Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Art Appreciation (Week 1)

Laying the ground

medium: charcoal and eraser
pencil and eraser

slow

Reading excerpts from People's History like:

"Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they men they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides...they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation...In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of mil...and in short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile... was depopulated...My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write..."

Written by Las Casas from his Histories of the Indies. Comment reflects his first observation account of Columbus settling in Hispaniola in 1508.

1800 painting by Albert Bierstadt, loved, praised and sold for twenty five thousand, The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, in actuality, the Matterhorn of the Alps.


What is the baggage we carry? What is the history of the land we stand on? What is our own history, personal, political, economic? What are we carrying with us today? What are the daily habits informed by? Who picks up our mess? 

Discuss cultural constructs

View "Anything is Possible" by William

Discuss Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Quote the Constitution: "

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Memphis Sanitation Strike


http://www.hankwillisthomas.com/WORKS/Mixed-Media/1/


Watched Kara Walker's A Subtlety



Exercises:

-The HAND, drawing gesture, contour, and shading
-Shading steps 1-10
-Portrait through touch
-The other- Portrait through looking at light- Rub Out




No comments: