Ch 1 Questions

What is the relationship between your experiences and ongoing artistic work to your curriculum and teaching.
I think I tend to focus a lot of the ideas and themes I'm making art about into my curriculum. I also use my own experience with art making; drawing for example- (hate representational, love experimenting.. and some people are opposite) to create lesson plans where everyone is challenged but is able to do things they enjoy. I also think it's important to let students create their own bodies of work, based on themes they are interested in. I was never really given that opportunity in any of my high school art classes. To allow students freedom to research, brainstorm, and develop themes and create art is a really important skill in being an artist. 
I want to be able to show students my past work and the things I'm currently working on and tell them what I am currently making my art about so they can get a glimpse into how an artist thinks and works.  




How do you describe what you do as an artist.
I feel like I'm all over the place. I really like experimenting with a concept and making art about it, especially building off of past pieces I've made. I also sometimes just create abstract art based off the style of another artist that I like, and over time it develops into its own thing. A lot of my themes deal with childhood, compromise, and nostalgia. I sometimes jump from style to style, but try to take time to develop styles that I find to be the most successful. I also try to make A LOT of stuff, the more stuff you make, the better. I also will leave my works in progress alone for a while, to make sure I don;t overwork them. 

Drawing

These are just some ideas for teaching observational/representational drawing:

I will make a more concrete lesson plan later


-Blind contour of each others faces
-Drawing detailed still life with sticks
-Allowing students to choose a private place around school or outside to draw still life: have them think like a child, explore their chosen space and draw things that interest them.

Experimenting with colors, "copying"

Abstract Art 5th Graders

Talked about the definition of abstract art vs. representational art

Watched this VIDEO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kdzGAjG26s starting at 3:27

Talked about why abstract art is unique and why most people CANT do it. 

Talked about famous artists like Rothko, Pollock, and Frankenthaler and asked students to try to figure out how they made their paintings. 

Talked about what makes an abstract painting successful.

Students silently looked at famous abstract paintings and then wrote down their thoughts. Short group discussion about whether or not it is successful and if students liked it or not.

Experiment time: I gave short demos on how to paint with stick and how to make prints with sandwich bags. Set expectations for how to handle paint. I showed a list of verbs on my powerpoint of things they could do in their art making:

Swirl

Blot

Shake

Drip

Slide

Warp

Scratch

Cut

Splatter

Scratch

Rub

Scrape

Rip

Tape

Mush

Mix

Spread

Then, I played classical music and had students get to work! 

First Day Intro

Presentation about myself

Experimenting with colors:

Give students black, white, red, yellow, and blue paint.

Have them create as many colors as they can without repeating the same color.

The last part of class students will create their own color and name it and share it with the class. 

The Invisible Dragon by Dave Hickey

“Saying that the market is corrupt was like saying that the cancer patient has a hangnail”

“The arguments such artists mount against beauty come down to one simple gripe: Beauty sells. . .  Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells something else, it is a seductive advertisement. Art is not idolatry, they argue, nor is it advertising. Idolatry and advertising however, are indeed art, and the greatest works of art are always and inevitably a bit of both.”

“As Baudelaire says, “the beautiful is always strange,” by which he means, of course, that it is always strangely familiar and vaguely surprising. “

“For more than four centuries, the idea of “making it beautiful” has been the keystone of our cultural vernacular-the lovers machine gun and the prisoners joy-the last redoubt of the disenfranchised and the single direct route, without a detour through church or state, from the image of the individual. Now that generosity, like Banquo’s host, is doomed to haunt our discourse about contemporary art—no longer required to recommend images to our attention or to insinuate them to vernacular memory, no longer welcome even to try. “

“Should we really look at art, however banal, because looking at art is somehow good for us, while ignoring any specific good that the individual work or artist might propose to us?”

“Art is either a democratic political instrument, or it is not”

“The vernacular of beauty, in its democratic appeal, remains a potent instrument for change in this civilization”

“Yet the vernacular of beauty, in its democratic appeal, remains a potent instrument for change. Mapplethorpe uses it, as does Warhol, as does Ruscha, to engage individuals within and without the cultural ghetto in arguments about what is good and what is beautiful. “

“Because, in truth, if a senator didn’t think an image was dangerous, it wasn’t. “

“I am certain of one think: images can change the world”

“I would suggest, but after centuries of bureaucrats employing images to validate, essentialize, and detoxify institutions, to glorify their battles, celebrate their kinds, and publicize their doctrines—we now have an institution to validate, essentialize, ad detoxify our images—to glorify art’s battles, celebrate art’s kinds, and publicize art’s doctrines—and, of course, to neutralize art’s power. “

“There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never "plain," nor appearances ever "sincere." To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful.” 

“A gorgeous island of gaudy, speculative images was borne forth like blossoms on the great tsunami of doubt and spiritual confusion that swept through the late nineteenth century, cresting into the twentieth and exploding across Europe in a conflagration of wars and revolutions, scattering beauty among the bodies. By the 1920s, however, answers were once more available, assurances against doubt and confusion were at hand, and there were men in power to assure our compliance with these assurances”

Even though this book is hard to understand, I have been able to get the main ideas from it.

My biggest question is, I guess, how to we stop this pattern of dominance from “the academy”? How do we allow beauty to come back into contemporary art?

Another question, and I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot already, is, how do we make contemporary art more accessible? Or should it be made more accessible? I think it should…. I agree that the sort of elitist and highly educated contemporary art club is basically serving no one but itself. So, do we change how contemporary art works? That seems impossible? Do we make it easier for non-art degree people to understand and appreciate and feel welcome in the contemporary art world? I think that is something worth exploring…

Trip to LA

The Broad 

Jeff Koons

Robert Rauschenberg

Jeff Koons

Cy Twombly 

John Baldessari 

Infinity Mirrored Room- Yayoi Kusama

Mark Bradford

Kara Walker

Jean-Michael Basquiat 

Keith Haring

Robert Therrien

Leon Golub

Jenny Holzer

Josh Smith

Seven Magic Mountians, Ugo Rondinone