GO Blog 03 Fine art critique

I choose a bronze sculpture by Italian sculpturer Giovanni Battista Foggini. It is called Perseus slaying Medusa. I like it because I think that Foggini captures the violence in the picture in a magnificent and beautiful way. It is like I am in the mythical tale when I watch the statue.

Unfortuaetly this is the only picture that I have been able to find and it is a very small one.

From 

http://www.scholarsresource.com/images/thumbnails/192/m/mid1297.jpg

The motif for the sculpture comes from the Greek mythology. Perseus needs to slay Medusa in order to keep a promise to Polydectes. The problem is that Medusa's gaze will turn a man into stone. He borrows some tools from the other gods and manages to kill Medusa by looking at where she is in his reflective shield.

Medusa is a character that I have had a longstanding relationship with. It is one of my favourite mythical people/creatures. A medusa head is a pretty common enemy in the Castlevania video-games series to the Nintendo consoles. They are a pain in the ass as all players of the series know.




Another figure that comes to mind is famous/infamous Swedish singer who called himslef Eddie Meduza. His songs about anti-establishment, women, booze and snus. During the 80's he was the second biggest live artist in Sweden even though none of his songs was played on the radio.



Art word of the post Design or Composition;

Design is what the artist had in mind before creating the artwork or a blueprint if you will, and did she/he successfully do that. I think that if most people watching the artwork and get the same feeling as the artist intended, then she/he succeded in bringing that design to reality (Schirrmacher & Fox, 2009). It is also the extra "umpfh" that separates a good artwork from a superior one. It is a fundament to the other art words.

I think that Battista Foggini succesfully accomplished the design of Persues slaying Medusa with the critera that Schirrmacher and Fox sets out in their book. There is a balance and coherence in the statue, and the focal point is right between Perseus and Medusa.

References

Schirrmacher, R. & Englebright Fox, J. (2009). Art & creative development for young children. Belmont, CA, USA: Delmar, Cengage Learning.

GO Blog 01 (or Gothenburg for creativity?)

Creativity one of those things that makes human really human and not mere animals. Creativity is so many things. Its creating something from nothing, its working with limited resources, its working with unlimited ones. Its focusing in, its being broad. It's doing it for yourself or sharing your creativity with the rest of the world. It can present problem solving or beauty.

I like old New York style graffiti like Dondis Children of the Grave series. Dondi was a pionnering graffiti artist and fore runner for many of todays artists.

Photo: Martha Cooper

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I get really inspired with words and speech. My creative side get a real kick start from listening to certain stand-up routines or programs, sometimes I mix them in my head and make new routines out of them. Some clips are easier to understand why they get stuck to my mind and others are a bit of a mystery. It´s easy when its a joke, but with some of my favourites there is something else that does make it stick inside my head.

So an example of that is Eddie Izzard, he makes new and creative jokes about some of the most known things of all, or jokes about something you would never had imagined. Yet it is very accessible and in this clip it is also an example where he starts a joke and then does the equivalent of an u-turn in the middle of it. And the confusion and surprise that occurs adds to the joke, at least the first time...

This is a living legend in Swedish comedy Henrik Schyffert. I know its not funny when you do not know Swedish, but I could not omit him when talking about creativity.

Neo-Tokyo in Akira by K. Otomo.

Another sort of over arching milieu of inspiration is post-apocalytic city environments. There is something about the destruction, grayness and hopelessness that is both beautiful and disturbing at the same time. Example of this would be the picture of Neo-Tokyo to the left from Katsuhiro Otomos Akira, the tv-series The Walking Dead or the game Fallout 3. So it can take a couple of different shapes but still give me the same sort of goodie feeling.

GO Blog 02 Leaving Hibernation

So I made a sculpture using food. This could be used to celebrate someones birthday or something along those lines.
It became a hedgehog leaving hibernation. It mostly consists of a mash containing sweetpotato, white potato, cream, butter, salt, white peppar and nutmeg. The heart is a frozen piece of ketchup, which melts when the mash is put on it (leaving the hibernation state). The spikes are of carved hotdogs, which is harder than it looks. The eyes and nose comes from homemade meatballs.

I got the inspiration from a story told of one of my uncles. He was very fussy with food when he was young. So my granddad used to paint pictures of cars and dogs on his flatbread in order for him to eat it. This is sort of an extension of that.

The ingridients, the extra meatballs are for snacking. 

The ketchup heart. 

 One funky looking hedgehog.

The gruesome aftermath.

Art word of the post: Mass or volume

Mass or volume are words to use in description of 3D art such as sculptures which makes it appropriate in this blog. Words to describe the hedgehog would be; heavy, solid, organic soft and sationary (Schirrmacher & Englebright, 2009). Heavy because I think the mashed potatoes gives a heavy look to it, and feeeling in stomach if one eats to much of it. Solid for the fact that it is just that both in reality and apperance. Since the sculpture is built with only , in lack of a better name, natural material it has a very organic feel to it. The texture is soft since it consists mostly of  mashed potatoes and the sculpture is very stationary on it´s plate since it would brake if it was to be moved.

References

Schirrmacher, R. & Englebright Fox, J. (2009). Art & creative development for young children. Belmont, CA, USA: Delmar, Cengage Learning.