Downtown Presbyterian Church

Personally, I thought that the church was pretty neat just because it was so unusual. I loved the stained glass windows and just all the colors on the walls. They were very vibrant and fun. However, the red carpet did kind of clash with it. Other than being confused as to why they built the church like this, my group thought that the way it was set up and by the painted columns at the front, it really made it seem spacious. I could actually get the sense that I was in a building looking out into the Egyptian desert. Although the lighting was typical of a church, I feel that it fit this kind of setting because ancient Egyptians would not have had a way to make artificial light.

Ron Porter

http://nashvillearts.com/2010/08/30/ron-porter-brings-it-into-focus/

I was intrigued by this article mainly because of the interesting first picture. Ron Porter is a local surrealist artist who combines realist landscapes with out of place everyday objects. I thought it was interesting, however, that Porter first started out as an abstract painter. I think although his paintings look very detailed and the landscapes look very realistic now, his previous abstract style is still shown through the abnormal and out of place objects he puts in his artwork. Although we haven't discussed any art like this in class, due to its modern style, some of the elements we learned about are still present in Porter's paintings. Many decisions went into this painting, especially since Porter was not just recreating a scene. He had to decide what exactly he was going to include in it, and when he was going to stop adding objects. He also included  a foreground, middle ground, and background, and created a horizontal axis throughout the painting with the horizon.

The Palette or Narmer

 The Palette of Narmer was a ceremonial version of similar palettes that were used to ground up eye makeup. The top center of the front of the palette is a picture of a fish and a vertical chisel that represents the sounds nar and mer, representing the main subject of the relief sculpture, Narmer. Narmer is shown much larger than the rest of the people represented on the palette to show his importance and power over them, which is also shown by his actions of killing the man in front of him and those already deceased in the bottom section of the palette. The other side of the palette also shows Narmer overtaking the enemies with help from a bull. The whole palette itself represents the unification of lower and upper egypt.

As we moved into the Ancient Egypt section of our studies, I realized it was much different from the art we had been looking at because it was more sculpture than paintings. This particular piece of artwork shows typical egyptian art elements. The artist used iconography, which is the reading of images. It also includes the element of simultaneous narrative because it is not just one complete picture, but of different images of different parts of a story. Lastly, it uses the traditional Egyptian style of the composite pose which was made using a grid, with the figure's shoulders forward and the rest of the figure facing to the side.

Collage Assignment

All of the things I included in my collage mean a lot to me and show how I became who I am. The pictures of people show my family back home and all my friends back home. I even included a picture of my roommates here at Belmont who have become my new friends. The road kind of divides the picture. The top right is my hometown and the bottom left is my life in Nashville. I included my hobbies such as listening to music (the Bob Dylan lyrics and butterfly confetti from Coldplay concert), playing soccer as is shown by the soccer ball, and taking fun photos with my Diana Mini that’s drawn under the Bible verse. Speaking of the verse, I wrote in my favorite verse to show what I believe and that my faith is important to me. I chose the color purple because its my favorite color and I picked blue because it represented the sky in the landscape country drawing. I wrote the verse in red because red it the best color that represents love, and I felt it would help connect it with the red butterfly on the collage.

• Decisions: I chose things that meant a lot to me and that I also thought would be aesthetically pleasing.
• Color: The colors went along with the things I like and what I was trying to portray.
• Light: The dark places were the things of Nashville/Belmont. The lighter parts of the collage were the things of my past. I didn’t choose to do it that way because I was pessimistic about the future, but just because the future is unknown, and the past is so well known and exposed already.
• Texture: The textures in my collage were created by textures in my drawings.
• Volume: I didn’t use cutouts but I tried to use shading and dark areas to create volume.
• Line: I chose to use a diagonal axis and had an implied line along that axis using the road and the placement of the pictures.
• Space: I used the road as perspective and created foreground with the skyline and background with the landscape.
• Scale: Nashville kind of stands out the most because it is one of the biggest part of my life right now because I am adjusting to a new life here.
• Symbolism: Butterflies=Coldplay, Road=Moving, Skyline=Nashville, Country fence=Cleburne, Soccer ball=My love of soccer, American Flag=where I live

• You: My love of Coldplay, my faith, and my favorite sport (soccer) make me who I am today and I represented this by confetti from a Coldplay concert, my favorite Bible verse, and a soccer ball.
• Friends and Family: I put picture of all my friends and family because they definitely play a major part in making me who I am.
• Your town, community, school: I represented my old town (Cleburne) and my new town (Nashville) in the drawings I made. I added a picture of my new Belmont community and school.
• Your country: The flag in the top left corner represents that I am an American.
• The world today: Just the clothes we are wearing and the architecture of the buildings show the style of the world today. The Bible verse is also more of a reminder of how the world should be.
• Art: Art means a lot to me and that’s why I chose to do a lot of drawing in my collage. Art in the world today is expressed through the architecture in the Nashville skyline and by Coldplay because although it is still a different medium of art, it is still art.
• History: The bell tower also expresses the rich history of it. What Belmont has because has changed the rest of my life because I chose to come here. It was also a very big part of history in the Civil War, and it fits into art because if it wasn’t so aesthetically pleasing it wouldn’t be what we center our campus around.

Never Too Old

http://nashvillearts.com/2010/09/01/dawn-whitelaw-a-painters-journal/

This article really stuck out to me because the woman in it paints for her career, yet she didn't even pick up a brush until she was 35. Sometimes I feel as though I can't be a good artist because I am so inexperienced and didn't get the guidance and teaching other students did in their high school years, so it is very comforting to know that it is never too late to get started on art. The artist, Dawn Whitelaw, is most known for her landscape paintings. When reading her description of her steps to making a painting, I couldn't help but think about the element of making decisions that every artist has to go through. Whitelaw has to decide where she will set up to paint, exactly what she will include in the painting, what time of day she will paint, and what colors she will use. Color is a very important element in her paintings. Whitelaw loves how nature makes her feel and she tries to convey that emotion through the bright colors scheme she uses in her paintings. I just felt that this article was so encouraging because you just never know how good you can be at something until you try.

The Parthenon

This week in class we spent quite awhile talking about Frederich Edwin Church's "The Parthenon." At first, this just looks like a picture of ruins, but really, there is so much more to it if you break it down. Obviously the Parthenon was very significant to whoever paid to have it painted, which I find unusual because it was an American by the name of Morris Jesups who lived long after the Parthenon was built. We know this as a fact, not only because we can research that it was painted in 1871, but also because of the clues in the painting itself. First of all, the fact that the Parthenon is in ruins is a big clue that it wasn't painted in ancient times. Also, we know that it was definitely painted after oil paint was invented as this is the medium used. But yet, for some reason Jesups still had some reason to have church make the Parthenon such a glorious-like element of the painting, due to the fact that it is almost dead center, placed on a hill, and illuminated by the light source of the painting.

The painting also reveals a lot about the Church himself. Obviously he was not an amateur artist. This is evident not only because of the obvious skill being that it almost looks as realistic as a photograph, but because of the learned artistic elements embedded in this painting. Church knew how to create a foreground, middle ground, and background, and also knew how to balance out the centered Parthenon with the column on the right of the foreground. Whether the sun was really shining like this or Church just chose to do it this way, he still had a great sense of light, especially when trying to make the Parthenon look as great as he could.