Welcome

Welcome to the Springfield Township High School Art Blog. The purpose of this forum is to inspire discourse surrounding your artistic experiences while building writing skills, exercising your art vocabulary, and refining descriptive language relating to art. In your writing, you may choose to discuss museum and gallery exhibitions, publications, articles, professional works, student works, or responses to each other’s ideas and investigations. Additionally, participants may want to pose questions or react to artistic predicaments, sharing the trials, frustrations, solutions, or the general excitement we feel when we make or look at art.

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

The World, Matisse, Moma, You, Me


The World:  With all the wrapping that's going on lately, one starts to think about quality papers, materials, patterns, and ways of bonding them together.  Beside gifts, artists have been wrapping things for years, pasting paper, and bonding materials together as collage.

 MAN RAY, The enigma of Isidore Ducasse

The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, Man Ray, National Gallery of Art.
 http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=43741&PICTAUS=TRUE



 http://christojeanneclaude.net/projects/the-pont-neuf-wrapped#.VJBDm8ksPLU
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
The Pont Neuf Wrapped, Paris, 1975-85
Photo: Wolfgang Volz
© 1985 Christo 

The Hannover Merzbau
 The Hannover Merzbau by Kurt Schwitters. Photo by Wilhelm Redemann, 1933.
http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/07/09/in-search-of-lost-art-kurt-schwitterss-merzbau


Matisse:  At the end of his career, Matisse was cutting paper, and, under his direction, others helped assemble some large collages.

Matisse’s studio, Hôtel Régina, Nice, c. 1953. Photo: Lydia Delectorskaya. © 2014 Succession H. Matisse
Matisse’s studio, Hôtel Régina, Nice, c. 1953. Photo: Lydia Delectorskaya. © 2014 Succession H. Matisse http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1512

Moma:   Henri Matisse: The Cut Outs, Is the current show at New York City's Museum of Modern Art.   This exhibition is an opportunity to view and appreciate the scale of these collages.  Pictures in a book or online just don't cut it.      [yes, I intended that]
  
You:  Throughout my career, I've taken students to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Barnes Foundation.  Some were even lucky enough to go to The Modern and the Whitney in NYC.  The one outstanding comment I would hear after every trip was, "Wow! I thought those works were impressive online/in books, but seeing them in person is a moving experience- inspirational."

Me:  My current work has been in torn paper. It was inspired by waves washing up on the beach and leaving a line of sand and debris along the shore.  My collages are as much about the mark an artist makes as they are about the mark a wave leaves behind.  They were not based on the artists or shows seen above.  However, those artists broke ground long before, adding to my palette, and granting me permission to continue.

Like as the waves...