Tuesday 28 August 2012

illustrations




Illustration

·      Anime

In the western design culture the term anime was more used to describe Japanese stylised animation, as anime became more popular western culture began to incorporate some of the Japanese type styles in their designs examples of this was animated series the Batman, Batman beyond, spiderman unlimited.

The influence of anime on western culture mostly started in the 1980’s. Transformers can be seen as a poor example which was inspired by mecha anime.

More and more western and Japanese animation companies started collaborating as the popularity of anime increased thus animatrix was created.  Marvel animation and Toei animation are good examples of these collaboration as they created the Dungeons and dragons series.








·      Manga

At first Manga did not really exist in the west except through imports. But in 1998 cartoon network started showing one of the first manga shows called Dragonball Z.

In 2001 magazines started showing more adult type anime for example BLEACH and Death note.





·      Otaku
A third theory sheds some light on the history of why and how the Japanese fans called themselves "otaku".
Takashi Murakami, the famous otaku/pop artist, cites his friend Toshio Okada, one of the world's leading experts on otaku culture, in explaining where the usage of "otaku" came from. Okada, Murakami says, links "otaku" to Shoji Kawamori and Haruhiko Mikimoto, the creators of Super Dimensional Fortress Macross (1982), at Studio Nue. Kawamori and Mikimoto were students at Keio University when they started working on Macross.
Keio is known as one of the more upstanding and relatively upper-class institutes of learning in Japan. In tune with their somewhat aristocratic surroundings, Kawamori and Mikimoto used the classical, refined second-person form of address, "otaku", in preference to "anata," the usual form of address. Fans of the studio's work began using the term to show respect toward Studio Nue's creators, and it entered common use among the fans who gathered at comic markets, fanzine meetings, and all-night line parties before anime movie releases. (Murakami 2001)
Tomohiro Machiyama (2004) suggests that the use of “otaku” as a form of address amongst anime fans was mimicked from the Macross anime directly. Machiyama says that the main character, Hikaru Ichijoe, frequently uses the extra-polite “otaku” when talking to other characters.
I recently heard Toshio Okada lecture at MIT, and he discussed this subject further. According to Okada, at science fiction conventions, otaku from various places (i.e. anime clubs from different schools) would meet each other. Out of respect for each other's clubs, they would refer to each other using "otaku", the extra polite form of address.
Even though Akio Nakamori would write about the otaku-zoku in a less than positive light, many otaku began using the label for themselves in proud defiance and half-joking self-deprecation. Otaku no Video (1991) provides an excellent example of sincere otaku pride combined with otaku making fun of themselves.

Art movement Surrealism





Mysterious objects in paintings are objects that still look the same just in a weird way. René Magritte’s painting "Not to be Reproduced" is an example of a painting with mysterious objects. There are two reflections in a mirror the person and the book. The book's reflection is correct, but the person's reflection is of the back of his head instead of his face.
Rene Magrittes painting "Son of Man" is another example of a surrealist painting with mysterious objects. There is a guy stiff with an apple on his face.

Salvador Dali did not paint dreamlike paintings all the time. He also painted optical illusions. He painted "Apparition of face, and fruit dish on a beach". It has one optical illusion that looks like a fruit dish but could also look like a face and a lady sitting down. There is also a mountain that looks like a dog.
 

From reading this section you now know many interesting facts about surrealism. You also know how surrealist artists changed objects into optical illusions, mysterious objects, and familiar objects that have been oddly changed optical illusions.
Surrealism shared much of the anti-rationalism of Dada, the movement out of which it grew. However, Breton, who was a part of the Dada group, wanted to form a movement in which artists could unite to protest war by accessing subconscious thoughts. The original Parisian Surrealists organized group activities as a reprieve from violent political situations and to address the unease they felt about the world's uncertainties. Surrealists were interested in exposing the complex and repressed inner worlds of sexuality, desire, and violence, and interest in these topics fostered transgressive behavior. Many of the artists underwent psychoanalysis to study and uproot their latent feelings and behaviors as a cure for what they believed to be the constraining and repressed codes and morals of society.

The Surrealists generated creative works that exposed the artists' inner minds in bizarre, symbolic ways in order to uncover anxieties and to treat them analytically through visual means. The Surrealists depicted dream imagery and archetypal symbols derived from their unconsciousness. The collage aesthetic was significant to the Surrealists, as they believed it tapped into the subconscious by creating unlikely juxtapositions using imagery garnered from popular culture. The Surrealists employed collage in every medium including film.
Rise and Decline of Surrealism
Though Surrealism originated in France, strains of it can be identified in art throughout the world. Particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, many artists were swept into its orbit as increasing political upheaval and a second global war encouraged fears that human civilization was in a state of crisis and collapse. The emigration of many Surrealists to the US during WWII spread their ideas further. However, following the war, the group's ideas were challenged by the rise of Existentialism. And in the arts, the Abstract Expressionists usurped their dominance by pioneering new techniques for representing the unconscious. Breton became increasingly interested in revolutionary political activism as the movement's primary goal. The result was the dispersal of the original movement into smaller factions of artists. The Bretonians, such as Robert Matta, believed that art was inherently political. Others, like Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, and Dorothea Tanning, remained in America to separate from Breton. Salvador Dalí, likewise, retreated to Spain, believing in the centrality of the individual in art.
Further Developments:

Abstract Expressionism
In 1936, the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged an exhibition entitled Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, and many American artists were powerfully impressed by it. Some, such as Jackson Pollock, began to experiment with automatism, and with imagery which seemed to derive from the unconscious - experiments which would later lead to his 'drip' paintings. Robert Motherwell, similarly, is said to have been "stuck between the two worlds" of abstraction and automatism.


http://www.theartstory.org/movement-surrealism.htm

World war 2 Atomic Bomb

August  2nd 1939 just before the outbreak of world war ll a letter written by Professor Einstein was sent to the American president by the name of Franklin D. Roosevelt, this letter contained information about the on goings in Nazi Germany. The Nazis were trying to purify U-235 which could be used to build an atomic bomb.
Since the letter was sent the Americans were working on they’re own atom bomb, they called it project Manhattan. Over a time period of six (1993-1945 ) years project Manhattan cost about 2 billion dollars.
A massive enrichment laboratory/plant was constructed at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. H.C. Urey, along with his associates and colleagues at Columbia University, devised a system that worked on the principle of gaseous diffusion. Following this process, Ernest O. Lawrence (inventor of the Cyclotron) at the University of California in Berkeley implemented a process involving magnetic separation of the two isotopes.

Following the first two processes, a gas centrifuge was used to further separate the lighter U-235 from the heavier non-fissionable U-238 by their mass. Once all of these procedures had been completed, all that was needed to be done was to put to test the entire concept behind atomic fission.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was the key force behind the Manhattan Project. He literally ran the show and saw to it that all of the great minds working on this project made their brainstorms work. He was amongst those who oversaw the entire project from its conception to its completion.

Finally the day came when all at Los Alamos would find out whether or not The Gadget (code-named as such during its development) was either going to be the colossal dud of the century or perhaps end the war. It all came down to a fateful morning of midsummer, 1945.

As many know, atomic bombs have been used only twice in warfare. The first and foremost blast site of the atomic bomb is Hiroshima. A Uranium bomb (which weighed in at over 4 & 1/2 tons) nicknamed "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima August 6th, 1945. The Aioi Bridge, one of 81 bridges connecting the seven-branched delta of the Ota River, was the aiming point of the bomb. Ground Zero was set at 1,980 feet. At 0815 hours, the bomb was dropped from the Enola Gay. It missed by only 800 feet. At 0816 hours, in the flash of an instant, 66,000 people were killed and 69,000 people were injured by a 10 kiloton atomic explosion.

Reference/Source: Outlaw Labs











Saturday 17 March 2012

Contemporary examples of photography as: reportage, art, science, behind closed doors: domesticity, intimacy, pornography, paparazzi and snapshots.



-      Photography as reportage
·       Reportage is an example of journalism, these photos can sometimes be very brutal or in other words vivid images of death, motor accidents, animal slaughter or child abuse the examples are almost limitless. The picture that I found to explain this example of photography as you can see is a murder scene, as you will note that this image is vivid and there is no cover up no euphemism of any sort because this is news and we all have to know what is going on out there.




-      Photography as art
·       This example of photography may contain a lot of metaphoric symbolism or sometimes in a more serious sense it could mean exactly what it is. Like all art you have to keep an open mind because the art you see in front of you could mean anything you want it to its what you see in it that makes it art.














-     Photography as science
·       You can see science in everything you see around you even in photography the image I’m using as an example is a perfect in showing you what it looks like when you stop time this is where art and science meet. This proves that a small thing such as a drop of water falling into a puddle of water can be science and art.






 










Behind closed doors.

-      Photography as domesticity
·       Domesticity means loving home this is an example of advertisement, people advertise their homes for, to rent out, to sell. These photos makes the home look good so certain lighting should be used to create a certain vibe.



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        Photography as intimacy
·       These type of photos could be taken at weddings, funerals, when people are on holiday or just when you’re in love. These photos could also be incorporated in an artistic sense or for advertisement. This effect brings a warm and human quality to an image.


 

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       Photography as paparazzi
·       Paparazzi usually follow around people who are famous, this type of photography goes hand in hand with reportage and espionage. These photos are used to exploit famous people’s personal lives and to let the world know what goes on in that famous person’s life.



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   Photography as pornography
·       These photos are used for human pleasure or in an more elegant way for advertisement.

Victorian age

·         Gothic revival
This is a style of architecture that started and existed in the   1740s, it was also called the Victorian Gothic style.

·       Eclectic style
This style existed more in the fine arts, this style emerged from different types of styles mixed together to form a new style.

·       Victorian aesthetic

·       Sentiment
This is a soft and kind of emotion more like a general thought, feeling or sense.

·       Ornate elaboration

-Artists

·    Louis Prang
He was born in Breslau 1824. He learnt to dye print calico in his german father’s shop. He also trained in the united states to become a lithographer in 1850.  Soon after becoming a lithographer and just after the civil war he began printing chromo lithographs.
·    Walter Crane
He was born in Liverpool on 15 August 1845. He was a designer of his time he specialised in children’s books. He worked on illustrations for a poem for a short while, after that he started studying drawing in his free time whilst working for a famous wood engraver named William James Linton.

·    Kate Greenway
Also called Catherine Kate Greenway was born in London on March 17th 1846. While Kate was still a teen her father encouraged and supported her artistic talents. She was an poet and an artist, her inspiration came from her happy childhood.

·    Howard Pyle
He was also known as “the father of American illustrations”. He was born in Wilmington on the 5th of March.  He Graduated in an art school in Philadelphia, after that he went to New York City to further develop his artistic talents.

·    Charles Dana
He was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts on 14th September 1867 he is mostly known for his drawings of women from the first quarter of the twentieth century. In 1878 he began to draw as an apprentice for Goerge Post. His work also appeard in books.

Random Exercise Age of realism and social consciousness in art


Realism in American Literature, 1860-1890



Broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality" or "verisimilitude," realism is a literary technique practiced by many schools of writing. Although strictly speaking, realism is a technique, it also denotes a particular kind of subject matter, especially the representation of middle-class life. A reaction against romanticism, an interest in scientific method, the systematizing of the study of documentary history, and the influence of rational philosophy all affected the rise of realism. According to William Harmon and Hugh Holman, "Where romanticists transcend the immediate to find the ideal, and naturalists plumb the actual or superficial to find the scientific laws that control its actions, realists center their attention to a remarkable degree on the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, and the verifiable consequence" (A Handbook to Literature 428).
Many critics have suggested that there is no clear distinction between realism and its related late nineteenth-century movement, naturalism. As Donald Pizer notes in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, the term "realism" is difficult to define, in part because it is used differently in European contexts than in American literature. Pizer suggests that "whatever was being produced in fiction during the 1870s and 1880s that was new, interesting, and roughly similar in a number of ways can be designated as realism, and that an equally new, interesting, and roughly similar body of writing produced at the turn of the century can be designated as naturalism" (5). Put rather too simplistically, one rough distinction made by critics is that realism espousing a deterministic philosophy and focusing on the lower classes is considered naturalism.
In American literature, the term "realism" encompasses the period of time from the Civil War to the turn of the century during which William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and others wrote fiction devoted to accurate representation and an exploration of American lives in various contexts. As the United States grew rapidly after the Civil War, the increasing rates of democracy and literacy, the rapid growth in industrialism and urbanization, an expanding population base due to immigration, and a relative rise in middle-class affluence provided a fertile literary environment for readers interested in understanding these rapid shifts in culture. In drawing attention to this connection, Amy Kaplan has called realism a "strategy for imagining and managing the threats of social change" (Social Construction of American Realism ix).
Realism was a movement that encompassed the entire country, or at least the Midwest and South, although many of the writers and critics associated with realism (notably W. D. Howells) were based in New England. Among the Midwestern writers considered realists would be Joseph Kirkland, E. W. Howe, and Hamlin Garland; the Southern writer John W. DeForest's Miss Ravenal's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty is often considered a realist novel, too.
"The basic axiom of the realistic view of morality was that there could be no moralizing in the novel [ . . . ] The morality of the realists, then, was built upon what appears a paradox--morality with an abhorrence of moralizing. Their ethical beliefs called, first of all, for a rejection of scheme of moral behavior imposed, from without, upon the characters of fiction and their actions. Yet Howells always claimed for his works a deep moral purpose. What was it? It was based upon three propositions: that life, social life as lived in the world Howells knew, was valuable, and was permeated with morality; that its continued health depended upon the use of human reason to overcome the anarchic selfishness of human passions; that an objective portrayal of human life, by art, will illustrate the superior value of social, civilized man, of human reason over animal passion and primitive ignorance" (157). Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism (Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott, 1954).
"Realism sets itself at work to consider characters and events which are apparently the most ordinary and uninteresting, in order to extract from these their full value and true meaning. It would apprehend in all particulars the connection between the familiar and the extraordinary, and the seen and unseen of human nature. Beneath the deceptive cloak of outwardly uneventful days, it detects and endeavors to trace the outlines of the spirits that are hidden there; tho measure the changes in their growth, to watch the symptoms of moral decay or regeneration, to fathom their histories of passionate or intellectual problems. In short, realism reveals. Where we thought nothing worth of notice, it shows everything to be rife with significance."
-- George Parsons Lathrop, 'The Novel and its Future," Atlantic Monthly 34 (September 1874):313 24.
“Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” --William Dean Howells, “Editor’s Study,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine (November 1889), p. 966.
"Realism, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm." --Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Realism in Victorian age

England in 1841 was at the very dawn of the Victorian Age. It was the decade that would come to be known as "The Hungry Years," as industrialization spread and the lower classes became more firmly established. During the years preceding, the gradual spread of industry had led farmers away from the countryside, and eliminated at single strokes the jobs of countless workers with such inventions as the power loom and the combine. These people found themselves competing for few jobs in what was becoming a highly mechanized economy. A middle class of merchants was formed out of the aristocracy who found their taxes dwindling and the lower class that aspired to more. Business ventures such as the South Seas Bubble company collapsed, but other commercial ventures, such as the China Tea Trade, flourished. However, even for these businesses, times were changing, as the steam ship took over from the mighty and glorious clipper ship, queen of the seas. Ideologically, this was a troubled time, as a crisis of faith in God resulted from the many discoveries of science. Soon educated men divided themselves into two principal schools: Utilitarians, the followers of Jeremy Bentham, who based everything upon the utility of objects, and who managed a quick reform of the Civil Service; and the followers of Coleridge, firm believers in faith. Although we have a lingering impression of the Victorian Age as a repressive and repressed society, it was one of the most vital periods of English history, lively and full of controversy. Belief in technology was at its height, and the superstitions of magic had been swept away, reserved for gothic horror novels. Medical science was improving by leaps and bounds. Living conditions were terrible for many in 1841, and it was not long before Marx produced his _Communist Manifesto_, but England was by that time well ont he way to becoming the dominant nation in the world, and London the jewel in the crown of the British Empire.



Courbet painted figurative compositions, landscapes, seascapes, and still-lifes. He courted controversy by addressing social issues in his work, and by painting subjects that were considered vulgar, such as the rural bourgeoisie, peasants, and working conditions of the poor. His work belonged neither to the predominant Romantic nor Neoclassical schools. History painting, which the Paris Salon esteemed as a painter's highest calling, did not interest Courbet, who stated that "the artists of one century [are] basically incapable of reproducing the aspect of a past or future century ..."[2] Instead, he believed that the only possible source for a living art is the artist's own experience.[2]
His work, along with the work of Honoré Daumier and Jean-François Millet, became known as Realism. For Courbet realism dealt not with the perfection of line and form, but entailed spontaneous and rough handling of paint, suggesting direct observation by the artist while portraying the irregularities in nature. He depicted the harshness in life, and in so doing challenged contemporary academic ideas of art.

[edit] Biography

Courbet was born in 1819 to Régis and Sylvie Oudot Courbet in Ornans (Doubs). Though a prosperous farming family, anti-monarchical feelings prevailed in the household. (His maternal grandfather fought in the French Revolution.) Courbet's sisters, Zoé, Zélie and Juliette, were his first models for drawing and painting. After moving to Paris he returned home to Ornans often to hunt, fish and find inspiration.[3]
He went to Paris in 1839 and worked at the studio of Steuben and Hesse. An independent spirit, he soon left, preferring to develop his own style by studying the paintings of Spanish, Flemish and French masters in the Louvre, and painting copies of their work.
Self-portrait (The Desperate Man), c. 1843–1845 (Private collection)
His first works were an Odalisque suggested by the writing of Victor Hugo and a Lélia illustrating George Sand, but he soon abandoned literary influences, choosing instead to base his paintings on observed reality. Among his paintings of the early 1840s are several self-portraits, Romantic in conception, in which the artist portrayed himself in various roles. These include Self-Portrait with Black Dog (c. 1842–1844, accepted for exhibition at the 1844 Paris Salon), the theatrical Self-Portrait which is also known as Desperate Man (c. 1843–45), Lovers in the Countryside (1844, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon), The Sculptor (1845), The Wounded Man (1844–1854, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), The Cellist, Self-Portrait (1847, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, shown at the 1848 Salon), and The Man with a Pipe (c. 1848–1849, Musée d'Orsay, Paris).
Trips to the Netherlands and Belgium in 1846–1847 strengthened Courbet's belief that painters should portray the life around them, as Rembrandt, Hals and other Dutch masters had. By 1848, he had gained supporters among the younger critics, the Neo-romantics and Realists, notably Champfleury.[4]
Courbet achieved greater recognition after the success of his painting After Dinner at Ornans at the Salon of 1849. The work, reminiscent of Chardin and Le Nain, earned Courbet a gold medal and was purchased by the state.[5] The gold medal meant that his works would no longer require jury approval for exhibition at the Salon[6]—an exemption Courbet enjoyed until 1857 when the rule changed).[7]
In 1849 Courbet painted Stone-Breakers (destroyed in the British bombing of Dresden in 1945), which Proudhon admired as an icon of peasant life; it has been called "the first of his great works".[8] The painting was inspired by a scene Courbet witnessed on the roadside. He later explained to Champfleury and the writer Francis Wey, "It is not often that one encounters so complete an expression of poverty and so, right then and there I got the idea for a painting. I told them to come to my studio the next morning."[8]