Sanna J-H Art Blog

Spaces and Photography

2011-01-15T15:57:00.000-08:00

very now and then there comes a time when I'm sitting quite relaxed and at my most comfortable, only to then slowly pick up the camera and start taking a good look around me.

Documentation...Documenation...Documentation...

Media - Screenprinting

2008-05-05T22:20:00.000-07:00

Screenprinting, silkscreening, or serigraphy is a printmaking technique that creates a sharp-edged image using a stencil. A screenprint or serigraph is an image created using this technique.
It began as an industrial technology, and was adopted by American graphic art well before the 1900s. It is currently popular both in fine arts and in commercial printing, where it is commonly used to print images on T-shirts, hats, CDs, DVDs, ceramics, glass, polyethylene, polypropylene, paper, metals, and wood. The Printer's National Environmental Assistance Center says "Screen printing is arguably the most versatile of all printing processes."[1] Since rudimentary screen-printing materials are so affordable and readily available, it has been used frequently in underground settings and subcultures, and the non-professional look of such DIY culture screen prints has become a significant cultural aesthetic seen on movie posters, record album covers, flyers, shirts, commercial fonts in advertising, and elsewhere.
Graphic screenprinting is widely used today to create many mass or large batch produced graphics, such as posters or display stands. Full color prints can be created by printing in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black). Screenprinting is often preferred over other processes such as dye sublimation or inkjet printing because of its low cost and ability to print on many types of media.

Interesting links:

Extras- Extras

2008-05-05T20:34:00.001-07:00

This post is mainly a compilation of my interests that at the same time follow some of the paths set out in the University syllabus:

''Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.''

Interesting Link:

Some very intriguing words spoken by Mr. Lee and I recommend, that who ever reads this blog watches this!

The Lost Interview with Bruce Lee

I would also like to include some info on two animation films I watched recently; ''Waking Life'' and ''Animatrix''. These to films raise several modern day questions and philosophies, using a very expressfull and powerfull media.

''Waking Life'' is a digitally enhanced live action rotoscoped film, directed by Richard Linklater and made in 2001. The entire film was shot using digital video and then a team of artists using computers drew stylized lines and colors over each frame. This technique is similar in some respects to the rotoscope style of 1970s filmmaker Ralph Bakshi, which was invented in the 1920s.

The title is a reference to George Santayana's maxim that "[s]anity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled."

Interesting links:

Waking up in Waking Life - Discussion of the philosophical and political ideas presented in the movie
Buddhist interpretation of Waking Life
Clip from film
Clip #2 from film

The ''Animatrix'' is a collection of nine animated short films released in 2003 and set in the fictional universe of The Matrix series.
Development of the Animatrix project began when the film series' writers and directors, the Wachowski brothers, were in Japan promoting the first Matrix film. While in the country, they visited some of the creators of the anime films that had been a strong influence on their work, and decided to collaborate with them.[1]
The Animatrix was conceived and overseen by the Wachowski brothers but they only wrote four of the segments themselves and did not direct any of them; most of the project was created by notable figures from the world of Japanese animation.

Interesting links:

P.S.
Last but surely not least, I would also like to mention the music I have posted. It is the soundtrack to the film ''Dead Man'', by Jim Jarmusch The movie is something of a Modern Western, which includes twisted elements of the Western Genre. The film is shot entirely in black-and-white.

Institution part II - Various Galleries

2008-05-05T19:15:00.000-07:00

Below is some information on various galleries around the world, that I have visited, in different parts of Europe:

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a small museum on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy. It is one of several museums of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Containing principally the personal art collection of Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979), a former wife of artist Max Ernst and a niece of mining magnate Solomon R. Guggenheim, this museum houses a somewhat smaller and more idiosyncratic collection than the other Guggenheim Foundation museums. However, the works on display include those of prominent American modernists and Italian futurists. Pieces in the collection embrace Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. These include notable works by Picasso, Dali, Magritte, Brancusi (including a sculpture from the Bird in Space series) and Pollock.
The collection is housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an unfinished 18th century palazzo which was never built past the ground floor level. In one room, the museum also exhibits a few paintings by her daughter Pegeen Vail. In the courtyards between the main buildings are sculpture gardens containing an extensive collection of works.
Its most famous (or notorious) exhibit is the 1948 bronze "The Angel of the City" by Marino Marini, positioned at the front of the palazzo, facing the Grand Canal. It is rumoured that this nude and clearly excited horse rider was originally possessed of a screw-in (sic) demountable penis so that it could be removed in order to avoid offending passing VIPs. So many of the bronze phalluses were stolen (although this may be an urban myth), that the current member has been welded to the Angel's body.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is the most important museum in Italy for European and American art of the first half of the 20th century. Philip Rylands is the museum's current director.

Malmö Konsthall was opened in 1975 and is one of Europe’s largest exhibition halls for contemporary art. Architect Klas Anshelm has created an exhibition hall with great flexibility, generous space and fantastic light. The construction materials are light and simple: concrete, glass, wood and aluminium. Most of the gallery has a ceiling constructed like a latticework of 550 domes with both natural and artificial light sources. The height of the ceiling varies. The light well - with the higher ceiling - has a big sloping skylight towards the north. Klas Anshelm got inspiration for the construction when visiting the sculptor Constantin Brancusi in his Paris studio. The result is a gallery that is both functional and aesthetic. An exhibition space that presents the artist with endless possibilities.

Malmö Konsthall arranges exhibitions with an international focus which encompasses both the classics of modern art and current experiments

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is located directly on the shore of the Øresund in Humlebæk 35 kilometers north of Copenhagen in Denmark. It has a wide range of modern art paintings, sculptures and videos, including works by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Anselm Kiefer, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. The videos are often housed in room settings where the viewer is made to feel part of the scene being portrayed. Perched above the sea, there is a sculpture garden between the museum's two wings with works by artists including Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, and Jean Arp. The name of the museum derives from the first owner of the property, Alexander Brun, who named it for his three wives, each with the name of Louise.
The museum is included in the Patricia Schultz book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die.

Interesting links:

Institution - Camden Art Center

2008-05-05T16:26:00.001-07:00

Camden Arts Centre is a stimulating and welcoming place where you can actively engage with contemporary art, artists and ideas, through a dynamic and challenging programme of exhibitions, talks and events and education.

is a Grade II listed building sited in the London Borough of Camden, London Englan, between the areas of Hampstead and Kilburn. It is the largest art centre venue in North London, although by no means is it the largest arts venue per se.

The venue began as the Hampstead Arts Centre in 1965, part of the former 1897 Hampstead public library. It was taken over by the local council in 1967 and renamed the Camden Arts Centre. It ran courses for artists, and also showed artworks. Exhibitions in the larger galleries were the responsibility of the Arkwright Arts Trust, and these were often ambitious and of well-known artists. These aspects of the centre moved away, along with most of the local artists who had frequented the Centre, to become the Hampstead School of Art in 1992.

The original venue reopened as an Arts Council arts centre, after a £4.2 million makeover, in January 2004. It has a focus on the visual arts.

Interesting links:

Publication - Baudelaire

2008-05-05T12:22:00.000-07:00

''By 'modernity' I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.''

-from 'The Painter of Modern Life'

In the French society after 1848, a gap begins to open between bourgeois modernity, on the one hand, and aesthetic modernity, on the other. The later claims of the various modernisms to create the authentically new can be traced back to this early sense of `false' modernity whose surface momentum conceals its inner sameness, its increasing reproduction of the safe limits of the bourgeois world. Here too the particular modernist preoccupation with time begins.
Baudelaire argued that painters should paint figures in contemporary dress, rather than in archaic costumes from the past, and that the contemporary, in all its diverse and fleeting guises, had a heroic or epic dimension. Baudelaire's idea of modernity was not merely a question of being up-to-date or subject to swiftly changing fashions, although these were symptomatic of a modern type of experience. It claimed that the modern in art related to the experience of modernity, that is, to an experience which is always changing, which does not remain static and which is most clearly felt in the metropolitan centre of the city. As soon as we try to pin modernity down or define it in a simple formulation, we risk losing this sense that it is, by definition, constantly subject to renewal, that it marks out shifting ground. For Baudelaire, new subjects required a new technique; just as there were appropriate forms that the modern in art could take, so too there were inappropriate forms.

Journal -Dan Eldon

2008-05-05T11:48:00.000-07:00

Daniel Eldon (1970-1993) was an English photojournalist. During the summer of 1992, the famine in Somalia was raging. He flew from Kenya from the refugee camps. The international news agency, Reuters, spotted his work, and by Christmas, he was working for the company, shooting the increasingly desperate situation. He followed the story closely and was present at the U.S. Marine landing, where a barrage of international photographers and journalists were waiting for the American soldiers as they crept, faces blackened, off their landing craft in Mogadishu.
Throughout the spring of 1993, Eldon stayed in Mogadishu. The situation worsened, and the death of Pakistani peace keepers turned the conflict into an international incident. During this time, his pictures were featured in newspapers and magazines around the world. On 12 June 1993 his photo made a double-page spread in Newsweek magazine, as well as the covers of newspapers everywhere.
In April 1993, he published his first book, Somalia, a collection of photographs and collages which sold rapidly to aid workers and soldiers posted to the country considered by most to be more dangerous than Bosnia.
The violence and horror of the situation was extremely hard on Eldon. Although he had “had enough” by late June 1993, he agreed to stay on to cover the unfolding events. On 12 July 1993, he and three of his colleagues raced across Mogadishu to cover the bombing of what was thought to be General Aideed’s headquarters. In the ensuing confusion, all four young men were beaten, clubbed and stoned to death by an angry mob furious about the death of over 50 at the hands of U.S. and U.N. soldiers.

Interesting links:

Artist - Goya

2008-05-05T06:02:00.000-07:00

Francisco Goya, was a Spanish painter and printmaker. He has been regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and as the first of the moderns. The subversive and subjective element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a model for the work of later generations of artists, notably Manet and Picasso.

Considered to be "the Father of Modern Art", Goya began his painting career just after the late Baroque period. In expressing his thoughts and feelings frankly, as he did, he became the pioneer of new artistic tendencies which were to come to fruition in the 19th century. Two trends dominated in his art and together they represented the reaction against previous conceptions of art and the desire for a new form of expression.

In order to understand the magnitude of Goya's art, and to appreciate the principles which governed his development and tremendous versatility, it is essential to realise that his work extended over a period of more than 60 years, for he continued to draw and paint until his 82nd year. His different attitudes towards life is evident in his work; in his youth he accepted the world as it was, quite happily. In his adult years, he began to criticise the world, and in his old age, he became embittered and disillusioned with people and society.

Furthermore, the world changed completely during his lifetime. The society, in which he had achieved a great success disappeared during the Napoleonic war. Long before the end of the 18th century Goya had already turned towards his new ideals and expressed them in his graphic art and in his paintings.

Interesting links:

What Is Art? (First Assignment For Art & Philosophy)

2008-05-05T05:15:00.000-07:00

(a man’s thoughts as he steps into a gallery)
‘Ah the age old question, the thought at the back of every artists mind, the wonder if what they are doing is actually real to someone else. What is art? Is it a thought, a philosophy? A memory?’
He keeps still for one moment, pauses as though he was actually thinking about it. Then he carries on floating through the room. ‘What do you see when u look at art, what do you see in other people who look at art, is it your art?
Are you bored?
Do you try?
Is it fear?
What’s so scary about art?
Is it making you think?
Do you really want an answer or and excuse to go away for a while?’. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Who is this man talking to? Himself yes sure, but what’s in him.
‘Why not try to ask yourself another question, maybe the answer is the same for all questions. I have recently realised that we as humans, in fact have more then one life. Now people from one of my past lives has come back and with him brought a bouquet of friends. Ever felt like your room is too messy and need to clean it up, but there’s too much, where do you start? And that’s the same for my questions. Which question comes first? What difference does it make?’
Lights a cigarette, ‘So now I’m supposed to sit here come up with something good to say, something challenging, when the truth is you would hate me later for telling you. I would be the destroyer of your fantasies. Everybody needs to hold on to their fantasies because that’s the half of the body that carries art. It’s the thing we…can’t quite put our finger on, but know we need it. If you touch it, it might fall to pieces.
…has he gone to see the riverman?

Spontaneous combustion? Tell me… what are you thinking of.
That sore in the corner of your eye, sorry it’s in the corner of my eye now… its always the same shoulder that keeps aching, I’m not a doctor so I can’t help my self…I can’t help myself.
Twitch, flick, something somewhere is moving you can feel it but you don’t know where its coming from, but you like it. Somehow it gives you comfort, or maybe I’ve been so tired for so long that I forgot what it feels like to be comfortable…so you are just trying to imagine what it could feel like.

Feel the dark clouds creeping over from the back of your eyes, my eyes.
Who am I speaking for? Who am I speaking to?

Is this art? Would you have the balls to call this art, or would it make you a coward?

You might see this as one connecting thought running through some cynical old man, or a bunch of dead end roads, one having absolutely nothing to do with the other. Or this might be it, the big Kahuna. Question is, why do we feel the need to define art, look at it as something that has to be thoroughly examined, conquered, it just might ruin it. Basically, stop asking that question and move on with life, get over it because it’s not part of the big picture, its not going to keep you safe, not going to determine the way your life will unfolds. Just let the rain fall, no need to chase after the rain drops.