This weeks Thesis picture/hw assignment

What I got out of Collingwood's theory on art was this idea that art is the expression of emotion. The artist has some inner issue/problem/feeling/desire etc etc that he/she wants to communicate and art is the accurate communication of that feeling. I think that Collingwood is much more successful in his theories then Bell was however, I think they both missed the mark in that art is more of an ideal or virtue. It is indefinable and yet it is.

With that in mind I set out to shoot an image that would clarify my deepest emotions or at least illustrate them. I think overall I am obsessed with philosophy, that was my major as an undergrad and with that I am always questioning everything, especially existence and reality. Perhaps my biggest drivers are the feelings that I associate with death ie. primal fear/embracing/curiosity/hatred/ultimate release. I tried to illustrate my feeling of being set adrift in life with the rolling of the landscape. I also wanted to show a pattern with the graves from an unsettling viewpoint. I wanted it to seem so uniform and neat, this idea of death in a grid on a rolling landscape. Also the grave I focused on was my grandparents and in that this picture was very personal for me to take. My grandmother who lived with my family from my birth until her death in 2005 is buried here and it was a very interesting experience being alone there at night and not feeling the nervousness I would have expected but instead an odd warmth and comfort.

It's been awhile...

Ok so I took a bit of a hiatus from my blog but I figure I need to start posting more... I had a lets say very interesting and eye opening winter break, and it is part of the reason I have not posted.

I figure with the new semester underway and in what feels like FULL SWING that I might post my thesis work as I complete it weekly to get feedback.. here is this weeks image... my focus was on form as defined by Clive Bell.

For this image I wanted to shoot nature with man's imprint. From far away this is a scene of trees clustered together in a snowy park somewhere at the water's edge. Up close the footprints in the snow become clear and it becomes a scene that many people enjoyed recently. The houses become clear through the trees and the colors (I hope) show an unnatural color looming on the horizon, where all the streetlights are causing an orange haze on the horizon.

When reading Bell's theory on how all official art work displays significant form, I realized that my thesis fits within the framework of Bell's theory on art being significant form because of what is said on pg 18 of "The Art Question". Basically Cezanne's work is an ideal model for Bell's theory of significant form because Cezanne does not sacrifice form for nature but actually does the exact opposite and sacrifices nature for form. My thesis does exactly this in 2 obvious areas, where if I conversely focused on nature over form I would have compiled a completely different set of imagery thus far.

The first example of where form is more a priority then nature is in my depiction of 360 degrees. I am showing my environments not as a smooth transition, or dome that wraps around on itself but instead as 6 separate images within a flat panoramic where form dictates how the shots are ordered.

The second area is in my treatment of color/or the night's lighting. I am obviously not showing the scene as it appears naturally to the naked eye, I am instead opening the shadows to my discretion and dimming the bright areas once again to my discretion and showing the different areas/objects in the images within the color palettes I choose. I am also over saturating the colors to give a feeling of hyper-reality. The only kind of reality I have ever known and suspect most of my generation/American peers has ever known. This reality where you exist alongside or in the same construct as facebook, terrorist attacks, satellite's, Oprah/Gates, global warming, swine flu, Ipods, Disney, Nickelodeon, MTV, Tsunamis, kids starving in Africa (India, Korea, Bangkok, South America, down the street), where the priorities it would seem are in keeping up with the Jonses, being brainwashed that aging is bad, fat is bad, #3's are good (McD's), alongside Paris Hilton, 9/11, AIDS, Cancer, cell phones, youtube, History, Science, Dieting, Math, E=MC2, hug a tree, serial killers, Nuclear threats, asteroids, the holocaust in this culture nearing 2012... I could go on but fear I went on too long here already.. regardless you get my drift.. what do you focus on? When do you start mistaking justified personal fears for conspiracy theories and predictions for prophecy, is our destiny really written? could be. Or it could be that just one text of trillions made it through until today, and maybe it is just a work of fiction (talking about Nostradamus).. anyway I digress, the coloring of my images, obviously does not illustrate all of that, however the coloring does illustrate my notion of a hyper-reality, where you can seek knowledge in almost any direction and satiate yourself, and the more and more you gain obviously the more learned become, however, once you pass a certain capacity of knowledge the very structures laid out before you become more and more false, and the less the nature of things matters visually, visually the flat piece becomes about creative composition and how well the artist does this.

And with that I will stop. I do not want to ramble too much.