Museum Trip
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena
Admission – Free with Student ID
Parking – Free
http://www.nortonsimon.org/
The Norton Simon is a great museum for our class! Not small… not ginormous… a nice, medium-sized place. And the ground floor has 600 years of painting, 14th – 20th centuries, nicely organized across the length of the museum, so you can really get a sense of culture, ideas, and styles across the different ages. Plus the place is camera friendly! They don’t like flash pix, but otherwise you can pretty much go nuts.
They own a ton of “Degas Ballerina” sculptures (you can’t miss ‘em!) So why don’t you copy a ballerina pose and have someone take a picture of you near the sculpture. If you get super-near, the security guards might freak out, but as long as it looks like you aren’t putting the art in any danger, they’re pretty cool with us.
They also have a nice garden you can check out and a nice South & Southeast Asian collection downstairs.
Find any 2 paintings to talk about. Take a photo of you with them. Then write about them, “Compare & Contrast”… you can pick 2 paintings in the same room (time period) or way apart, or whatever you like. How are these pieces the same? How are they different?
If we’d bought that $143 textbook, it would have a chapter on “Formal Elements” like Line, Shape, Color, Texture, Rhythm, Harmony, Scale, Balance… you can still think about those words and use them to compare the “Formal Qualities” of the paintings. For “Content,” what are they about, what’s going on? Again, compare and contrast.
Art Project
Graffiti Writing at the Venice Legal Art Walls
http://www.veniceartwalls.com/
As you’ll read on their website, they’re open Sat & Sun from 10a to half-hour before sunset. Anyone can paint as long as they bring ID and get a permit. There’s no cost, except maybe for parking. If you’re under 18, you can still paint, but they won’t let you use spray paint… you have to use brush or roller paint. But that actually doesn’t suck as much as it sounds. You can go to the hardware store and get those little mini 4″ rollers – they’re so fast & fun to work with.
Like pretty much all Museum Visits & Projects, this will be a lot more fun if you go with some peeps from class. Plus Graffiti Writing with one color of paint is weak. If you go by yourself at least take 2 colors. If you go with class peeps, just have each person bring 1 can, and you’ll have lots of colors.
Have fun & take pix. Snap whatever you do, and take some pix of other work you like there. Then just blog a little bit about your experience. If you want to shoot some video, you can just upload it to YouTube and embed it in your blog.
Artist to Research
Here’s the list of names we’re drawing from the hat. After you post your piece on your artist, put a comment to this page with the URL for your post so we can check out what you wrote. Post it by the end of this week (week 2) Sunday 30 Jan, so we can have Week 3 to look at what everybody wrote and leave comments before we start midterms.
Chauvet Cave, 32,000 YA (YA = “Years Ago”)
Altamira Cave, 14,000 YA
Hildegard von Bingen, 1098-1179
Jan Van Eyck, 1395-1441
Hieronymus Bosch, 1450-1516
Raphael, 1483-1520
Johannes Vermeer, 1632-1675
Francisco Goya, 1746-1828
JMW Turner, 1775-1851
Hiroshige, 1797-1858
Victorine Meurent, 1844-1927
Claude Monet, 1840-1926
Wassily Kandinsky, 1866-1944
Henri Matisse, 1869-1954
Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973
Jackson Pollock, 1912-1956
Yves Klein, 1928-1962
Andy Warhol, 1928-1987
Sol LeWitt, 1928-2007
Keith Haring, 1958-1990
Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1960-1988
Yayoi Kusama, 1929-
Chuck Close, 1940-
Julian Schnabel, 1951-
Matt Groening, 1954-
Mark Kostabi, 1960-
Lady Pink, 1964-
Shepard Fairey, 1970-
Banksy, 1974-
Kat Von D, 1982-
Neck Face, 1984-
Zevs, ?-
Revok, ?-
Joe Connolly (Graffiti Guerilla) ?-
Fafi, ?-
John Cage, 1912-1992 (not a painter, but we’ve brought him up)