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On Halloween we watched a lecture different from ones we've seen before - this one was about an artistic idea rather than the journey of an artist/person otherwise involved in art. Adams talked about what made up Japanese aesthetics (including three important aspects: wabi, sabi, and yugen) and how the West reacted to it. She also discussed how the West influenced Japan (making Japan want to "modernize" itself) and the differences between traditional Japanese and modern Japanese culture and aspects. Prominently featured in this analysis was a novelist called Tanizaki, who lived during the Japanese transition from traditional to modern, and his opinions on said transition.
I was fascinated and somewhat horrified at how excitedly Japan seemed to leap into a modern era, and it made me wonder how much direct influence the West had over that process. However, while I do not feel that traditional Japanese culture should be entirely thrown away, I do believe that modern conveniences such as electricity changed Japan for the better and should not have been bemoaned so much by Tanizaki. On that note, he seemed strangely attached to the texture of his teapots and the wood of his toilets (that last one is just all kinds of bad ideas...and smells), as well as candles (as opposed to electricity). I can understand his being upset that Japan is so willing to change to fit the West (I don't like their willingness to throw away much of their culture and tradition as the price to that change). With all that being said, I have to wonder if he ever got used to electricity replacing candles and non-absorbent substances for toilet seats replacing wood, and I hope Japan re-adopted some of their older traditions while he was still alive, if for no other purpose than to keep their pre-mid-19th-century culture alive. I very much liked the tradition that an imperfect object was better than a perfect object. It seems to show the object's journey as a whole rather than the finished product at the very end. (This is kind of what our recent figure drawings had, where a viewer could conceivably see the searching lines from the very beginning in the final product.) I'm not sure how I would use this in my art, but one day I would like to. My home project is finally underway! I don't anticipate that it'll take me too long, but I hope I'm not wrong. After a long brainstorming period, I came up with the idea of drawing a mouth while we were reading Canterbury Tales in English. One of the characters, the Prioresse, is described as being a very attractive nun, and at one point the narrator takes special care to describe the way she eats, as if the people who eat with her watch her mouth and sexualize her actions to the point where they can't focus on their own food. I was fascinated by her being reduced to a pair of lips, since this still happens today, 600-700 years later.
My plan is to color the lips with several different media (most likely paint and colored pencil will be used, but I definitely plan on using lipstick and I may use tulle and lace as well), giving it a patchy look. This is supposed to represent how she may seem important for only one thing at a distance (the patches of different media will ideally blend together to create a uniform-ish image at a distance), but when you get closer, you see the different aspects of her personality and realize that she is good for more than just one thing. In lieu of an independent project this time around, we did studies of figures, with both gesture drawings and figure drawings. The final (the first picture above) is the official project.
I have come a long way in terms of making figures. While I feel like the face could use some work, and I didn't get to finish the shadow under the chair, I love the way the rest of her body (especially the legs) turned out. Ironically, I think the feet turned out fantastically, and the feet are usually what I leave out in quick gesture drawings because I feel like I won't be able to make them right. Hopefully as I do more figure drawings (although it may be a while before that happens again), I continue to improve at a level with which I'm satisfied. |
AuthorMolly Goodman Archives
May 2019
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