Self Portrait Morphology

The term morphology in biology refers to the outward appearance (shape, structure, colour, pattern) of an organism or taxon and its component parts. This is in contrast to physiology, which deals primarily with function.

Also in use is the term "gross morphology", which refers to the prominent or principal aspects of an organism or taxon's morphology. A description of an organism's gross morphology would include, for example, its overall shape, overall colour, main markings etc. but not finer details.

Using photoshop create a self-portrait morphology.

Research Essay and Presentation

Select a Modern Artist and prepare a 3 to 4 page essay and a 5-10minute PowerPoint presentation:

Due Date: March 5th

This is a list of modern artists: important artists who have played a role in the history of modern art, dating from the late 19th century until (approximately) the 1970s. Artists who have been at the height of their activity since that date, can be found in the list of contemporary artists.

Media Artsit list

Pablo Picasso

Blue Period Between 1900 and 1902, Picasso made three trips to Paris, finally settling there in 1904. He found the city's bohemian street life fascinating, and his pictures of people in dance halls and cafés show how he assimilated the postimpressionism of Paul Gauguin and the symbolist painters called the Nabis. The themes of Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as the style of the latter, exerted the strongest influence. Picasso's Blue Room reflects the work of both these painters and, at the same time, shows his evolution toward the Blue Period, so called because various shades of blue dominated his work for the next few years. Expressing human misery, the paintings portray blind figures, beggars, alcoholics, and prostitutes, their somewhat elongated bodies reminiscent of works by the Spanish artist El Greco.

Rose Period Shortly after settling in Paris, Picasso met Fernande Olivier, the first of many companions to influence the theme, style, and mood of his work. With this happy relationship, Picasso changed his palette to pinks and reds; the years 1904 and 1905 are thus called the Rose Period. Many of his subjects were drawn from the circus, which he visited several times a week; one such painting is Family of Saltimbanques. In the figure of the harlequin, Picasso represented his alter ego, a practice he repeated in later works as well. Dating from his first decade in Paris are friendships with the poet Max Jacob, the writer Guillaume Apollinaire, the art dealers Ambroise Vollard and Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, and the American expatriate writers Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, who were his first important patrons; Picasso did portraits of them all.

Protocubism In the summer of 1906, during Picasso's stay in Gosol, Spain, his work entered a new phase, marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian, and African art. His celebrated portrait of Gertrude Stein reveals a masklike treatment of her face. The key work of this early period, however, is Les demoiselles d'Avignon, so radical in style—its picture surface resembling fractured glass—that it was not even understood by contemporary avant-garde painters and critics. Destroyed were spatial depth and the ideal form of the female nude, which Picasso restructured into harsh, angular planes.

Cubism—Analytic and Synthetic Inspired by the volumetric treatment of form by the French postimpressionist artist Paul Cezanne, Picasso and the French artist Georges Braque painted landscapes in 1908 in a style later described by a critic as being made of “little cubes,” thus leading to the term cubism. Some of their paintings are so similar that it is difficult to tell them apart. Working together between 1908 and 1911, they were concerned with breaking down and analyzing form, and together they developed the first phase of cubism, known as analytic cubism. Monochromatic color schemes were favored in their depictions of radically fragmented motifs, whose several sides were shown simultaneously. Picasso's favorite subjects were musical instruments, still-life objects, and his friends. In 1912, pasting paper and a piece of oilcloth to the canvas and combining these with painted areas, Picasso created his first collage, Still Life with Chair Caning. This technique marked a transition to synthetic cubism. This second phase of cubism is more decorative, and color plays a major role, although shapes remain fragmented and flat. Picasso was to practice synthetic cubism throughout his career, but by no means exclusively.
Cubist Sculpture Picasso created cubist sculptures as well as paintings. He also made constructions—such as Mandolin and Clarinet from odds and ends of wood, metal, paper, and nonartistic materials, in which he explored the spatial hypotheses of cubist painting. His Glass of Absinthe, combining a silver sugar strainer with a painted bronze sculpture, anticipates his much later “found object” creations, such as Baboon and Young, as well as pop art objects of the 1960s.
Realist and Surrealist Works During World War I (1914-1918), Picasso went to Rome, working as a designer with Sergey Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. He met and married the dancer Olga Koklova. In a realist style, Picasso made several portraits of her around 1917, of their son, and of numerous friends. In the early 1920s he did tranquil, neoclassical pictures of heavy, sculpturesque figures, an example being Three Women at the Spring, and works inspired by mythology, such as The Pipes of Pan. At the same time, Picasso also created strange pictures of small-headed bathers and violent convulsive portraits of women which are often taken to indicate the tension he experienced in his marriage. Although he stated he was not a surrealist, many of his pictures have a surreal and disturbing quality, as in Sleeping Woman in Armchair and Seated Bather.

Paintings of the Early 1930s Several cubist paintings of the early 1930s, stressing harmonious, curvilinear lines and expressing an underlying eroticism, reflect Picasso's pleasure with his newest love, Marie Thérèse Walter, who gave birth to their daughter Maïa in 1935. Marie Thérèse, frequently portrayed sleeping, also was the model for the famous Girl Before a Mirror. In 1935 Picasso made the etching Minotauromachy, a major work combining his minotaur and bullfight themes; in it the disemboweled horse, as well as the bull, prefigure the imagery of Guernica, a mural often called the most important single work of the 20th century.

GuernicaPicasso was moved to paint the huge mural Guernica shortly after German planes, acting on orders from Spain's authoritarian leader Francisco Franco, bombarded the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish civil war. Completed in less than two months, Guernica was hung in the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris International Exposition of 1937. The painting does not portray the event; rather, Picasso expressed his outrage by employing such imagery as the bull, the dying horse, a fallen warrior, a mother and dead child, a woman trapped in a burning building, another rushing into the scene, and a figure leaning from a window and holding out a lamp. Despite the complexity of its symbolism, and the impossibility of definitive interpretation, Guernica makes an overwhelming impact in its portrayal of the horrors of war.

Dadaism and Surrealism

Introduction:

The movement known as Dada was born in Zurich, Switzerland and was primarily created as a backlash to the traditional views of culture, art, and literature. The first group of Dadaists sought to eliminate all forms of reason and logic due of the atrocities caused by World War I. Art created during the Dada movement was to be interpreted freely by the viewer and was not based on the formal standards shown by earlier traditional artists. The Dada movement was spread throughout Zurich, Berlin, New York, Paris, and the Netherlands and varied by form such as: poetry, art, literature, and music. Surrealism, in turn, was a positive movement which at first was solely focused around automatic writing, expressing the thought and subconscious of the artist. Surrealism was founded by Andre Breton in the 1920’s and stretched the human imagination revealing through artistic imagery a world of fantasy and dreams, not reality. Both Dada and Surrealism share the same purpose to explore avant-garde methods of creativity while rejecting the traditional standards of art.


Dada:
The complex nature of the Dada movement began as a negative response to society and, in turn, radically altered twentieth-century art. The movement criticized conventional ideas of the use of mediums by utilizing prefabricated supplies, altering them slightly in order to obtain a different view of the piece. Marcel Duchamp’s readymade ,Fountain, a porcelain urinal in which the artist wrote R. Mutt on and submitted it to the Society of Independent Artists Exhibit in 1917. The purpose of the Dada movement was viewed negatively and was “not intended to be creative: it is intended to cast discredit on creative activity”(Frey 12). Max Ernst’s painting Celebes, which was completed in 1919, depicts an ambiguous creature that somewhat resembles an elephant. This painting is an example of the whimsical and bizarre imagery used during the Dada movement. In the bottom right corner of the painting, a headless body is beckoning the creature towards its direction, making the image disturbing as well as humorous. The main focus of Celebes is a fantastical creature whose body resembles a boiler.
























Marcel Duchamp Fountain, 1916-17


Max Ernst, Celebes, 1921

Collage was another technique used by artists Hannah Hoch, Kurt Schwitters, and Jean Arp during the Dada movement. Jean Arp’s Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, completed in 1916, displays a random pattern of squares depicting the notion of escaping the rational world. Arp’s collages differ greatly from the academic realm of art because of the way in which he created them, which did not entail a formula. The form of Arp’s Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance is not intended to represent or depict an object “since the disposition of planes, and the proportions and colors of these planes seemed to depend purely on chance, Arp [I] declared that these works, like nature, were ordered according to the laws of chance, chance being for Arp [me] merely a limited part of an unfathomable raison d’etre, of an order inaccessible in its totality”(Arnason 244). Arp’s technique in making this collage was based simply on chance, by throwing pieces of paper on the floor Arp was able to see the random pattern that was caused. Arp ventured away from the aesthetic and visual aspect of art by relinquishing control over the work he was creating, while Academic art was focused on the aesthetic nature of works.



Jean Arp, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916

Surrealism:
The art of the Surrealist movement was centered around the irrational and the subconscious, both depicting dream-like images. When the Surrealist movement began in 1919 the main aspect of creativity was applied through automatic writing, which allowed irrational thoughts to be written through lack of reason and logic. The way in which art was later depicted changed when artists began to documenting dreams through imagery in paintings. The Surrealist approach to art depicts the artist’s inner thoughts and subconscious, digressing from the negatively charged Dada movement. Art critics have described surrealism as a “search for the bizarre and marvelous”(Matthews 139) because of the whimsical and dream-like images found in paintings of this movement.

Salvador Dali, a major artist of the Surrealist movement, painted The Persistence of Memory in which he depicts the ordinary objects such as watches in a morphlike stage. Dali depicts the watches in this dreamlike landscape in limp shapes as if they were melting. Dali said that the shapes were “nothing more than the soft, extravagant, solitary, paranoiac-critical Camembert cheese of space and time”(Arnason 305) , in reference to the melting forms of the watches.




Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931

Another artist greatly associated with the Surrealist movement was Joan Miro, who painted whimsical and bizarre images in his works. Joan Miro's painting Carnival of Harlequin, completed in 1924, displays a scene of brightly colored organic forms and shapes in a humorous manner. The creatures or figures in Miro's paintings appear almost as if they are cartoons, taking up the entire canvas so that the viewer doesn't focus on merely one aspect of the scene. Some of the shapes appear to be floating in the top corners of the canvas while others, such as the one on the left side, use ladders to climb up through the work. The figures in Miro's Carnival of Harlequin are "lively, remarkably vivid, and even the [his] inanimate objects have an eager vitality"(Arnason 295).


Joan Miro, Carnival of Harlequin, 1924


Rene Magritte altered the manner in which images were treated in Surrealist paintings in his work The Treachery of Images, completed in 1928, in which he depicts a smoking pipe with the phrase "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" or "This is not a pipe". The ambiguity of Magritte's paintings is due to his treatment of ordinary objects displayed in a different manner, similar to Dali's watches in The Persistence of Memory. Magritte shows a representational approach to art in his works, while Surrealist artists such as Miro use the automatic style of painting.




Rene Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1928


While Academic art was thought to be a process in which the artist was trained to paint in a specific style, the artists of both the Dada and Surrealist movements created works through an automatic process. This process differs greatly from the method in which Academic art is created due to the irrationality and spontaneity by which the subconscious is expressed. The artists of the Dada and Surrealist movements rejected the “bourgeois art which they [we] regarded as symptomatic of a culture about to crumble with the war”(Remender/Lucareli 210). These artistic movements challenged the way in which society viewed art due to the radical nature of their images.

Copyright reading

Reading 1: http://www.ic.gc.ca/sc_mrksv/cipo/cp/cp_main-e.html

Reading2 : http://webdesign.about.com/b/2008/02/18/learn-how-to-protect-your-online-content-and-fight-copyright-theft.htm

Questions:

1) What does the term "copyright" mean?
2) How do you copyright your work?
3) How do you protect your work from internet theft?

Please Check in Assignment

Please make comment here.

Course Outline

This course emphasizes the development of the knowledge and skills required for the production of media art works (e.g., robosculpture, photocopy art, computer animation with synthesized sound). Students will develop an appreciation of the history of media arts through analysing specific works, and will create media art works using a variety of technologies (e.g., digital camera, photo-imaging software, computer-modelling software, synthesizer, videotape, multi-track sound recording).

The expectations for the courses in media arts are divided into three distinct yet related strands: Theory, Creation, and Analysis. The Theory strand is focused on understanding of concepts, including elements and principles, as well as techniques, technologies, and processes. The Creation strand deals with various aspects of the creation of media artworks. The Analysis strand is focused on examination of aesthetic issues and the function of media arts in society.
As an Open course, the Grade 11 Media Arts Profile is designed to broaden the student’s knowledge and skills, and provide a solid and practical foundation for the media arts.
The activities in this course of study are designed to prepare students to meet the challenges of a technologically advanced society. A focus on the creative process gives students practical skills, appropriate motivation, and the theoretical knowledge needed to communicate ideas, feelings, and beliefs through the media artwork they create. In addition, students develop an appreciation and awareness of this new and innovative art discipline.
Students are introduced to the technical, historical, theoretical, cultural, moral, and ethical social contexts of media arts in society. An essential component is hands-on exploration and skill development with integration of theoretical content. Progressing through the units in sequence allows students to build on previously acquired knowledge and skills. The course has been designed to integrate and accommodate the experienced student as well as those students who have not previously taken Grade 10 Media Arts.

Reviewing the Grade 10 Media Arts document and familiarizing oneself with the media arts resources would be beneficial to teachers who are new to this subject area.
Self-expression is a fundamental aspect of this course. It is imperative that students have the opportunity to explore and experiment with the tools and techniques available to them as they unfold during the course, in order to become knowledgeable creators. Media Arts is a new, experimental direction in the arts. It is essential that students and educators realize that this hybrid art form is in a constant state of flux.
The culminating unit of the course is an Independent Study Unit (ISU). The final product takes the form of a digital portfolio, which gives students something tangible to take into the world of work or further study.

http://www.curriculum.org/csc/library/profiles/11/html/ASM3OB.htm

Colour Management with digital formats

There are several misconceptions about colour management. These include it being expensive and it being difficult to understand. Hopefully, by the time you've had a look through this article you will have a better idea of why you should look at colour management as an essential part of producing better pictures.

Reading 1:
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/article_pages/CM_intro.html

Reading 2:
http://www.printingforless.com/rgb-cmyk.html

Photomontage: Project 5

Photocubism The Photocollages of David Hockney: Project 4

Intrigued by how Cubist painters incorporated multiple viewpoints of a single subject, British artist David Hockney applied it to the medium of photography. You will be creating a photocollage based on Hockney’s work.

Supplies needed:1 roll of 36 exposure color print film. Any brand film. You can use either 100 or 400 ASA film but make sure you camera’s ASA dial is correctly set if it is not done automatically.
Compose a photo with a strong center of interest. Since you are taking pictures of a very wide area, you should keep your center of interest very close.

If your camera has a Program mode (P) you may use it for this assignment. If you’re using a semi-automatic or manual camera remember to use your meter to get the correct exposure on every shot. You must also make sure your camera is correctly focused for each shot.
Remember, never to move from your spot until you’re done. You may tilt the camera up and down during the shoot, but never change your shooting position.

Practice shooting first. The idea behind Hockney’s approach is to photograph a large scene by breaking it up into many smaller ones. You must think of your scene as having an invisible grid with overlapping squares placed upon it. Begin shooting with only your waist turned three-quarters to the left. Continue to shoot your first horizontal row of photos, remembering to always overlap the photo you just took, until you reach a position where your waist is turned three-quarters to the right.

Begin to shoot the second row of horizontal photos as you did previously, but you must also overlap the top of this row with the bottom of the last row.
Continue to shoot the entire scene always overlapping both vertically and horizontally until you complete the scene.

Shoot the real thing when you feel comfortable. Bring the film in for processing. Ask for matte finish and an extra set of prints.

Roll due on: ________________ Collage due: _______________

Due date: Feb 26

Cubomania Self Portrait: Project 3

Create a Self Portrait using the Cubomania technique.

Due date: Feb 22nd.

Dream Collage Project 2

Surrealism in art, poetry, and literature utilizes numerous unique techniques and games to provide inspiration. Many of these are said to free imagination by producing a creative process free of conscious control. The importance of the unconscious as a source of inspiration is central to the nature of surrealism.

The English word "Surrealism" is a mis-translation of the French word "Surréalisme." The correct translation should be "Superrealism." Breton somewhere said that the "surréel is to the réel what the surnaturel is to the naturel." English-speakers say "supernatural". The reason why this matters is that the prefix "surr-" in English is often, not always, associated with the Latin prefix "sub" e.g. surreptitious (Fr. subreptice), surrogate (Fr. subrogé), implying exactly the opposite of the intended meaning.

Breton would later qualify the first of these definitions by saying "in the absence of conscious moral or aesthetic self-censorship," and by his admission through subsequent developments, that these definitions were capable of considerable expansion.

Due date: Feb 19th.

Photomontage is the process (and result) of making a composite photograph by cutting and joining a number of other photographs. The composite picture was sometimes photographed so that the final image is converted back into a seamless photographic print. The same method is accomplished today using image-editing software. The technique is referred to by professionals as "compositing", and in casual usage is often called "photoshopping".[1]

Cubomania Project 1

Activity project 1: Using Photoshop create a Cubomania.(black and white images only)

Cubomania is a method of making collages in which a picture or image is cut into squares and the squares are then reassembled without regard for the image. The technique was first used by the Romanian surrealist Gherasim Luca.

Due Date: Feb 13th.