Required Assignment 3: Work of Art Redux (Track A) Coursera

Required Assignment 3: Work of Art Redux (Track A)

Live!: A History of Art for Artists, Animators and Gamers

We’ve done a bit of research and have identified at least thirty artists who created work based on Velazquez’s Las Meninas. See here for a short list. Now it’s your turn. Make a work or series of works, in whatever media you choose, that takes its inspiration from Las Meninas. You can: 

• take apart and put back together selected elements of the painting (as Picasso did). 
• riff on a theme of the painting (looking and being seen, reality and reflection, a moment in time, stillness, the painter’s process, etc. Note that many of these themes have actually been modules for this course). 

Both of the above are possibilities, but there are certainly more. At any rate your approach needs to be deliberate. Consider the difference between making a “copy” of the original, “appropriating” the original (as a creative strategy) and working “off” the original. Along with your images, post a short (2-3 sentence) explanation of why you did what you did.

After much thought   I felt that Las Meminas  reminded me of the pageants for young girls that sort of exploit their femininity and sexuality.  At my weekly workshop I noticed two Barbie dolls that my friend Riva was working on and photographed them to use on my assignment.  It is a riff on the some of the themes, exploitation,reflections, looking in and being seen and in this case the "photographers" process. A photo montage plus some digital sketching. 

Haunted by Family Portrait!!!

Required Assignment 2: One Thing and Then Another (Track A)
Live!: A History of Art for Artists, Animators and Gamers  Coursera

Instructions:

Choose an object or an image.
Turn it into something else.
Then turn it back into itself again. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a major project of deconstruction or manipulation. But it could be. Or it could be just a change of context, orientation, or point of view.
Document your process and post the results with a short 3-4 sentence description of what you did.
Some things to think about:

Your object or image can be in two (flat) and/or three dimensions.
You could make the objects or collect them from elsewhere.
Your "process" could be sequential or not.
Your documentation could be a photograph, drawing, digital image or other similar visual element.
Your documentation could be one or several images. (Note: Because of the limitations of the platform and in consideration of your peers, please consider limiting the number of images you decide to include. Between 1 and 6 images should be sufficient for this assignment.)

Haunted by family portrait!!!

I took a family portrait that has bothered me over the years... perhaps it sort of haunted me.  I looked so sad while everyone else is smiling... perhaps I was jealous... my brother getting most of the attention. Well after all is was his Bar Mitzva!!! Maybe cause I didn't like the skirt I wore... my mother had hand painted a rose on it.. So it was time for a little destruction and manipulation...  The painting was  done before the course but I felt it fir the assignment.. The photo manipulation was done in the same spirit. 

Original Portrait

Oils on grey pressed cardboard

Photo manipulation

Live!: A History of Art for Artists, Animators and Gamers Coursera

Live!: A History of Art for Artists, Animators and Gamers

For the past 9 weeks I took my first course or MOOC  at Cousera, an online site for learning from well known universities. This was run from Calarts  and was of a very high standard.  Last evening they had a closing hang out using google+ to sort of sum up the course.

At art school, RISD, I took several Art History classes but none really compared to this experience. The lectures were wonderful showing Art through various concepts rather than in the chronological fashion.  These lectures and exposure to a wide amount of art, some of which I was familiar and some quite new , seemed to trigger a wider view to research, like a seed growing new shoots. If this ever goes online again I would strongly recommend.  

I would like to share some three of the required assignments from the course. 

Required Assignment 1: World-in-a-Box (Track A)

This assignment is taken from an excellent book entitled Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the assignment (New York: Paper Monument, 2012). It’s also listed in the course bibliography. I credit it to sculptor Rachel Foullon, who credits it to sculptor and teacher Jack Risley.
Instructions:
Using any means, materials and style you like, create a collection of objects and design a means of displaying them. Some things to think about:
Your objects can be in two (flat) and/or three dimensions.
You could make the objects or collect them from elsewhere.
They might belong together chronologically, or not.
Think about how the objects can be combined to make something that adds up to more than just themselves (or alternatively, how the collection “is what it is”).
Think about how the objects relate to each other spatially and how the means of display reinforces or complicates that sense of space and objects within it.

This is a photo montage using as a background on of my own fragmented oil  paintings and then pasting various sculptures from photos of Storybook land, a group of theme parks in Holon. The statues represent well known characters from Israeli  children's books. I put in the easel to sort of represent myself in this fantasy world. Also painted in the fashion of children's paintings,,,, example the sun etc.  Although these books are not known internationally I thought they represented a child's fantasy. It was not fully understood... in my peer evaluation they thought the rat with a suitcase was "unemployed" or "homeless"... homeless he was cause he wanted to rent a flat in the famous  Flat for rent by Lea Goldberg.