My Kid Could Paint That

Bruce Davidson received national attention for his photography at the young age of 19, after winning a Kodak film contest for a picture of an owl. This first step began a long run of work documenting communities, particularly in New York, and social strife. His work during the summer of 1965 documented the Civil Rights Movement just before Voting Rights Act. This body of work perhaps has gained the most notoriety out of any other artist covering that monumental event.

BY MADELINE VASQUEZ 

Morris Louis was known for his immense amount of work within the world of Color Field painting. Towards the beginning of his career as an artist, he had not yet found his style and drew odd sketches of figures and painted people. Around the mid-1950’s, his inspiration from Rothko, Pollock, Newman, and others, allowed him to realize that he loved the idea of free-flowing color and tonal relations. He said, "The more I paint the more I'm aware of a difference in my approach and others. Am distrustful of over-simplifications but nonetheless think that there is nothing very new in any period of art: what is true is that it is only something new for the painter and that this thin edge is what matters." 

He worked with the the three styles of Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, and Lyrical Abstraction. From these styles he created a five series grouping of his works in which each we called, Veil, Floral, Unfurled, Stripe, and Column. Between 1955 and 1957 he ended up destroying a lot of his paintings, but continued to work on and complete the Veil series shortly after. 

Louis’s Delta Theta is one of his most famous and recognizable works of art in his Unfurled series. He was known for altering the canvas he used, so for this he folded the canvas and then poured different colors of acrylic down the sides to create the dripping effect. By not using up the whole canvas, Louis took on the amazing concept of pictorial space and how an artist does not need to cover the whole canvas.

Bright, pink light. It blinds you, but it also draws it in. It’s like opening your eyes in the morning. It’s like a deep pink sunset. It’s the white like that peaks out from magic door #1, #2, and #3. Which one will you choose? Which door holds the bright white light of your dreams? Walking inside a James Turrell exhibit is like opening that magical door.

Raemar Pink White is a shallow space construction piece by James Turrell. For these pieces, Turrell makes small architectural modifications to create a space that is then filled with light. A shallow space construction piece is viewed from the rear of a large room which controlled lighting challenges the viewer’s depth perception.

James Turrell, the King of Light. For years Turrell has been taking viewers on a journey of self discovery as they rediscover light and their surroundings. Turrell is one of the first artists to look deeply at light and use it as a medium for art. Turrell focuses on the sensory experiences of light and “he creates opportunities for viewers to experience light as a primary physical presence rather than as a tool with which to see or render other phenomena.” By isolating light he pushes viewers to think about the properties of light itself by examining transparency, volume, and color.

I think Turrell resembles Rothko, if Rothko used light. He creates huge pieces covering walls with bold and bright colors. The colors engulf you. The colors and the light is all that you see, but you feel the movement of the light too.

I was fortunate to visit a Turrell exhibit at the LACMA in 2014, but that was before I took art history. Unfortunately, I walked through the exhibit without the knowledge to understand the genius of Turrell. But, I do not think that took away too much from the exhibit. Even without knowing Turrell’s motives as an artist, I still felt the light, movement, and color. It’s not always about understanding art, as much as feeling the art. Turrell’s works prove that art is about feeling, seeing, and learning.

Three years after painting Flag and White Flag, Jasper Johns created my personal favorite among his works: Three Flags. The painting is technically fantastic with clean lines, hues of time-faded white fabric, and unbelievable depth extracted from an object as flat as a flag. The painting jumps out at you—flies into your personal space—and has a freshness in its style. With stars and stripes on stars and stripes on stars and stripes, one can see nothing but good old-fashioned patriotism. So that was Johns's goal, right? Good. Simple analysis—moving on.

Surprisingly, love/hatred of America was not the idea behind the work. During the first part of his career, Johns used "concrete" subjects—familiar items from everyday life—to withdraw emotion from his paintings. Since they already feel comfortable with the image in front of them, viewers feel an automatic association with Johns's works.

The emotional response elicited by Three Flags also results from the highly symbolic nature of its subject matter. Observers' reactions differ dramatically based on their national allegiance and the point in time at which they view the painting. For any person, though, it is difficult not to have personal experiences tied to a symbol as omnipresent as the American flag. Although he tried to remove emotion by using clear, tangible objects, Jasper Johns created a highly affecting piece with Three Flags, whose simplicity generates ever-changing reception.

About 5 years ago, I was an avid reader of the web-comic Incidental Comics. In one particular comic titled "Self Portrait" Grant Snider features a man attempting to paint himself in the styles of various artists. The last one (pasted below) is in the style of Chuck Close.  

Clyfford Still, PH-118, 1947

By SAI GONDI

Simple subjects caught the eye of Morandi as the majority of his subject matter includes bowls, vases, flowers, landscapes and bowls. Born in Bologna, Italy, Morandi never really travelled very far. The influences of his heritage greatly influenced him. As a soft-spoken recluse, many called him 'il monaco,' meaning the monk. His fame went from provincial, to national rather quickly due to his immense talent. Surely his vast amount of works included what seems to be the same vases and bowls and to that thought you would be indefinitely correct. Morandi would take jars, bottles and vases and remove all labels in which he would then have an unlimited amount of easily accessible subjects that he could arrange and rearrange. His drive for purity and perfection landed him as the master of natura morta of the 20th century.

Still Life 1955 exists as one of the hundreds of stills lifes completed in Morandi's lifetime. The use flat colors and neutral earth tones reoccur endlessly. Like many other pieces, this painting alludes to the ever so present Italian heritage embedded in mind. Morandi draws from the breathtaking Medieval architecture present in not just all of Italy, but particularly in his hometown, Bologna. Similarly to 18th century still life master, Chardin, Morandi looks at all subject matter with fresh eyes. His repetition and focus on the same objects is allowed due to this prospective. "I am essentially a painter of the kind of still life composition that communicates a sense of tranquility and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else." This calm mood continues throughout all his works as his patience and perfectionism lands him at the top tier of natura morta.

By EMMA SHAPIRO

When I was in the fourth grade and still believed in magic, my friend Emma and I decided God had given us special powers -- a certain clairvoyance, a capacity for truth -- which would enable us to save the world. We did not know what, exactly, we were to save the world from, but this seemed irrelevant at the time. We felt important, and thus we were happy. The evidence was everywhere. First there was the large stick from the playground -- creatively dubbed "The Stick" -- which appeared to be covered with ancient hieroglyphs. I still remember those meaningless squiggles. They were uncommonly beautiful. Next there was the wind in the grass, which I thought nothing of until Emma convinced me each ripple was really the footstep of an angel. Her mother had told her this, and Emma's mom was my English teacher, so of course I trusted them both. But I would not have believed as strongly in our game as I did if it hadn't been for the eyes. One Wednesday afternoon when we were looking for God, Emma pointed at the sky and said, "It's Him! He's watching us!"

I had no idea what she was talking about, so she pulled me closer and aligned my gaze with her finger. One of the clouds was not a cloud. It was a gigantic eye made of cloud-bits. Thus began the strangest and most glorious phase of our self-aggrandizing fanaticism. We saw eyes everywhere. I especially recall how we scoured the bricks on the back of the school with the palms of our hands, feeling for little craters, which we always found. We were ecstatic, waiting for a message that never came; we said that God was "everywhere and nowhere at all," our first foray into philosophy. Then it ended. I do not know when, or even if, I stopped believing in God, but a creeping sense of shame told me the game itself was fake, like the feeling you get when you first contemplate the impossibility of Santa Claus. Emma and I grew apart. We turned to books and love for answers, with varying degrees of success. (My first crush is now-- horrifyingly-- a senior at Pembroke.) Even the allure of our favorite stories and hopeless romances paled in comparison to our self-imposed holiness. This is why I have chosen Jackson Pollock's Eyes in the Heat-- because it brings back all the mystery and excitement of when Emma and I went looking for God on the playground.

Pollock toys with the mind's tendency to seek out facial features. We naturally detect faces on the fronts of cars and in outlets for three-pronged plugs; here, we find eyes in vague, loping ellipses.

Some shapes in Eyes in the Heat are clearly more eye-like that others, and once the mind is primed, we find new eyes in the slightest indications of roundness. Even knowing the title changes what the viewer finds; I would like to have two people look at this painting for twenty seconds-- telling only one person the title-- and then ask them what they saw. Eyes in the Heat shows how truly arbitrary artistic meaning can be and emphasizes the importance of the subconscious and the power of belief in our everyday quest for truth.

I, as hopefully all Missourians, have a great love of Benton. His depictions of the Midwest were some of the first artistic creations of the region since George Birmingham nearly a century before. While his regionalism may have had allowed many along the coasts to dismiss Benton, this is completely undeserved as his depictions represent the hardscrabble life that is often forgotten by the East Coast intelligentsia. The story of the Midwest is one that must be told, while it lacks the panache and dazzle of the coasts, it is the gritty work of farmers that keeps this nation running.

The etching presented here is very typical Benton's work. A single object, in this case the man, serves as the center post of an agrarian merry-go-round. All things swirl around the man emphasizing both his artistic and real world importance. The print is balanced rather well on both axis. On the horizontal the large tobacco shed is counter weighted by the small structure and the hay bale, averaging the eye back to the farmer. Black earth cements the work to the bottom half, while the darkening sky on the edges keeps the eye of the matters at hand.  

Everybody knows pop art. They may not know Fragonard, or Daumier, or Freidrich, but if you drop Warhol's name or Lichtenstein's, you're much more likely to get a response. At a primal level, people respond to bright colors and the beatification of images they recognize in a way that's almost comforting. Roy Lichtenstein's work takes the appropriation of the every day to a whole new level with his work. While working at Douglass College, a colleague and mentor Allan Kaprow advised him, "art doesn't have to look like art," a sentence that changed the nature of his career as an artist. In 1961, he painted his first borrowed image, featuring a scene of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck fishing from his son's copy of Donald Duck: Lost and Found. He took the exact subject and added his own spin, slightly altering the perspective and doing the whole cartoon in stylized blocks of primary colors. He titled it Look Mickey, and with that, his new style was born.

Lichtenstein moved quickly from children's books to popular comics, taking the style of Benday dots used for commercial printing and engraving and incorporating them into his work. Many include melodramatic images of classically dressed and styled women, frequently crying over men. In 1963, he divorced from his wife, which likely inspired this series of subjects. The first in this trend, Drowning Girl, painted in 1963, sparked this trend in his work that would continue for the next decade or so. Like the comic books that inspired him, his figures had thick block outlines, and traditionally attractive features. For most of the 60's, he continued to work in the primary colors that defined his style so early on.  His work was designed to question what defined art, and to poke fun at the traditional ideas of art, especially the school of abstract expressionism that was so popular at the time. Many artists at the time believed that using images from something as low and common as a comic book was a type of artistic blasphemy, which only encouraged Lichtenstein. He took delight in poking fun at the status quo and society. His most dramatic pieces are painted in this same bright blocky style, teasing the nature of this melodrama as a form of entertainment, while continuing to "insult" traditional artists with his style.

Thinking of Him is the pinnacle of Lichtenstein. The same bright block colors that you so often see in his work, with the comic-inspired look and the subject we're all familiar with. The curvature of the lines helps to create a movement and a life for the characters that keeps such a blocky painting from stagnating. With the rounding of the subjects, the whole painting rotates in on itself towards the center. It leads your eyes to follow the never ending loop of human thought inside this emotional state. All of the lines on her face lead back to him in some way, from the arc of her nose, to the bend of her parted lips and the shape of her hair, everything takes the audience back to him, the same way he occupies her thoughts. He wears blue, surrounded by a blue cloud, separate from her entirely, except for the blue in her tears. Her sadness is the only thing left that connects her to him. Every girl who's been in a relationship has felt this sorrowful scene in one way or another. However, in Lichtenstein's typical flare, it's wrought with sarcastic undertones. Somehow, they don't discourage the audience even though he's mocking the viewer. It's a playful work, underneath the subject, that says, "You've felt that way, haven't you? Look how silly we humans are." It's in our nature to question and be curious and impish and Lichtenstein brings that out in us.

When I look at this painting, I'm struck at first with a remembrance of that grief in myself, but after a moment he gets me to laugh as I see the silliness in my own human nature. It offers a reprieve and a perspective in a moment of sadness that took me by surprise as I spent more and more time with Thinking of Him. The more time I spend with this work, the more I've come to respect it. It's a gift to take the power away from the heartache and for such a gift to exist inside of a first-rate work of art makes Lichtenstein all the more masterful.

Salvador Dali is, in general, a strange and random artist. Many of his surrealist paintings can not be fully interpreted. The First Days of Spring was painted a couple of months before Dali joined the Surrealist movement. He called this painting “veritable erotic delirium,” which means he wanted to create shocking, detailed images. The various images seen in The First Days of Spring reappear many times in Dali’s other paintings.

Similar to many of his other paintings during his Surrealist period, Sigmund Freud’s theories were the main influence. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams suggested a person’s childhood experiences were the source of someone’s fears, desires, and neuroses. As a tribute to his inspiration, the old man with the little girl on the right of the painting is thought to be a representation of Freud.

In the center of The First Days of Spring, there is a photo of Dali as a child, which further indicates the scattered and seemingly random images relate to his childhood. This painting was painted in 1929, a time when Dali and his father’s relationship was unstable. Dali’s father was becoming more and more disappointed in his son’s occupation and behavior, which caused their relationship to be strained. Figures of a man and a boy appear many times in Dali’s other paintings, while the seated man on the left is said to be Dali’s father in The First Days of Spring, signifying Dali’s desire to mend their broken relationship. The distressed man leaning on a woman in the front of the painting shows Dali’s sorrow towards his father while the contrasting happy artwork directly behind the two figures symbolizes Dali’s hope to be happy once again. Furthermore, the two fighting men in the back could be seen as a representation of Dali’s suffering. Although viewers see Dali as a peculiar man, each portion of his eccentric paintings represents something meaningful in his life.

In a post last year, I talked about Marc Chagall's adoration of Bella Rosenfeld—with his lyrical descriptions of their love and his numerous sacrifices to bring her with him while he built his art career. Paris through the Window depicts a time when the two were separated by 1,500 miles, three years after Chagall moved to Paris to take advantage of its artistic opportunities.

Despite the bright colors in Paris through the Window, Chagall faced an inner-conflict when he painted it. He was caught between two nations and two cultures, and the man in the bottom-right corner embodies Chagall's identity, split between Liozna and Paris. The side of his face looking west at France is blue, but the left half of the painting contains so much beauty and brilliance. The man's right side faces east to his native Russia and his Bella. The couple floating in front of the Eiffel Tower—with the man to the west and the woman to the east—represents Chagall and Bella, floating in ethereality of love despite their separation.

An early work of Chagall, Paris through the Window includes many of the artist's characteristic aspects, such as floating couples, playful cityscapes, and vibrant colors. Like his love for Bella, much of Chagall's style remained throughout his career. He maintained his brightness through wars, displacement, Bella's death, and the genocide of his people. Chagall always looked both forward to the future and back at his heritage—split like the man in his painting from decades before his biggest heartbreak.

By LILI TUCKER

By LISA MAEDA

Hands are integral to the artist.

Alfred Stieglitz met Georgia O’Keeffe at the age of 52. His photography had propelled him to fame in the art world, and his work is still considered to be the best of the best. Georgia O’Keeffe was 28 years old at the time, teaching art at a quaint school in Texas.

Despite their 24 year age gap and their tremendously different positions, the couple fit together. Stieglitz took no time in divorcing his wife to move in together with O’Keeffe, who he loved to photograph. Naturally, their relationship developed significant strains, but the initial passion between the two was unmatchable. The portraits of O’Keeffe that Stieglitz had photographed were intimate and erotic. Yet, sometimes, they exhibited her beauty in ways unrelated to her sexual body.

I’m particularly fond of Stieglitz’s series of Hands. He photographs O’Keeffe’s hands in various positions. They are graceful, interlocked, and sometimes violent. In this photograph, however, O’Keeffe’s face also makes an appearance. Her slender fingers compliment her stern face. The solemn expression does not detract from her raw beauty. Stieglitz’s publishing of these photographs are a testament to the love he felt for her. Despite their ups and downs, the work created from their love is undeniably gorgeous.

There's nothing quite like the beginning of an era, like the exciting freshness of an idea. For Giorgio de Chirico, this was his new idea, and the spark that would light the minds of the greatest surrealist artists known to man. In 1910 de Chirico began his Metaphysical Town Square series in which this painting was the first made. These dreamily isolated works show heavy resemblances to where de Chirico grew up and spent his childhood years. In this painting, de Chirico depicts Florence's Piazza Santa Croce in a very simplified fashion. He uses the classic piazza with facades and long drooping shadows, along with deep and rich colors to reflect a city at dusk. This cumulative effect isolates the viewer to feel as if they are there, but as a ghost. This is truly what I love about de Chirico's paintings.

By MELISA CAPAN

Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column, 1944

By ELLIE SCHNEIDER

I stand in Gallery 265 at the Art Institute of Chicago staring at Georgia O’Keeffe’s Cow Skull with Calico Roses. I had seen O’Keeffe’s work before, the classic, mega-focused flowers, including Blue and Green Music and Oriental Poppies. I had never seen this side of her, though.

After presenting about O’Keeffe for the class I learned about her life in New Mexico and how that greatly influenced her work, which includes many animal skulls from her time in the desert. Paintings like Cow Skull Red, White and Blue and Ram’s Head are right up there with Red Canna and Black Iris III.

While I will always appreciate O’Keeffe’s bold flowers and feminist pieces, Cow Skull with Calico Roses makes me feel more emotion than any rose or iris. I’m not quite sure how to describe the feeling. The cow skull makes me feel hollow like the object itself. The soft cream makes me feel war. The white roses make me feel feminine and bring a sense of purity. The black stripe makes me feel scared as it rips through the middle of the painting. After researching the painting, I found that the flowers were common grave decoration in New Mexico, which affirms my feeling of fear in the black stripe, since I think it is death peaking out from behind the soft cream canvas. Furthermore, the cow skull is another symbol of death, as the O’Keeffe’s subject most likely died in a drought in New Mexico.

While O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz stayed together until his death in 1946, Stieglitz started an affair with Dorothy Norman around 1927 to fill the void of intimacy he lacked in his marriage. Cow Skull with Calico Roses could represent the death of her relationship with Stieglitz. It could also be seen as the “death” of the flowers as her subject matters changed when she spent more time in, and eventually moving to, New Mexico. While her flowers show the life cycle: birth, growth, death, and decay, her skull pieces focus on death and decay.

No matter the reason behind O’Keeffe’s painting, I will always count it as one of my favorite paintings. When I walk into Gallery 265, every other piece of art disappears and I am immediately drawn into the hollow skull and the rich black stripe. O’Keeffe combines beauty and death unlike anybody I have ever seen before.

René Magritte, The Invention of Life, 1928

By MADELINE VASQUEZ

You’re sitting in a room full of paintings, admiring each and every one of them. You get up and walk over to a painting that makes you stop, think, and question what the meaning behind it is. Along with that, you realize how although you may be confused by the painting, you are able to feel the emotion and isolation behind it, making the appreciation of the work of art so much more immense. I personally got this feeling while researching the artist, Magritte.