30 April 2009

Modernism and postmodernism

Contextual studies - aka art history. Postmodernism emerged within architecture. It had crises of originality (everything's been done) and of identity (if everyone is an artist, what does an artist do). One of our small-groups tasks was to decide whether some paintings were modern or postmodern. Surely that's a Dali (=surrealist=modern) at top left? (No; it's an appropriation=postmodern. The artist is Glenn Brown, currently showing at Tate Liverpool.)
My group missed the fact that these weren't abstract (=modern) paintings, but some rather famous hospital doors (the original is in colour) -
In the afternoon, learning how to use sketchbooks for research. You don't carefully draw the entire object, you focus on the bit you're interested in - ie, if you need to know how a certain part of it works, you draw that bit in detail. Obviously obvious, but needs to be said now and again.
Yet again I shied away from using lots of colour and doing huge drawings. I prefer pen, and lots of small things on a page - hmm, why...

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