Gallery Blog #2

"Bald Man with Coffee Mug" by Kate Varney

"Martini Diver" by Elizabeth Cramer

These two pieces were my favorite from Wednesday's gallery. Once again, both of these pieces are in black and white.

In Kate's "Bald Man with Coffee Mug", what immediately attracted me to the piece was the man's eyes. She drew his eyes in a way that made him look like Igor (or at least that's what he reminds me of). I'm not sure how accurate this picture is compared to the photo that inspired the piece, but I'm guessing that Kate somewhat exaggerated his facial features. She made his eyes small, and didn't give them too much detail. Also, the skin around his eyes seems sunken in. The rest of the portrait is very detailed and realistic. I like the contrast. Everything in the picture, aside from his expression, is so precise- the shadows along the creases of his shirt, the wrinkles above his eyebrows, how she gave depth to the coffee in his cup. It all seems ordinary until you look up at his face. Perhaps she didn't do this intentionally, but the expression on his face really struck me.

Elizabeth Cramer's Piece "Martini Diver" also grapped my attention because of how different it was. The diver in the middle is realistically portrayed, just as if it were from a photograph. However, the images on the sides of the piece are what make this piece somewhat unusual (in a good way, of course). What I notcied immediately was the large monster on the right side of the piece. The fish/monster is my favorite thing about the picture. When you look at the diver in the center of the piece you can see how Elizabeth used a combination of texture and color to give the piece depth. Focusing on just the diver, it almost seems as if the viewer is looking down at the diver as they are swimming up towards the surface. The martini glass and the monster seem more flat in comparison. These two objects are facing eachother; the space around the monster and the glass doesn't give them a lot of depth. What I enjoy about this piece is how Elizabeth combines three seperate objects into one picture. These objects don't even have a direct correlation with one another.

From listening to the gallery talk I noticed that both artists gain their inspiration from other pieces. Elizabeth explained that she created "Martini Diver" by tearing out three separate images from National Geographic, putting them together, and then painting the images in her own style. Kate did the same thing in her piece "Bald Man with Coffee Mug". She told us how she saw an image in National Geographic and reinvented it using her own techniques. I would like to see the original images, just to see how much they both really changed. Personally, I like how they modified these images in a way that steared them away from "normal". Both of these artists took common images and tweeked them slightly, causing the viewer to take a second look. The man's eyes in Kate's piece is what sends the message (to me, at least) that there is something different about this picture- this isn't your everyday portrait. In Elizabeth's picture, the combination of the three images turns is what makes it unique- you wouldn't ever see this type of situation in real life. That's what I like about these pictures. In class we discussed the idea of appropriation. We asked the question "how far can an artist go before they can no longer claim their art as their own?" These artists may have been initially inspired by someone else's art, but the modifications they made to the images gave their pieces a completely different meaning. So, in this sense, they can still rightly claim the art as their own. Honestly, if I saw the real images, they probably wouldn't be significant to me what-so-ever. But these two pieces struck me in a way that a photograph from National Geographic ever could.