Blog 6

*late post that should have been for November 11

During my latest project, I studied the work of Renée Magritte, and specifically his piece "The Treachery of Images". I can say that I learned how tedious it must have been for him to have painted this because painting smooth and seamless letters (actual letters, like a, b, c) is quite the challenge. I honestly haven't looked at many other artists because it is difficult for me to find artists who have work that relates to what I am doing, but I'm working on that. Formally, (in my project) I wanted to achieve a clear and opaque background with smooth lettering, including the words that I chose to keep and/or cut out of the piece (altering from the original). I wanted the phone in the middle to have an imaginary texture similar to that of the pipe in the original piece. Conceptually, this piece shows a change in society, but also has the same idea of Magritte's piece, meaning that the picture is a phone, but it isn't really a phone...but it is a phone (it gets kind of confusing). Magritte said "Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see."
This can somewhat reply to my technology statements. We often hide true relationships with family and friends with our technology, and although we may keep in touch with them through smart phones and laptops and tablets, that is the exact thing that can mask a real relationship with them. We want to see them, but they are hidden by our technology. ((more to come in the next blog I'm making up, hopefully with a new artist to talk about))

Blog 5

This week, I'm looking at an artist named Robert Rauschenberg. He was a pop artist who used appropriation where he juxtaposed a previously made work of art and put his own spin on it. This particular piece of his, he took a comic book from the 1960's and clipped a piece of it to appropriate. He scaled it in to just the girl's face, and changed the text from "I don't care if I have a cramp! I'd rather sink-- than call Mel for help!" to "I don't care! I'd rather sink-- than call Brad for help!"
He changed the art from the original meaning to something different and perhaps modernized it slightly. The humorous concept of the piece is that the girl was so upset with her boyfriend or maybe ex-boyfriend that she wouldn't want to ask him for help to save her from drowning. (the work is titled "Drowning Girl")
This relates to my work in a sense that I am taking something well known (comics were popular in the 60's, and particularly DC comics) and modernizing it by relating the piece to technology and today's culture.

https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/lichtenstein-drowning-girl-1963

Blog 4

In this piece I am making yet another technology statement, as this is the "theme" for my concentration. For this work in particular, I am appropriating "The Treachery of Images", as I said before. Instead of a pipe being the focus of the painting, I will replace it with an iPhone. Formally, since the pipe had shades of brown and some yellows and whites, I am going to paint a black iPhone so that I can have shades of grey, black, and white (maybe blue as well). The idea behind his work that states "This Is Not a Pipe" is a phrase explaining that although it is a painting of a pipe, it isn't a pipe. But it is. It's a picture of a pipe, just not the real thing. In the same way, my painting of a phone isn't really a phone, but it is at the same time. Technology hasn't changed the whole world, but it has. We still have families, like we always have, we have friends and relationships, we have presidents and leaders and the news. But now it has changed because so much of our life is centered around technology as a means of communication. Whether we like to admit it or not, there is little to no avoiding the constant feed of information. Technology has slowly become a way of life...whether or not it's always a good or bad thing.

So far, I have drawn the phone, text, and painted the background. In past pieces, I have addressed specific ideas, such as children with technology, and the idea of family time and relationships that are altered because of technology, but for this piece, it is more of a general development of our society statement. After I finish this, I will be appropriating another work of Magritte's. That will be included in later blogs.