Art Analysis: Laurie Simmons

In the art world the audience plays a big part on the success of the artwork and the artist. In this case Del Kathryn Barton is the artist, she has created multiple, unique works. She has great success with theses artworks including winning multiple Archibald Prizes. “Hugo” weaving, 2013, and her self portrait were two artworks that stood out of all the works due to their meaning and appearance. Some people will love but then some people hate it. Having a person so big as Hugo Weaving really brings the world closer to acknowledging the artwork. If there was no audience the artwork or Del Kathryn Barton would have no success.

When I examine the iconic painting “Gold Marilyn Monroe”, I viewed dazzling art elements that consist of lines, shapes, texture, values, and color. Firstly, the lines within the painting posses thickly curved, curled, diagonal, and straight lines. The curled lines are prominent on the hair of Marilyn. Additionally, the thickly curved lines the bring out the facial features can be viewed on Marilyn’s hair, eyebrows, eyes, forehead, and lips. Moreover, the diagonal line can be seen on the sides of Marilyn’s jawline. Also, the straight lines are noticed on the left side of Marilyn’s neck, her lower chin and the framing that encapsulates Monroe’s face. Secondly, the shapes of the painting are organic because Marilyn’s face is natural and symmetrical

One pleasant afternoon, my classmates and I decided to visit the Houston Museum of Fine Arts to begin on our museum assignment in world literature class. According to Houston Museum of Fine Art’s staff, MFAH considers as one of the largest museums in the nation and it contains many variety forms of art with more than several thousand years of unique history. Also, I have never been in a museum in a very long time especially as big as MFAH, and my experience about the museum was unique and pleasant. Although I have observed many great types and forms of art in the museum, there were few that interested me the most.

Fiona Lowry, a recognised Australian artist, is a well-known painter. She was born in 1974. She completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts with Honours, at the Sydney College of the Arts. She is currently represented by Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide and Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney. Lowry’s artistic ability has been recognised with numerous Art awards. These include the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2008 earning a $100 000-dollar prize and the Fleurieu Art Prize in 2013. Lowry was also a finalist in the Archibald Prize in 2011 and in 2013.

This artwork appears to be an abstract piece made from magazine clippings to create a collage. The artwork is a vertical piece that measures approximately 17 x14. It focuses in on the subject of a girl who is created out of neutral colors. She stands out against the rainbow background. In the background each clipping has a different element and pattern, but they all work in unison creating a rainbow background.

Throughout history the unique and changeable Australian landscape has inspired a diverse array of artistic responses. Impressios of its power and beauty, expressions of individuals' responses, symbolic religious orientation, the range of landscape art works extends onwards. A great example of the vast variations of styles can be seen in the artworks of Glover, Drysdale, Berkowitz and Reid.

Terror and mockery come together in the portraits of Cindy Sherman on display at the Crocker Art Museum. Walking into the large, dimly lit ballroom, one may begin to feel a slight sense of trepidation as the viewer looks around to find nine sets of beady eyes watching one’s every move. Sherman produced her History Portraits during the late eighties and early nineties, nine of which are displayed at the museum. In her portraits she uses lush fabrics, lavish jewelry, and false body parts to decorate herself in these self-portraits. Her portraits have been know to cause discomfort in the viewers who find the general stereotypes, depicted in her portraits, amusing, yet confusing and terrorizing.

Laura Mulvey understands Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills as to be rehearsing this structure of the ‘male gaze’, “The camera looks; it captures the female character in a parody of different voyeurisms. It intrudes into moments in which she is ungraded, sometimes undressed, absorbed into her own world in the privacy of her own environment. Or it witnesses a moment in which her guard drops and she is suddenly startled by the presence, unseen and off-screen watching her.”[v]

I want to start off with how much I loved the paper Holding Up the Arts by Diane Ragsdale. Ragsdale did an amazing job giving life to a problem that authors have struggled to do no matter the length of their works. As a result, the dilemma within the art’s nonprofit sector doesn’t come across off as dry and lengthy, but rather easy to understand and relatable. As an artist, she was able to bring together two worlds that both exist within the arts, but are difficult to tie together – the artistic side and the economic side.

In current society there is a desire for improving standards of individuals' lives, but how to achieve such a progression comes into question. Some people believe that this stability comes through repetitive practice in one particular area; meanwhile, others, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, think that improvement is found in trying new experiences. Although continually taking part in mastered experiences further builds previous skills in medical procedures, taking part in new experiences can insight self-improvement in physical activities and creative knowledge. In medical operations, mastered areas provide an increase in known skills. For surgeons, they can grow in their field by conducting repetitive surgeries. It is expected that these

Liz Larner creates art that has a presence and that shows instability. Her art is influenced by poetics. This is shown through the overlap in some sculptures as well as breakage in others. The art that she produces gives a sense of flow and completeness. Using instability as part of her work is something that brings a sense of change to her work as well as almost never using the same techniques. Her relation of her art work to real life shows her beliefs in the balance of reality and illusion.

No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman's photography is part of the culture and

The two works of art that I have chosen to analyze are 1) Jordan Casteel. Miles and JoJo. 2014. Oil on canvas, 54” x 72” and 2) Aaron Fowler. He Was. 2015. Mixed media, 134” x 165” x 108”. The themes that these works of art represent in regards to the exhibit are love, family, and pain. However, they also fall into other thematic categories. The main theme that seems to apply to both “Miles and JoJo” and “He Was” is Human Experience. Additionally, these arts differ in some ways.

The most prominent quality of Elizabeth Bishop’s, “One Art,” remains the concise organization and rhyme scheme of the poem, which amazingly keeps the audience informed at all times what the theme. Her choice of a villanelle constantly reminds the audience that “the art of losing” always seem easy until one loses something so much more than an inanimate object and at the point, it does become a “disaster.” Written in 1976, the poem is very modern and uses an impeccable rhyme scheme, diction, and imagery to convey the hints of misery and frantic the speaker feels.

There is some disparity between the way critics and philosophers like Judith Butler view Cindy Sherman's work and the way that Cindy Sherman speaks of her photographs. It may be the disparity that exists between many modern artists, who often operate on an intuitive level, and the philosopher critics who comment upon them from a theoretical perspective or a pre-established framework. On one level, Cindy Sherman may only be playing "dress-up" (as she herself admits) in her famous History Portraits (1989-90) (Berne, 2003). On another level, however, her "dressing-up" may be indicative of a deeper problem in modern gender identity theory which is the problem of "becoming" woman (Butler, 1994) or, as Judith Butler sees it, the problem of performativity. In the History Portraits, Sherman may certainly be said to be "performing" and perhaps even attempting to "become" the male and female characters she represents in her work. Indeed, it is upon such a premise that philosopher critics and gender theorists find her work so engaging. This paper will examine Cindy Sherman and her History Portraits in relation to Judith Butler's gender theory, the portrayal of the self, and how gender identity has changed throughout the course of modern history. It will examine representations of womanhood from Romantic Idealism to Post-Modernism and will also