On May 23, we took a trip to the gallery at Plant Zero in Manchester where the senior show is. There were a couple pieces of many different artists represented. I was really drawn to the photorealistic oil paintings of mannequins in a window. The reflections were really cool. Audrey and I really liked the beer made out of bottle caps, as well.
These hyperrealistic paintings of haphazardly wrapped packages in bright colors are SO COOL. I have no idea how they are painted so accurately, it's incredible.
I found these oil paintings by Philip Barlow. I really liked how he captured the blurriness and circles that the sun makes when it reflects off of things. I especially like the beach scenes, but the city is more like the stuff that I do. He does portraits as well, but I didn't like those as much. From this article, I garnered two distinct categories of political commentary art. It dealt with the first question "Is art better suited to bearing witness or fomenting change." I think there are both. There is art that is clearly reacting politics and world events, and there is art that is trying to start something, and change things. I also think that art can have a little bit of both, as well. In Audrey's post about artist depiction of war, she talks about how the art is used as a reminder of all these terrible things that happened.
What I was mostly interested in the counter play between aesthetics, social commentary (content) and the growing art market, and weather or not one is ever sacrificed for the other(s). I think that work sacrificing aesthetics for content would drive viewers away. Artists that sacrificed anything for the economics side of things as well would also do the same. Another thing that I found interesting was a comment Layla Ali made when asked the question "How do you conceive your role in relationship to politics?" She talks about how she uses her artwork to explore her questions and make sense of things she wasn't so clear about. This made me wonder whether a finish piece would end up as more of a question, or an answer. These have the gestural brevity in the marks that we talked about.
This is what I'm going to paint. I'm going to do it pretty small just so there's not too much negative space with the grass and the path.
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