Eastern Oregon University
General Education Assessment
2008 Spring Pilot Project:
Critical Thinking Outcome
Art 101: Foundations of Visual Literacy
Student Samples
Level 3: Proficient
Art 101
P. Johnson
Blinding Infinity.
Art has always been a vehicle of discussion for the human limit. Both searching the internal limit of spirituality, and the outer of the expanse and power of human form. Of all the art mediums I feel none is as powerful or exacting as Sculpture in the exploration of this limit. The ability to have an idea or a thought take corporeal shape, to have matter, is both powerful and provocative. It gives the work a sort of un-ignorable presence as it consumes space. The power of this gives the artists a greater capacity to play the role of creator and God. This search for the quiddity and span of human limit can never be answered completely this paper will look at two giants in the world of sculpture, Antony Gormley and Michelangelo, their search for defining the infinite limit of the person. Has spanned 500 years and is iterating.
Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950, he studied at trinity college in Cambridge, were he received a degree in anthropology, and archeology and art history. He did not study sculpture till he attended post graduate at Slade School of Art, Central School of Art, Goldsmiths College. His work oscillates between large smooth, complete forms to express the body, to small and busy lines or objects that have no form in themselves but the unity expresses the intended form. Gormleys work deals with interiority, and the supposed existence of invisible nature. It is like seeing the world through some sort of energetic glasses, a pair that can see the inside the form of a human, beneath the skin. While at other times they see the matrix of the figure is more substantial. All of his work lends us eyes to see the person, the phenomena of the human in a new or deeper way. Whether by making forms to mimic or represent he human or to create an environment that make you the viewer the form in questions, in discussion as with the Clearing.
I am going to talk about three of the main categories I have split Gormley’s work into: the static smooth forms of his lead casted mold of his body or other cast forms in series, I’ll call the Imutables, the installations that make you the viewer the only recognizable form in the space, Breathing Room, Clearing, these are the Systems, and his more recent work that is playing with the negative matter of a form and using the void to define the space, making a sort of cloud that concentrate on the surface of the invisible form. Float, Exergy, Shift. These are the Statics. These figures are rarely highly representational they are abstracted, simplified or augmented in some way. He uses his own body as a object to be cast from frequently, with the exception of a few of his projects the figures are life size or larger. He uses a lot of metal and cast substances concrete, and lead to create or surround these figures. One thing that holds true with all the poses that his figures hold in the lack of motion the have a very stable stance never reaching too far out of the balance of the form. While the posed figure have a lack of velocity they certainly do not have a lack of energy, the gestural nature of these have a sort of latent power or urgency about them.
The Imutables The smooth complete skin forms of these sculptures have a sort of invulnerability this comes at the cost of being stuck and more or less a prisoner of placement, motionless in a paralyzed pose. Often these forms are in series and are presented in public byways as with Broken column, starting a conversation between you the viewer and the real and the abstracted. Having his abstracted forms in the normal and ordinary, questions the validity of the everday by presenting something unchanging unbreakable and frozen, a travesty of the eternal. They present the temporality of human nature, or that nothing last forever. I see these as a subtle memento mori, we will be gone with out a trace only leaving minor evidence of our existence. These statues are dead, simplified and yet the have a longer and more substantial place in the course of matter. They will never die, they will age, but such slow attrition as to out live our short spat. Having the inanimate being the more physically lasting, brings the conversation of worth to mind and the fact that the most valuable is not physical, but it is invisible, these figure are armored shells, and they are empty of life they have a meaningless existence. They Reiterate the invisible nature of human worth and value.
The void forms of his recent work brings up the questions once again of the unsubstantial human nature and how there is no lasting form, but there is this cloud of stuff or energy that surrounds and has been attracted or collected by the form and even in the forms absence defines the space and innate existence of a form with the substance of nothing Or that the truly infinite is the substantial but also the invisible to the physical eyes so why not see the universe the invisible and the corporeal be the unseen as it is unimportant to the spiritual eyes.
The third group of works that I called the Systems, create an environment that make you the viewer the form in question. Making the environment that encompasses you the normal and makes you the anomaly in discussion as with the Breathing Room or Clearing. These large scale installations I believer are the culmination of the other two groups in this exploration of the human infinite. Moving you from the role as a bystander and viewer to being the driving force of a piece, Hopeful will provoke you to analyze you own existence as a critic would discuss a work of art. Having the individual be the center of the are makes the expression of such a piece infinitely changing from person to person, day to day. Even with the infinite expression you are still bound in this space, standing in clearing in a seven kilometer tangle spiral of aluminum rod, makes you seem so limited and short, the ordered chaos seems to have reached a sort of dynamic stability while including you in the force and drive that the endlessness of the lines demand.
Michelangelo was born in Tuscany in 1475, as a young boy he worked in a quarry under some stone cutters. Then at the age of thirteen he apprenticed under a master painter Domencio Ghirlandaio. While most of his fame from the colossal paintings of the Sistine chapel ceiling. The works of art that I want to address are his marble sculptures. Even though most of the arte he made was commissioned by the nobles As was true of most art of this epoch the strength and drive was in the workmanship of the piece as apposed to the conceptual aspects of it. Where the Icongraphy of art work out weighed the originality. Even though this was the art environment that he was entrechend in Michelangelo create some universally emotive work on the human figure I feel that his most powerful and less dates is when he was given less directions on the intention of the piece. His human studies, sketches have a riveting sort of power in the visual illusion of soul. Most of of his work is romanticized meaning that the specimens of the forms were the best, the emotions portrayed more intense so of the cinema-fication that we experience today. This follows the renaissance movement both in thought and art. He was considered one of the few real Renaissance men, this was a time of extreme optimism and faith in the power of intellect, and science was though to grow without bound.
I think that Michelangelo’s drive to speak of the limit less bounds of Humankind is what makes his Art still remembered today he tapped into the timeless expression of the human. You can see this faith in latent power that was dreamed to lie in the core of the person, in the all commanding gaze of his Moses. Michelangelo believed each sculpture had to declare it presence and that it had a certain amount of right and command in space. He believed it was his calling to free the spirit that was bound up in a certain stone. Also the spirits that he freed were human and they were in no danger of dying they just were prisoner in the stone they are made of.
While Gormely exploration of the human infinite was largely thought powered and a philosophical endeavor, Michelangelo was striving to tap in to that power that he so clearly saw in the stone he carved and in the spirits that he desired to conversed with. On the completion of his Moses sculpture he was rumored to have in rage hit the knee of the figure screaming his frustration at the silence, demanding why I would not speak to him. The archetypal Pygmalion complex. Gormley questions and supposes that there is some sort of invisible world that supersedes our corporeal one. Michelangelo knew that here was one, he was or felt the spirit of it and drove him self almost to madness to make it, to force it to occupy matter, space as he felt it should.
Gromley uses his art as the discussion a sort of vicarious journey into the eternal that seems to be ubiquitous with human spirit. He asks the viewer for their perspective on existence while using his art to catalyze the process. Michelangelo sought to create the unseen to make something out of what we see as nothing. The fabrication of matter out of void. I would argue that Michelangelo’s life work is his true art, the undefeated spirit that he fought so hard to make the wisp of invisible that he was into a corporeal tangible space. Gromley spoke of the intangible infinite nature of humankind, while Michelangelo tried to reach the bound of the infinite limits of his own space.
Level 2: Adequate
Art 101
Midterm Paper
April 30, 2008
I have always been fascinated with Michelangelo, from the Sistine Chapel to his David statues; so he was an easy choice. Andy Goldsworthy is an artist I didn’t even know existed until I saw a fascinating picture of “rowan leaves laid around hole” After doing a little research on Andy I decided to write about him as well. In this paper I will tell a little bit about these artists, their work, and the content of their work; I will also compare these very different artists and their artistic expression.
Michelangelo was a renaissance artist born March 6, 1475 in Caprese, Italy and lived till February 18, 1564. After learning to read and write Latin in Grammar school, Michelangelo begged his father Lodovico to allow him to study with the famous artist Domencio Ghirlandaio. After a few years of this, Michelangelo became bored with painting. What he really wanted to do was carve sculptures. So at the age of fourteen he became friends with the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni. After being given a room in the Medici palace Lorenzo became so impressed with Michelangelo’s work that he gave him an allowance. After this he started to perfect his art, and this is how one of the great renaissance artists came to be (Wilkinson 9-15).
Andy Goldsworthy is a contemporary artist who was born in Cheshire, England 1956. Andy knew he wanted to do outdoor sculptures at an early age when he constructed his frist ones in the woods outside his house in West Yorkshire. He attended Bradford Art College for a year and when he applied for a few other colleges for further study he didn’t hear back until Preston polytechnic offered him a sport in their fine art course. This offered him the opportunity to work outside near the sea and to work with something other than wood; he worked here almost daily for the next three years during term time. Andy left college in 1978 and moved into his career as an artist (Freidman & Goldsworthy 11-21, 194).
Andy Goldsworthy’s work consists of using nature in unique ways. Most of Andy’s sculptures are constructed with materials found in nature such as sticks, rocks, leaves, ice/snow, etc. The destine of his are usually shows the beauty of nature, it also shows the destructiveness of nature in that he makes most of his sculptures outside where they can be destroyed, sometimes right after finishing them or even before he has them completed. His subject matter usually is pretty abstract emphasizing more on flow and feel than a specific shape or form. His work also seems to stick to patterns in color or types of material; if he is using slate rock, that’s all you will see him use, if he is making something with fallen leaves, he will look as long as it takes to find the right color and shape laying around.
Michelangelo’s work was mostly contracted by the Catholic Church so his work reflects that with a lot of religious figures and meaning. He liked to use mostly marble for his sculpting, in his paintings he used mostly oils, and in his drawings he would use chalk. Most of his work was done in sculpting and is done with great care and detail. When looking closely at Michelangelo’s work you can see the time it must have taken to obtain that much detail. In his era, the sculptors of Greece were considered the best and if you look at Michelangelo’s work you can see the strong resemblance to Greek art.
There are not many different style choices Michelangelo makes to convey his subjects. In a lot of his sculpture and architecture he uses size and realism to formally address the meaning of his work. Like in the statue David, being seventeen feet tall gives the piece a much more powerful feel than if it were only life size or a miniature. Also dealing with size is the Sistine chapels. This place is massive on any scale. The sheer size of the room gives the piece a tremendous pull whether it be in pure curiosity or to the religious meaning. I am sure walking into this room alone makes you feel really tiny and in doing that it will make you think maybe a higher power helped to create it. With the research I have done, most of Michelangelo’s work was done on a huge scale, and the ones not done on a big scale are usually part of a bigger whole peace. The Sistine chapel for example is made up of a lot of little pieces, I say “little” in relative to the size of the overall piece. When looking as his use of size in his sculptures it also allowed him to use much greater detail than if he made them smaller. In his more famous paintings like the Sistine Chapels, you can see not as much fine detail and he uses light and shadow to show detail and emotion. His chalk drawings are mostly shadowing rather than fine lines and detail but the way he uses shadow makes the drawing look extremely detailed- when he even bothered to finish them.
Most of Michelangelo’s work was contracted by the Pope of the Catholic Church. Very little work that I can find was not done for the Church. Michelangelo’s influences were mostly biblical in mature; this wasn’t only because of his commissions to the Catholic Church but also due to his Catholic upbringing. There is also a strong Greek influence which is very common in the time. When looking as his work it fits perfectly into the time and the style of art that the Catholic Church used during that time period.
My personal response to Michelangelo’s work at first glance is sheer awe to the size of most of his work. In the book by Ludwig Goldscheider, when looking over the section about the Sistine Chapel there is a photo of the sealing as a whole, to do this the book has a twenty-eight inch fold out. When looking at this fold out it is still hard to pick out some of the finer detail and shadowing partially because it’s in black and white and also even at that size it’s hard to make out the details (50). When looking at a color photo by John Primavera on the internet the Sistine chapel looks amazing, seeing the use of light and color it makes the people in the paintings look like statues hung from the ceiling. To me this is very powerful. When looking at this huge work made up of many smaller paintings all about God, Christ, and the End of Days, you can’t help but think about a higher power and how the world was created.
Andy Goldsworthy makes many types of art work and different formal choices for each one. His choices are mostly made up by the environment he is making his work in, or what country he is in at the time. In the book Stone, Andy explains “My strongest work now is so rooted in place that it cannot be separated from where it is made – the work is the place” (6). He also describes how when working with the earth he is trying to understand nature and help people see “the stone in a flower and the flower in a stone” (6). So when he uses the colors that he does, like when he covers a rock in reed leaves or poppy flower petals, I think he is trying to show how nature is all connected and a rock and a flower are not so different. His work varies a lot in size some of his “cones” are huge and others are quite small; the same with all of his art. Some of his sculptures with ice are very small and delicate, he makes them early in the morning and when the sun is at its strongest and the ice is starting to melt he will take photos to show the way the sun reflects off of it, as he says in the documentary Rivers and Tides Working with Time. Andy says that sometimes the thing that makes the art is what will destroy it.
From what I can find Andy Goldsworthy only has one influence and that is nature and the different parts and seasons of nature. This is also part of the reason he makes what he makes, because he tries to help people have a better understanding of nature. Andy Goldsworthy’s primary interest is personal; he makes a lot of his art only a little ways from his house on some land that he owns. His artwork reflects the location perfectly in my opinion. When he makes a piece in a place he usually uses materials found near by and makes it so if nature decides to consume his art it won’t have any trouble absorbing the natural material.
My personal reaction to Andy is pure amazement, when looking at his work I see so many things it takes me a while to take it in. I like how some of his work looks so delicate and when he is finished he only gets a little time to appreciate it before it is destroyed. When I look at his art I like how it can blend in so well with nature but I know that nature couldn’t have done the arrangements he does with it. His work can also make you think of how fragile our world can be and in direct contrast how strong Mother Nature can be.
Comparing Michelangelo to Andy Goldsworthy is a hard thing to do because they work in such different medians; but there are some similarities. A similarity I saw right away was working with stone. While Andy tries to work with it in its natural state just moving and arranging it to where it gains the shape he is looking for, Michelangelo takes large pieces of stone and breaks and carves pieces of the stone away until he gets the shape he wants. They both use light and shadow to show detail and some emotion in their art. One of the big differences is that Andy’s work is more a personal type of art and Michelangelo works are contracted by the Catholic Church.
In conclusion these artists are both very interesting and have their own place in history. Michelangelo is a little more historic and biblical in his artwork and Andy is unique in his way of depicting the world around him. They both are worth looking up and reading about, I am glad that I was able to read up on them and look at the two very different types of art, they have created.
Level 1: Developing
Art 101
Spring 2008
Midterm paper
When observing the art of a Renaissance artist and a more contemporary or modern artist, some of the same aspects of their art follows one another, but there is also a dramatic difference between the two also. What could make the way and artist makes art and what type of art he makes, change through out the years?
The Brussels modern painter, Rene Magritte, spent much of his adult life in the 1920’s near Paris, were his work closely connected to the Surrealism Movement of 1924 which began with Andre Breton. Magritte’s work inspiration many times has been considered to come form a non-artistic source. Rene’s earlier work also considered much writing or “Pulp Literature.” The Surrealist Movement in Paris focused around many of the mystery novels and writings, of horror films that were being made in the time. These social aspects being such an important part of the movement encouraged Magritte’s earlier work with novel or film characters such as his painting Le Barbar, which took a character out of Pierre Souvestre’s novel, Fantomas.
Another well known artist form the Renaissance period was Michelangelo Bounarrot who came from the Caprese and Florence area in the late 1400’s to 1500’s. Michelangelo was always more focused in art rather then studies, so he was taken under the wing of painter Domenico Chirlandaio. Many of his greatest works were accomplished at very young age. Michelangelo’s success in art took him to many places were he was able attend schools and meet with a more literary group of people and explore more into sexuality and a Platonic outlook.
Magritte’s work is both abstract and simple mostly done on canvas with oil, even though he also made famous works of art with drawing and sculptures. Much of the subject matter in his painting has to do with real people and their body shapes. In Rene’s work, it is very common to see men in bowler hats with many times their faces covered by objects, animals, or fruit. When he depicts women in his art, he usually represents the nude female body in different colors, and shapes. Sky and space is also important to Rene’s work where he depicts animals and rooms such as The Large Family or The False Mirror.
Michelangelo was talented in many different forms of art such as the famous David sculpture, poetry, and engineering and also accomplished many paintings such as The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. The subject matter in almost all of Michelangelo’s paintings and sculptures has to do with the human body. Many of his works involved more of a religious view with more biblical characters or sometimes involved more of a social class.
Rene’s paintings use simply lines and brushstrokes. Though his lines were simple he captured the human form. Some of his art also displayed size and shape with his paintings of room’s with oversized objects such as combs or fruit and roses. In his work he uses the light to capture movement of oceans or shadows of objects and people.
I feel that many of Rene’s art works involve people as what they are. Much of his youth and his outlook on society are shown in his work with a political view. The Surrealism movement around the time effected how Magritte viewed people and the world, because of the World War I reaction. His art work is many times sad and confusing, and left with many more questions asked.
Michelangelo used a soft line and a more warm light in his work. Many of his sculptures and paintings were very big in size, and when make the shape of a human body; he was extremely realistic and used proportion.
Michelangelo came form a time when religion was very important to people’s way of life, so I feel that affected much of what his art was depicting. Not only would his work take on a personal aspect because of the importance of religion, but his work could also take a formal standing because his art depicted the main importance to the society of his time.
The sculptures that Michelangelo had created are incredible. To many viewers I believe his work would provide a very lighting feeling. Even if some aspect in his work is not completely understood, anybody could agree that he took great detail in his art. His sculptures feel like they are real people frozen in their form. He made an effort to show the muscular movement in the body and show the veins that would run down the arms or hands. He also used great description in the facial expression themselves. If the underline meaning of his work is not clear, the pain and suffering in his sculptures faces are clearly s how and could be easily understood.
Some of Magritte’s and Michelangelo’s work is common because they both liked to use sexuality and the body in their work. Both artists’ works are affected greatly by when and where they came from and the social and political aspect of things.
Michelangelo and Magritte both use the human body, but Magritte doesn’t make his human paintings as realistic. He likes to make his art simpler with the body changed and added to with different objects. While Michelangelo sticks more to the natural and realistic view of the body and people.
Though both artists came from extremely different times, some of the subject matter between the two stays the same. One of the most important influences of how and artist created their art is when and where they came form. Politics and religion changes so much through the years, that and artists work whether knowingly or not, are pulling influences in from at the time, their world.