This week I finished my second Q1 project. It is a loose watercolor painting of a church with an interesting shadow on it. I was trying to achieve my goals from my last critique, including increasing the amount of negative space and playing with the way that watercolors naturally flow. I also used an interesting color scheme, mainly featuring orange, purple, and blue. I played with color in this piece as well because the colors in my last piece were all very similar.
The two readings for this quarter's seminar were focused around the theme of protest art. Protest art is art that has a message about a certain issue that an artist or a group of artists wants to address. These articles discussed the different methods that artists used to make their own kinds of protest art.
The biggest concept I explored when reading these articles was the effect of the kind of art or medium on how effectively the message was portrayed. In the article about Craftism, there is an example of inflatable cobblestones created by a the Eclectic Electric Collective and Enmedio for a protest in Barcelona. The large and reflective masses certainly attracted the public's attention, but how effective were they at getting their message across? Unless someone looked into the situation or asked what the piece meant, it is unlikely that they would have understood the meaning behind the piece. In work such as that of the Guerrilla Girls, the message is printed straight up on posters and images. Protest art in this media is more easily accessible by the general public and does not take much thinking to understand the artist's goal by creating the piece. However, a poster is not as captivating as a large inflatable cube. Which is more effective, something that is eye-catching or something that speaks the truth without hesitation? The second article about the Guerrilla Girls went into much more detail about the kinds of topics that protest artists are focusing on today. Most topics touched on dealt with issues such as the wage gap and other inequalities between the genders. The Guerrilla Girls aim to educate the public on injustices they probably did not know even existed. The members of the groups themselves once said "We want to be subversive, to transform our audience, to confront them with some disarming statements, backed up by facts -- and great visuals -- and hopefully convert them" (p. 7). They are not trying to get people riled up about a topic, rather they want people to care. The craftism article says that rights and freedoms were won by disobedience, but a lot of what the Guerrilla Girls do is simply state the facts. There are still so many ways artists can discuss certain issues, but how effectively they portray their message or how they captivate their audience may make a difference in how much support they will gain for that issue. |
AuthorGrace Barron Archives
June 2018
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