venice

So Venice... It was interesting. I love car rides so getting there is already an adventure. Again, I went with my aunt Evelyn and Juan. We couldn’t really find parking so we just parked by some apartments and we walked to the beach. It was kinda crazy trying to get over there. There was lots of foot traffic and car traffic and the streets were so little! I had actually only been to Venice once before when I was younger and I don’t know why it seemed so different to me. Personally, I thought it was kind of dirty and crazy. Call me old fashioned but when I see a people dressed up as a marijuana plant and advertising it, it kind of makes me feel like WOAH!! Yeah it’s a really different culture in Venice.

Anyway, back to the drawing part. On the way over there I was trying to formulate a plan of what I was going to draw but it was useless since I’m not much of an artist. I can barely draw with a pencil, let alone with a spray can. We got assigned a little wall and I got the middle of it.  I wanted to get rid of the art that was there already so I just figured I’d start with that. I sprayed everything with yellow and after I was done I just sat there thinking what my next move was going to be. So I started to draw what I draw best… A TREE! I love trees and I’m always drawing trees on paper like in my notes and stuff so I decided I should try it with spray paint! this is what came out...

my tree

 So i liked my tree, i really did but i don't know it seemed a little too plain. I decided to leave it alone and I just watched Juan and Evelyn do their thing. There paintings where so colorful and amazing so I felt pretty lame with my lame tree. I wanted to add some color to it but i didn't know how to. I'm not very skilled with a spray can. I also didn't want to mess it up, but then i grabbed the pink spray can and this is what came out

I don't know if you can tell but my background has chicken pox!

Well, i was even more unsatisfied so....

this happened!

 

I didn't like it at first but when i looked at all of our drawings together it looked pretty good! So i was happy :)

So graffiti art is a lot of fun. There should definitely be more places like this where you can go and draw whatever you want, even a silly little tree. This experience was a great one and i'm pretty sure i'll come back and do it again. 

 

visiting the norton simon museum

Norton Simon Museum

I loved this museum! I thought it was going to be a lot smaller. I've never gone to a museum where they have actual paintings so I didn't really know what to expect. 

Okay so i went to the museum with my aunt Evelyn and my boyfriend Juan. We started out in the 14^th-16^th century gallery. It was amazing how many paintings there were. I was not surprised at all to see that this gallery was full of religious paintings. There were paintings of Christ, the Madonna and Child, and lots of different saints. I thought it was cool how in a lot of the paintings with saints in them you could see a hint of a halo. At first I didn’t even notice it until my aunt pointed it out. The galleries that i liked the most were the 19th century one and the modern/contemporary one. One of my favorite artist is Vincent Van Gogh and I enjoyed looking at some of his art pieces in the 19th century gallery.

 

 

Mulberry Tree 1889 - Van Gogh

 As i was walking through the galleries i noticed that there were many flower type paintings. I like nature and i love flowers so i found these two beautiful flower paintings that i really liked.

Flowers in a Glass Beaker, c. 1620 - Binoit

This still life represents a popular format employed by Dutch artists early in the 17th century. The crisply defined, tight blossoms are arranged in a compact bouquet in a glass beaker decorated with drops of molten glass. Although each blossom is very precise and exactly copied from nature, the bouquet itself is a work of the imagination. It contains flowers that bloom during different seasons. The almost symmetrically arranged flowers, aligned across the picture plane so that each one may be seen.

Vase of Lilacs, Roses, and Tulips, 1863 - Courbet

Gustave Courbet painted this still life while staying at a wealthy land owners house. The estate housed many gardens with exotic flowers and local flowers that were unfamiliar to artist from the east. The environment engulfed him and essentially inspired him to paint flowers.The Purply-white lilacs, pale yellow roses, burnt orange tulips and small red poppies burst forth from the canvas. Their lightness of color and thick green in between makes them pop. The flowers also come forward because of the placement in a dark, non-descript background.

The first painting is painted on copper, the second is painted right onto a canvas. The second painting is very unorganized and its unclear what flowers lay in between all of the green. I think that's what makes the painting real as opposed to the first painting that is simply made up. To my surprise i find them both equally bright. i thought that since the first painting is older it might be more dull in comparison to the younger painting. i do think that overall the second painting stand out more because it filled up most of the canvas space. The second painting would have that ability to if it was bigger or had more flowers i feel like the background is taking the spotlight away.

So overall this little trip was fun but exhausting. There were so many paintings to look at and each painting had so much detail it was impossible to take a good look at each one.

Chauvet Cave

The Chauvet Cave is located in the south of France. It contains the oldest cave painting from 30,000+ YA. One could say that the Chauvet Cave is the birthplace of art. The date places the drawings in the Aurignacian, or the early Upper Paleolithic period. The Chauvet Cave is considered one of the most important and oldest prehistoric art sites. 

WHAT?

The Chauvet Cave was discovered in December 1994 by Jean Marie-Chauvet, Christian Hillaire, and Éliette Brunel. Since Chauvet and his friends enjoyed studying caves, they were curious to see what they could find. They explored almost the entire network of chambers, and on the way back out, Éliette saw an amazing sight: a small mammoth drawn with red ochre on a rocky spur hanging from the ceiling. They had discovered ART! They started paying close attention to the walls and they discovered hundreds of paintings and engravings.

Among the mammoth painting they discovered paintings and carvings of cavebears, horses, bison, cave lions, rhinos, owls, and hyenas.

The Chauvet Cave is probably so important because it contains the oldest paintings known to mankind.  This cave is so different from any other cave because it contains paintings of carnivorous animals rather than non-threatening animals. This is really unusual for cave art because they usually draw animals that can be hunted.  Another unusual thing about the cave is that the artists drew pictures of animals that were not thought to be prehistoric, such as the owls. Another unique fact about the cave is that the artists that painted these animals used techniques not often seen in other cave art.  Typical of most cave art, there are no paintings of complete human figures, although there is one possible partial "Venus" figure that may represent the legs and genitals of a woman. Also an imaginary figure may be present; it appears to have the lower body of a woman with the upper body of a bison.

Probably the most famous painting in the cave.

HOW?

Many of the paintings appear to have been made only after the walls were scraped clear of debris. This left a smoother and noticeably lighter area upon which the artists worked.  The tools used are not known because they have not survived this time period but one can guess that they started with their hands and used sticks and rocks or maybe animal bone to carve. One type of method experts are sure they used is spray painting. By mixing pigment with water and spraying it either directly from their mouths or through tubes made out of animal bones they were able to create a spray paint type image. There are many handprints done using this method.

The oldest hand print, it most likely belonged to a male.

WHY?

There are many theories on why prehistoric people paint animals. It is hard today to interpret the art of the Upper Paleolithic because so much has changed over the 30,000 years since its creation. When studying Paleolithic art we are only observing a small proportion of what was made, only the surviving art. Many conjectures can be made as to what these paintings meant to the people who painted them.  While art historians often view this early cave art as the ‘awakening’ of a human instinct to study the world around them, the majority of pre-historians believe instead that it is part of a wider cultural behavior. One suggestion is that the art represented a type of communication related to the behavior of animals. I believe that the paintings are the result of a basic need of expression that is innate to human beings

For a tour of the cave: http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en/