Blog Post #3

       Since the last blog post, we have had two readings. The first one was a reading/drawing activity, which showed the difference between drawing on the right and left sides of the brain. It made us transition from using the logical side of the brain to using the artistic side of the brain and made us notice the shift. It was interesting but very difficult to complete the activities. I had already done the vases and faces and drawing upside down activities, but it didn’t make it any easier to do them again. I thought that the most difficult was having to draw my hands without looking because drawing hands is hard in general but when you cannot look at the paper, it makes it even worse. I was so tempted the whole time to just look down to see if it was even resembling a hand and I found it extremely annoying trying to draw that slow. I couldn’t take up as much time as  was suggested because it was so tedious. I understood the point of the activity but it was definitely a challenge.

      What we did in class the next day followed up on the reading. We focused on drawing different forms, all in nature and we had to draw what we saw with little to no looking at the paper. Once again, I found it frustrating that I wasn’t able to look at the paper as much as I wanted to. I wanted to look after every little line I drew, to check and make sure it looked right. But this wasn’t the point of the assignment. The point was to really look at what we were drawing and to get us to pay more attention to the different lines and forms of the object. We also had to look at a stool and not draw the stool, but draw around the stool; we looked at the negative space. But when we drew this outline, then cut it out, it still looked like the stool because the space around it creates the image as well. We also had to draw the human form. This was way more challenging than having to draw a tree or a rock. With only two minutes to draw the pose at first, and then five, I hardly felt like I started drawing before it was on to a new pose. At first, I felt like my drawings weren’t looking anything like the model, but with more time, I was able to focus more and had more time to get the form right; my drawings started to look more like the human form. 

      I decided to look more into the right and left side of the brain. I read a few more articles about it and even took a quiz on The Art Institute of Vancouver website, which told me that I was 46% left brained and 54% right brained, so the right side of my brain is dominant. I am more creative and I “use feeling and intuition to gather information.” The quiz gave me percentages of my left side and right side. It told me how linear, reality-based, symbolic, logical, sequential, and verbal I am for the left side, and then how concrete, fantasy-oriented, random, intuitive, nonverbal, and holistic I am for the right side. My most dominant characteristic on my left side is linear, meaning that I take information and line it up in a logical arrangement to come to my conclusion. On the right side, my most dominant characteristic is concrete, meaning that it is easier for me to process things that can be seen or touched. It is easier for me to understand things that I can visualize. It was a really interesting quiz because it gave explanations for all of the different characteristics and my results seemed really accurate. Here’s the link to the quiz!

http://www.wherecreativitygoestoschool.com/vancouver/left_right/rb_test.htm

Blog Post #2

We played pictionary in class on thursday. It was a fun game, but at the same time, showed us how humans can communicate using only images. I was actually surprised with how hard it can be to communicate an idea with only words and have your teammates see what you want them to see. They may see the image as something different than what you actually intended it to be. This demonstrated how difficult it can be for an artist to create a piece of art with their intended message and for the viewer to fully understand the meaning of the work. 

We have also begun to watch a movie called “Memento,” which follows a man who has short term memory loss and is trying to piece together the murder of his wife and how he lost his memory. The only details he remembers are from before the accident so he has to leave photos and notes everywhere for himself. But the more important information he tattoos on himself. The scenes have been growing more and more fragmented and short, much like his memory, and the order of scenes does not follow the sequence of events in the order that they occur. Instead, new scenes will jump into the middle of an event but then they end at the beginning of a previous scene, so they always lead up to what has happened and we find out how he got where he is. There is something not right with Teddy. For one, we don’t know his real name because he is called Teddy but his license says John G. It is still unclear whether he is the actual murderer or not. So far, thats what we’ve been led to believe but its questionable. Before he’s shot, he tells Leonard to look in the basement of the abandoned building but we haven’t yet seen whats down there. There is also a subplot going on with Natalie and her character is still unclear. She was bruised up and had lost someone too so somehow she fits into the main plot. But as of yet, it is really difficult to determine how the story will end up but I feel that there will be some interesting plot twists.

This week we read a second passage from “What is Time?” I found it difficult to get through because I’m not philosophical but I did find some interesting points made. It dealt a lot with memory and how our sense of time and memory fit together. The passage touched on the relativity of time: when we are young, time goes by so slow but it speeds up as we get older. When we are young, there is all of the time in the world and we are more focused on the present rather than planning ahead for the future but that changes as we get older. I think that a reason why time goes by faster as we get older is because we are much more aware of time and the lack of it, but for children, they are more carefree. Another point made about time is that when we are unoccupied or bored, time seems to go by so much slower than when our time is filled with events. This I found to be very interesting because time cannot actually be going slower or faster, its just our perception of it. When our time is not filled with events, we are waiting for something to happen, for something to do, so we are much more aware of the time, making it seem like its going by slower. But when we are occupied with something, we are not paying attention to time and so we lose track of it and it seems faster.

Blog Entry #1

In class, we have watched two separate music videos directed by Michel Gondry. Both were very artistic and played with the aspect of time. After seeing both for the first time, I was left confused and with no real sense of what the director was trying to achieve. Even after a second time, the meaning was unclear, though it was fairly obvious how complex each video was and how much work went into organizing them. I don’t think I would have been able to understand how the second video, Sugar Water, was done without Gondry explaining that it was a palindrome. After that it was clear to see that while one frame was going forward, the other was going backward but the same thing was happening at the same time in each. To even think of that  concept to me is amazing and to pull it off is even more amazing. 

I found the reading, “The Whole Ball of Wax” by Jerry Salz, that we were assigned to be very interesting. I agreed with a lot of what the author said but found that some claims may not be true in all circumstances. For example, I think that saying that “all those dogmatists, ideologues, academics, and theorists... demonize and belittle art as a gratuitous, semi-mystical, merely beautiful, purely formal amusement” is way to broad because surely it can be true for some but there are always exceptions. But one remark that I agreed with was that art can change the world, not in the sense of stopping global warming, as he says, but by osmosis. It can gradually change the opinions of people and greatly influence a society to make a change. I think that is what Salz is trying to say, that art can help people see the change that needs to be made. Until our discussion of the reading in class, I was confused on the comparison made between art and a cat in the last paragraph of the article. However, after hearing other peoples ideas on the meaning, I feel I now understand what the author was saying. He meant that art is not always direct, there is no definite solution and it is open to all sorts of interpretations. You look at a piece  of art, gather what you believe is the meaning or take whatever you will from it, and from this you connect with the artist, even if your interpretation wasn’t their intended meaning of the piece.

After seeing the two videos by Michel Gondry in class, and seeing the list of some other music videos he has directed, I became more interested in his work, so I decided to do a bit of research on him. I found that he started in music videos for a band that he was actually in, then got noticed by bigger artists and moved on from there. I also saw that he directed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Be Kind, Rewind, two movies which I had already seen and enjoyed. So I watched some more music videos which he has directed like “The Hardest Button to Button” and “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Floor” by The White Stripes and “Everlong” by Foo Fighters and each video was unique. But the one I found most interesting was “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Floor.” Jack White was alone in a dirty house with all of these holograms of other people, of him not alone, but they weren’t really there. He was the only one really there, which fits with the song because its about loneliness.