Week 8 assignment: essay – interrelationships reflection apa format | Applied Sciences homework help
- What difference do you perceive in de Kooning’s and Gorky’s treatment of sensa? 4. Look at the Gorky upside down. Is the form weakened or strengthened? Does it
make a difference? If so, what? Gorky’s Untitled 1943 (Figure 4-14) is characterized by a color field that has been worked over and over. It is essentially red, but a close look will show that there are levels of red, layers of red. And the painting seems to have a range of floating ob- jects that, when taken symbolically, seem to impersonate ideas or messages. All the symbols have been connected to what the Dallas Museum calls a special language of Gorky’s own. In this way the expression is not of abstract ideas but of concrete color, of the sensa that Gorky moves through the painting’s plane. Nothing specific is represented in this painting, but instead color is itself presented. It is for us to enjoy and to respond to in a fundamental way without the imposition of meaning or ideas. Ironically we call this abstract art as a way of contrasting it with represen- tational art. But abstract art is not abstract—it presents to us the concrete material of sensory experience. We see concrete color and form, and that may be the most profound aesthetic purpose of painting. 1Source: Matisse, “Notes of a Painter,” La Grande Revue, December 25, 1908. jac16871_ch04_058-090.indd 80 12/11/17 11:23 AM 81
PAINTING
rePresenTaTiOnal PainTing In the participative experience with representational paintings, the sense of here- now, so overwhelming in the participative experience with abstractions, is some- what weakened. Representational paintings situate the sensuous in objects and events. A representational painting, like an abstraction, is “all there” and “holds still.” But past and future are more relevant than in our experience of abstract paint- ings because we are seeing representations of objects and events. Inevitably, we are at least vaguely aware of place and date; and, in turn, a sense of past and future is a part of that awareness. Our experience is more ordinary than it is when we feel the extraordinary isolation from objects and events that occurs in the perception of abstract paintings. Representational paintings always bring in some suggestion of “once upon a time.” Moreover, we are kept closer to the experience of every day, because images that refer to objects and events usually lack something of the strangeness of the sensuous alone. Representational painting furnishes the world of the sensuous with objects and events. The horizon is sketched out more closely and clearly, and the spaces of the sensuous are filled, more or less, with things. But even when these furnishings (sub- ject matter) are the same, the interpretation (content) of every painting is always different. COMParisOn Of fiVe iMPressiOnisT PainTings From time to time, painters have grouped themselves into “schools” in which like- minded artists sometimes worked and exhibited together. The Barbizon school in France in the 1840s, a group of six or seven painters, attempted to paint out- doors so that their landscapes would have a natural feel in terms of color and light, unlike the studio landscapes that were popular at the time. Probably the most famous school of art of all time is the Impressionist school, which flourished between 1870 and 1905, especially in France. The Impressionists’ approach to painting was dominated by a concentration on the impression light made on the surfaces of things. PERCEPTION KEY Comparison of Five Impressionist Paintings 1. In which of the following paintings is color most dominant over line? In which is line most dominant over color? How important does line seem to be for the impres- sionist painter?