long periods of time when no one was using the lavatory on the 14-hour flight. I made several forays to the bathroom from my aisle seat, and by the time we landed I had a large group of new photographs entitled Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style. I was wearing a thin black scarf that I sometimes hung up on the wall behind me to create the deep black ground that is typical of these portraits. There is no special illumination in use other than the lavatory's own lights and all the images are shot hand-held with the camera phone. At the Dunedin Public Art gallery, the photos were framed in faux-historical frames and hung on a deep red wall reminiscent of the painting galleries in museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

‘Snapshot: Painters and Photography,’ at Phillips Collection

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/arts/design/snapshot-painters-and-photography-at-phillips-collection.html?ref=arts

Interesting art review of a great looking show that speaks directly to earlier content covered in class regarding post impressionist painters and their relationship to photography. The work in the show is more specifically related to the Nabis movement (Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Félix Vallotton,Henri Rivière etc) An interesting quote: "But, as the smartphone has taught us, amateur photographers will happily trade perfection for convenience. And the Kodak’s drawbacks might actually have endeared it to the Nabis; the blurry, awkward images it produced weren’t much of a threat to painting." It's interesting to think of how a painting aesthetic can be so significantly influenced by something as incidental as a response to a threat by another emerging genre. Also interesting to note the huge difference in how Vallotton and Vuillard made use of their photographs. 

 Looks like this show will travel to Indianapolis this summer....

Digital and Traditional Routes

Jan Vermeer The Art of Painting

c. 1666-73; Oil on canvas, 130 x 110 cm; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Hi

I want to recommend a class in SAIC which I am taking in this semester.

I think this class is related with our class, 'Photography into Painting'.

The name of class is "Digital and Traditional Routes" in Print department.

This is a first sentence of Digital and Traditional Routes's syllabus.

Where traditional boundaries between media have all but disappeared, high quality digital

printing and non-toxic screen printing and transfer techniques have made it possible for artists to

combine, digital imagery, photographs, and mechanical reproduction with painting. This course

combines printmedia’s imaging processes with studio painting to create hybrid works complex in

form and content. Technical demonstrations and critical discussion will drive independent projects

that redefine the parameters of contemporary print and painting studio practice.

We learn various techniques;

1. photo-screen, exposing, processing, and mono-typing

2. transfer processes

3. printing on panels and canvas, mounting paper to panels

4. acrylic paints and mediums, making paint and ink, sealers, overprint and UV varnish.

-syllabus-

The instructors' name are George and Dough.

They are really nice.

Even if I took print class at the first time, I could learn diverse techniques very easily

because we have a demo almost every week.

Thus we can learn technically how to make artworks

which are related with Photography and Painting.

Also we can see specific materials for screen printings, photo-screen, painting, etc.

If you interested in making somethings which are related with images of photographs and paintings, you should check out this class!

thanks