what is art

            Art is something I never really thought of as definable in one concrete and single definition. To me it’s like asking what love is or what is the meaning of life? It’s a difficult question that can challenge an individual’s brain because it makes you think hard and gives you many theories to consider. Over time art has evolved and many new topics have been brought to light about it. One such topic is that of the beauty of art or the aesthetics. 

            Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that deals with the beauty of art, its nature and its expression. In terms of art though beauty refers to the interactions in a work between line, color, texture, sound, shape, motion, and size that is pleasing to an individual’s senses. Aesthetics can be hard to narrow down because not all people will have the same view on what the beauty of art is. For example, what makes an artwork aesthetically beautiful for me is color. Color is what usually affects the viewer right away and what usually catches their attention. An example of art that is appealing to me and that I think is aesthetically beautiful is the art from Leonid Afremov. Out of the many pieces he has made, three artworks that I chose for examples are under the rain, Paris of my dreams, and alley by the lake. His art caught my attention instantly because he uses color to its fullest. As well the scenes he depicts are enhanced by the mood and atmosphere he sets with his kaleidoscope choice of colors.

Afremov, Leonid. Dance Under the Rain. Pallette Knife Oil Painting on Canvas. Private Collection

Afremov, Leonid. Paris of my Dreams. Pallette Knife Oil Painting on Canvas. Private Collection

Afremov, Leonid. Alley by the Lake. Pallette Knife Oil Painting on Canvas. Private Collection

Leonardo and Michelangelo

        Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452 as the illegitimate son of Ser Pierro da Vinci and Caterina a peasant girl. Never receiving a complete education because of his illegitimate standing, at the age of fifth teen, Leonardo became an apprentice to Andrea Del Verrocchio in Florence. It has been said that Leonardo had a good sense of humor, he was strong, intelligent, was a good dresser and a good natured person. As well as being an artist he was also interested in other things like inventing. So when he moved to Milan he worked as a military engineer for Duke Ludovico Sforza. He spent seventeen years there then started traveling around to different places like Rome and France after the duke was forced to flee because the French was invading. During these years he made many works like the Mona Lisa. He died in 1519 at the age of 67 years old.

                        Michelangelo was born on March 6, 1475 in Capresse. His father was Ludovico di Leonardo di Buonaroti di Simoni and his mother was Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena. He was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio and later Lorenzo de' Medici. Once he became an independent artist he traveled around completing works for his patrons. During these years he produced many artworks two of which are very famous, those being the David statue and the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He ended up in Rome for his last days and died in 1564. He was then buried in Florence.

            Michelangelo was arrogant, dissatisfied with himself, and had some habits that drove people away. He himself didn't seem to like to be in the company of others very much. Both artists worked in the Renaissance period and both artists were commissioned a lot with works based on bible events or scenes.

            Some examples of the styles of these two men are: for Leonardo his works of the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and Lady with an Ermine. A lot of his works represent woman and bible scenes, quotes, and events. He also took a scientific point of view with his paintings. He did research on everything he could possibly think would help him with his new work and liked to perfect the details. For Michelangelo he was more about the physical body. Most of the subjects in his works wore very little clothing and he represented his subjects as very muscular. He was accurate with his works of human bodies because he worshiped the human body and it showed in the detail of his works. For example with his works the statue of David, the Sistine Chapel, and the Pieta. These are mainly about men because men have those muscles Michelangelo seemed so intent on portraying. As well they are unclothed and very accurate. Leonardo’s subjects are mainly woman with detail blending into every part of the work from the subject to the clothes and background. 

Michelangelo. David. 1504. Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence. 

Wikipedia.org. marble statue. 21 October 2013

Michelangelo. The Sistine Chapel. 1512. Sistine chapel. Wikipedia.org. 21 October 2013

Michelangelo. Pieta. 1499. St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City. Wikipedia.org. Marble. 21 October 2013

Da Vinci, Leonardo. Mona Lisa. 1517. Musee de Louvre, Paris. 

Wikipedia.org. Oil on poplar. 21 October 2013

Da Vinci, Leonardo. The Last Supper. 1498. Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan. 

Wikipedia.org. tempera on gesso, pitch and mastic. 21 October 2013.

Da Vinci. Lady with an Ermine. 1490. Czartoryski Museum, Krakow. 

Wikipedia.org. Oil on wood pane. 21 October 2013

Lego Logo

          LEGOs are simple yet fun creations that I as well as many Americans feel a connection too. They were part of the childhood of many people raised in the 1930's and above. This toy sparks creativity and so it only stands to reason its logo would be just as creative. The Lego Company was started up in 1932 in Billund, Denmark by Kirk Christiansen. He and his employees started making and selling wooden products and toys. As the company grew, in 1949, Christiansen invented Automated Binding Blocks which is the precursor of modern day LEGOs. Today it has evolved from the four colors it started with to 55 different colors and 2,200 different shapes. The name Lego means to play well. The first logo for Lego was made in 1934 and it started out as an ink stamp that they would use on their wooden products. Presently the logo has gone through many changes, going from a plain black sharp letter logo to the one we know today. Today it is a red square with the word Lego, the word being rounder and in larger typeface and outlined in black and yellow lines. This look is supposed to be friendlier and represent the company’s values on quality, fun, creativity, imagination, and more.  

            LEGOs have become more than a toy for kids and more people are starting to see that this toy has endless possibilities. The Lego brand has made movies, games, clothing, books, sets, etc. LEGOs have also been made into art as shown by the artist Nathan Sawaya. Based in New York he makes artwork out of different materials such as LEGOs. He is currently touring museums in his show the Art of Bricks. His show tours North America, Asia, and Australia. As LEGOs are toys his exhibitions are among the first to focus on art from LEGOs. Many of his exhibitions have sculptures created solely for that single exhibition. He wants to inspire people to make their own creations using things you can find at home. For more information on this artist, tour dates, and locations you can visit http://brickartist.com/.

Sawaya, Nathan. Heartfelt. February 2009. 35" x 13" x 28". LEGOs. Private Collection. 

Sawaya, Nathan. Rebirth of New Orleans. December 2006. 66″ x 42″ x 64″. LEGOs. Main Branch of the New Orleans Public Library.

Berthe Morisot

        Berthe was a versatile French impressionism painter whose work ranged from landscapes to portraits. She was born on the fourteenth of January, 1841 in Bourgeois, France. Her grandfather was named Jean Honore Fragonard and her father was a government official. She had a sister named Edma. These two learned to paint young and together they traveled to Paris to learn more art. She learned from Joseph Guichard and Camile Corot and befriended other artists such as Edouard Manet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and others. Her work led her to have a regular spot at the Salon for years. In 1874 she married the younger brother to Edouard Manet, Eugene and stayed with him until his death in 1892.  As her life went on she became a flexible artist learning and experimenting with many mediums such as oil paints, watercolors, and others. On the second of March in 1895 she died at the age of 54.

            Some major influences in Berthe’s work was the impressionism movement and Edouard Manet. Being taught at first about painting in the classical art, Manet led her on a different path. One that would introduce her to an art to be known as Impressionism. However this was a two way road for these two so as Manet influenced Berthe she also influenced him. She was very beautiful and Manet would use her in some of his works, one of these being The Balcony. She influenced an interest in outdoor painting within him and tried to get him to use less black and use more colors. However even though he introduced her to impressionism he did not fully agree with it. He did not affiliate himself as part of her impressionist group of friends but even so she stayed loyal to her ideas and friends.

            Once introduced to impressionism she started painting more in the impressionist style and came to be an important figure in the impressionism era. In impressionism the artist paints images of an object in the way someone would see it if they had just caught a glimpse of it. It’s a style that uses bright and bold colors but it doesn't concentrate too much on detail. This style also consists of mainly outdoor scenes because only in the outdoors will an artist be able to find so much naturally colorful scenes. With her background being combined with this new form Berthe ended developing her own impressionist style. Her technique consisted of using large amounts of paint on her canvas. This technique led to a transparent quality in her work. She concentrated on the colors and strokes and less on the detail. Her style used many women and children and concentrated mostly on outdoor scenes that were about everyday life. Even in her landscapes women and children were incorporated. She used different mediums but mainly used oils and watercolors and was known as a water colorist.  Even though this style was impressionist it was all her own and many artists, such as Manet, respected this style of hers. Some of her impressionist work that show her style are Hide and Seek, The Cradle, and In Wheat Field.

Manet, Edouard. The Balcony. 1868. Oil on  canvas. Musee d Orsay, Paris

Renoir, Pierre Auguste. Children on the beach of Guernsey. 1883. Oil on canvas. Private collection

Monet, Claude. Impression Sunrise. 1872. Oil on canvas. Musee Marmottan Monet

Morisot, Berthe. Hide and Seek. 1873. Oil on canvas. Private collection

Morisot, Berthe. The Cradle. 1872. Oil on canvas. Musee d Orsay, Paris

Morisot, Berthe. In wheat field.1875. Oil on canvas. Musee d Orsay, Paris

Diego Rivera and Manabu Ikeda

Diego Rivera was born in 1886 in Guanajuato, Mexico. He was the son of Maria de Pilar Barrientos and Diego Rivera Acosta. He was a Mexican artist of the twentieth century whose style was influenced by many things such as his father’s work as a government official, symbolism, cubism, impressionist and others. He brought the mural art form back into the interest of the public eye of his Mexican people. He was known as the father of the Mexican mural movement and of modern political art. During his life he did some travels of which during he was inspired by the Mexican and Russian revolution. He made art that reflected the politics of his people as well as the lives of the working class and natives of the people of Mexico.

He was a communist and that affected some of his work. Also he was married four times, known to be unfaithful, and he had a habit of exaggerating his life or past. He told his past as adventures and almost fairy tale like recreations. Some things about his past are questionable, for instance, his participation in the early battles of the Mexican revolution and his involvement in a textile workers strike. Some famous murals of his are Man at the Crossroad, which was ordered to be destroyed because it was controversial. It had an image of Lenin and a Soviet Russian May Day parade. Two others were Thelmadatter and the city of Tenochtitlan which depicts life in Tenochtitlan. He died in on November 24 in 1957 in Mexico City from a heart attack.

Rivera, Diego. Man at the Crossroad. 1934. Rockefeller Center, New York.  

PBS.org. Mural. 30 September 2013.

Rivera, Diego. Thelmadatter. N.d the national palace, Mexico City. 

Squidoo.com. Mural. 30 September 2013.

Rivera, Diego. The city of Tenochtitlan. N.d the national palace, Mexico City. 

Wikipedia.org. mural. 30 September 2013. 

 Manabu Ikeda was born in 1973 in Saga, Japan. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Design and a Master’s degree from the Tokyo national university of fine arts. His uses very large blank paper canvases. With the paper spread before him he uses his pens and acrylic ink to start drawing. However because his canvases are so large he works with increments of four inch squares at a time instead of the whole canvas. Due to his method his work consists of many pen strokes. His work is unpredictable until the end because of his one-square-at-a-time method. Even so his artwork takes time, patience, and imagination. He can spend hours a days working on his art and sometimes some might take years to complete. His art has many different elements and pictures that all come to him from his imagination. He incorporates Japanese architecture with almost fantasy like scenarios or animals. He is influenced a lot by the natural world, and as he says here "The shape, color, and expression of nature… water, bugs, trees and weather, all those provide me with heart pumping sensations and questions,". Some of his works include Drifter, Lighthouse, and Regeneration. For more information you can visit about past and present exhibitions you can visit http://mizuma-art.co.jp/artist/0030/index_e.php

Manabu, Ikeda. Drifter. 2011. Private Collection. Huffingtonpost.com. 

Pen, acrylic ink on paper. 30 September 2013.

 Manabu, Ikeda. Lighthouse. 2009. Private Collection. Mizuma-art.jp.co. 

Pen, acrylic ink on paper. 30 September 2013.

Manabu, Ikeda. Regeneration. 2001. Private Collection. Huffingtonpost.com. 

Pen, acrylic ink on paper. 30 September 2013

The art of these two artists is very different in theme, medium, topic, etc. Where Manabu’s work is very detailed, Rivera’s doesn't contain the same type of detail. Also the reputation of both artists in regards to their art differs. Additionally where Rivera made art based on the real life of the Mexican people, manabu’s work contains real life issues but it’s disguised within his imagination and his fairy tale like creations. In manabu’s work there are many elements to see and one has to spend some time looking at all of it where Rivera’s doesn't have as many elements to concentrate on but is just as eye catching. Both of these artists however did and, in the case of Manabu, do their work on a big scale. 

Texture and Pattern

Texture refers to the surface of a painting or to what the painting is reflecting through its work. Texture can be visual and by this I mean the painting can be done so it has a lot of elements that give it the appearance of texture but the painting itself is still flat. In this type of texture there will be lots of detail that will show the texture in things like clothing, walls, etc. an example of this is the art piece Portrait of the Baroness James de Rothschild by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. You can see the detail in the woman’s dress. Texture can also be physical of which texture will be shown through what the viewer feels when he or she touches the actual painting. Physical texture can be made with layers of paint, bold strokes, etc. An example of this would be the painting by Vincent Van Gogh, Starry Night. If a viewer had to choose between a painting with no texture and one with, I feel the latter catches a viewer’s attention more because it gives the viewer a chance to experience art differently. It helps give the viewer a better understanding of art because they can feel it instead of just see it .

Pattern is a type of design that is frequent throughout an art piece. Patterns can be something simple like dots and stripes or something complex like a combination of many different pattern elements. Even though patterns can be predictable, the way an artist demonstrates it can make a pattern seem as beautiful and spontaneous as any other artwork. For example some of the works of M.C Escher demonstrate pattern one of which is called Angels and Devils. This type of pattern is something that was created with the use of mathematics. Pattern doesn't have to be boring but it depends on an artist’s creativity which, as shown by Escher, can be captivating.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Portrait of the Baroness James de Rothschild. 1848. 

Private collection. Sophia.org. Oil on canvas. September 23, 2013

Escher, M.C. Circle Limit IV-Angels and Devils. 1960. Flyschool.com. Woodcut. September 23, 2013.

Van Gogh, Vincent. Starry Night. 1889. Museum of Modern Art, New York City. 

Wikipedia.org. oil on canvas. September 23, 2013.