Art in Context

1
Art in Context

• Outcomes
• 1) Look at the artist you have chosen to study on
  this powerpoint.
• 2) Answer the questions about your artist from
  the art in context sheet in more detail.
• 3) Choose a picture you want to study/write about
  in more depth and print a colour version of it
  (if you havent already)
• 4) Make links to the words highlighted in blue,
  using the following website www.artlex.com. To
  give you even more information.

2
Georgia O Keefe

• American
• Surrealist painter
• who concentrated on massive close ups of
  flowers, as well as moody landscapes of the
  American mid-west
• She worked primarily in oil-paint and by the
  mid-1920s, she began making large scale paintings
  of natural forms from close up, as if seen
  through a magnifying lens.
• A lot of critics have suggested that her flowers
  are very feminine.
• Ideas What could you study in an extreme amount
  of detail?

3
Audrey Flack

• American
• Contemporary Painter
• PhotoRealist
• She uses airbrushes
• She concentrates on mystical and very colourful
  still life groups
• The objects she chooses to paint are very
  personal to her
• This painting is called Wheel of Fortune
• Her paintings can be compared to the Dutch
  Vanitas paintings which used objects in a very
  symbolic way to suggest life and death. (Small
  image to the right)

4
Art Nouveau

• 1900-1910
• An International movement involving artists from
  many different countries
• Art Nouveau can be recognised by the use of
  flowing lines based on natural forms. Plants,
  flowers , shells and animals were all sources of
  inspiration for designers.
• See the Powerpoint Presentation on the Year 8
  Art page of the school website for more
  information.

5
Islamic art

• Islam is the religion of Muslims, based upon the
  submission of the faithful to the will of Allah
  (the only God) Today, one fifth of the world's
  population believes in Islam.
• Of all the visual arts, calligraphy has been
  most highly regarded as a fine art by Muslims.
  The Arabic alphabet in various scripts, generally
  in combination with arabesque ornament, became
  the most prized decoration for architecture and
  other functional works, such as furniture,
  textiles, and vessels. Indeed, with the exception
  of poets and calligraphers, Muslims have never
  looked to artists for special insights or
  meanings. They have regarded the arts primarily
  as the decorative arts, based greatly upon the
  study of mathematics, and involving intricately
  geometric designs. The absence of figures is a
  characteristic feature of Islamic religious art.
  It is occasionally said that figures were banned
  in Islam from the start, but this is untrue.

6
Blossfeldt

• A German photographer who concentrated on highly
  detailed black and white photographs of flowers.
• Karl Blossfeldt (1865 1932) was a German
  photographer, sculptor, teacher, and artist who
  worked in Berlin, Germany, at the turn of the
  century. He worked with a camera he designed
  himself. That camera allowed him to greatly
  magnify the objects he was capturing, to up to 30
  times their actual size. He spent much of his
  time devoted to the study of nature. In his
  career of more than 30 years, he photographed
  nothing but plants, or rather, sections of
  plants. In many of his photographs, he would zoom
  in so close to a plant that the plant no longer
  looked like a plant. The images he created looked
  more like lovely, abstract forms. His photos
  revealed the amazing detail found in nature.
• When Blossfeldt began his career, photography
  was still quite new. Many people saw it as a
  scientific tool. They looked at it as an
  infallible means of capturing the world. Many
  people did not look at photography as an art form
  yet. Blossfeldt's work can be seen as a
  transition between looking at photography as just
  science and looking at photography as art.

7
Roy Lichtenstein
American Pop Art 1960s (Flower power, hippies,
youth culture) Much of his work is based on comic
strips, which at the time were very basic, using
only the Primary colours. He invented a technique
using benday dots for half tones, which he
stencilled through a metal mesh Acrylic paints
(had just been invented, a very bright paint ,
initially meant to be weatherproof for large
outside murals. It dries very quickly and has PVA
glue mixed with it, making it very
hard-wearing. His work reflects a
materialistic/consumer society. It is bright,
brash, bold and fun
8
James Rosenquist

• American
• Pop Art
• 1960s (Flower power, hippies, youth culture)
• Acrylic paints (had just been invented, a very
  bright paint , initially meant to be weatherproof
  for large outside murals. It dries very quickly
  and has PVA glue mixed with it, making it very
  hard-wearing.
• His work reflects a materialistic/consumer
  society.
• It is bright, brash, bold and fun

9
William Morris

• William Morris (March 24, 1834 October 3, 1896)
  was an English artist, writer, socialist and
  activist. He was one of the principal founders of
  the British Arts and Crafts movement, best known
  as a designer of wallpaper and patterned fabrics,
  a writer of poetry and fiction and a pioneer of
  the socialist movement in Britain.
• His family was wealthy, and he went to school at
  Marlborough College.
• He and his friends formed an artistic movement,
  the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They eschewed the
  tawdry industrial manufacture of decorative arts
  and architecture and favoured a return to
  hand-craftsmanship, raising artisans to the
  status of artists. He espoused the philosophy
  that art should be affordable, hand-made, and
  that there should be no hierarchy of artistic

• Victorian designer, famous for his intricate
  flower designs

10
Christo

• Christo creates environmental installation art.
  His works include the wrapping of the Reichstag
  in Berlin and the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris and
  the 24-mile-long curtain called Running Fence in
  Marin and Sonoma counties in California Although
  his work is visually impressive and often
  controversial as a result of its scale, he has
  denied that his projects contain any deeper
  meaning than their immediate aesthetic. The
  purpose of his art, he contends, is simply to
  make the world a "more beautiful place" or to
  create new ways of seeing familiar landscapes.
  Art critic David Bourdon has described Christo's
  wrappings as a "revelation through concealment."

11
Monet

• Impressionist Painter
• 1890s
• French
• Loved light and the play of light and shadow on
  natural objects
• Would paint the same thing over and over again,
  but at different times of the day, in order to
  capture the fleeting moment
• The invention of oil paint in tubes meant that
  for the first time painters were not confined to
  a studio, could take their equipment with them,
  and paint outside!
• Impressionist painters didnt use black in their
  palette as they felt that this colour doesnt
  occur naturally in nature. They painted quickly
  and used a series of dashes and paint strokes to
  build up a picture, which shocked their
  audiences! (who were used to paintings that
  looked like photographs at this time)

12
Sas Christian

• British Contemporary artist (Female)
• She works in acrylic paints and oils.
• Sas says, Theyre older than adolescent. Its
  their eyes that give them that childlike
  quality. It is the eyes. In every one of her
  pieces, the predominant feature is quite
  obviously those gorgeous, bulbous, ocean-sized
  eyes. They pull you right in. Sas Christian
  works out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida with her
  husband Colin, who is also a talented artist. She
  finds her inspiration all over, in one-liners and
  in music. She hasnt been painting for very long.
  She kind of stumbled into it, by discovering that
  she was good at it. And that she is. With her
  graphic design background, her work hints at an
  illustrators genius.
• the artists she most admires would be
  Bouguereau, Tamara De Lempicka, Mark Ryden... Sas
  draws inspiration from everyday occurences,
  movies and music.

13
Kahlo

• Mexican
• Born 1907, died 1951
• Female artist
• Influenced by Surrealism and Mexican Folk Art
• She was intensely proud of her background and
  heritage, much of her artwork dealt with her
  identity
• She used Oil Paint.
• She suffered from a horrific tram injury which
  meant a number of spinal operations, and spending
  a great deal of her life in pain.

14
Banksy

• Banksy (1974 -- ) is a graffiti artist from
  Bristol, UK, whose artwork has appeared
  throughout London and other locations around the
  world. Despite this he carefully manages to keep
  his real name from the mainstream media. However,
  many newspapers assert that his real name is
  Robert or Robin Banks.Banksy, despite not
  calling himself an artist, has been considered by
  some as talented in that respect he uses his
  original street art form, often in combination
  with a distinctive stencilling technique, to
  promote alternative aspects of politics from
  those promoted by the mainstream media.
• Some believe that his stencilled graffiti
  provides a voice for those living in urban
  environments that could not otherwise express
  themselves, and that his work is also something
  which improves the aesthetic quality of urban
  surroundings many others disagree, asserting
  that his work is simple vandalism
• Due to the shroud of secrecy surrounding his real
  identity and his subversive character Banksy has
  achieved somewhat of a cult following from some
  of the younger age group within the stencilling
  community.

15
Gormley

• Antony Mark David Gormley OBE (born 30 August
  1950) is an English sculptor. His best known
  works include the Angel of the North, a public
  sculpture in Gateshead and Another Place on
  Crosby Beach near Liverpool.
• Almost all of his work takes the human body as
  its subject, with his own body used in many works
  as the basis for metal casts.
• Gormley describes his work as "an attempt to
  materialise the place at the other side of
  appearance where we all live." Many of his works
  are based on moulds taken from his own body, or
  "the closest experience of matter that I will
  ever have and the only part of the material world
  that I live inside."