Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas was born 19 July 1834 until 27 September 1917 in Paris, France. He is well-known term ‘impressionism’ and chosen to call is ‘realist’. He was also known for his portraits because of their spiritual complexity and representation of human isolation. In 1859, Degas moved into a large studio in Paris, which gave him the opportunity to begin painting The Bellelli Family. Degas began painting several history paintings, in 1859-60 he painted Alexander and Bucephalus and The Daughter of Jephtha. In 1865 the jury accepted his painting Scene of War in the Middle Ages, when Degas exhibited at the salon for the first time by doing this he attracted some attention. Edouard Manet influenced Degas when they met in 1864, that’s what made the change in his art. Before 1886, Degas had a leading role in organizing exhibitions of his work which the impressionists later held seven additional shows.

The Dance Class (La Classe de Danse) 1873-1876, oil on canvas, by Edgar Degas

The style that impressionists use in their work are painting the realities of the world using bright ‘dazzling’ colours, most their attention is on the effect of light, and anticipating filling their scenes with closeness.

references:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Degas

http://www.biography.com/people/edgar-degas-9269770

Chuck Close

Chuck close Born: 1940, Monroe, WA. His style in painting can be called super realism or photorealism; he created a link between painting and photography. Photorealist used a grid method to expand and decrease each one of the squares to formal elements of design but most of them used the airbrush technique.


 

From close up the picture is not clear, it just looks like many abstract shapes but as you pull back, everything is shown clearly.
Chuck’s first big self-portrait mural-sized painting from photographs in black and white was incredible, doing this he took quite a lot of photographs of his neck and head so it fills up in t he frame and he painted in precision and delicacy and included shapes, texture, volume, shadows and highlights, that’s what made his painting amazing to look at.
Close had an unpleasant incident which affected him greatly as he had a spinal blood clot, which tragically left him not capable to use either his legs or his arms, but that did not stop him painting, he carried on and decided to put the paint brush in between his teeth even though the result was mini-paintings but from far it looked as a single or combined image.

References

http://thebeautifulbrain.com/category/dispatches/page/3/
http://www.chuckclose.coe.uh.edu/life/index.html

Walker Evans

Walker Evans was born in the U.S. from 1903 to 1975. He is a famous American photographer, whose work influenced development of ambitious photography. After Evans left college, he spent three years working in New York City where he later moved, and worked at dead-end jobs. When he was in France in 1926, when his father financed him to go to audition at Sorbonne (France) he took casual snapshots, that’s where his serious interest in photography developed. In the years 1928 and 1929 Evans created numerous substantial photographs that clearly indicated artistic ambition. Most of his photographs show patterns taken from skyscrapers or other machine-age products.

Evans style of work might have been once mistaken for that of a experienced if literal-minded commercial photographer but Gustave Flaubert expressed Evans idea of artist style, that an artist should be “like god in creation…he should be everywhere felt, but nowhere seen”.

Kitchen wall, Alabama, 1936

Evans photography created the powerful and unforgettable images of the time. When Evans went to New York, he visited subways and imaged people using a hidden camera, he took a series of rustic and urban America. He was also best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration recording the effects of the Greatest Depression.

references:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Evans

http://www.masters-of-photography.com/E/evans/evans.html

http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artMakerDetails?maker=1634

Saul Bass

Saul Bass

Saul Bass, born 1920 to 1996, Bronx district of New York. He studied at the Art Student League (New York) and Brooklyn College. Bass one of the most versatile and greatest graphic design but he was an exceptionally undoubted master of film title design, of course, with the collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Martin Scorsese. Bass worked as a freelance graphic designer/commercial artist after his apprenticeships with Manhattan design firms. His ability for creating perfect photographic references in the form of film poster campaigns and title sequences and minimalist symbolic images is amazing and cunning.

In 1956 Bass was called by Preminger to work on ‘the man with the golden arm’, for which Bass created and outstanding design which became so famous, it was a jagged arm, signifying the shaking and disjointed existence of a drug addict. Because of this design of the arm, he exploited what he called the importance of content in design.

When he worked with ‘the man with the golden arm’, Bass asked “why not make it move?”, as in in animation, he then created a new style of title sequence, since then,  what he had done became a classic. Bass is work was done in exact accuracy, that he used to create identities and brand for movies.




references:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Bass

http://designmuseum.org/design/saul-bass

http://www.saul-bass.com/

Biographies

Paul rand

Paul Rand was and is a recognized American graphic designer, best known for his corporate logo designs, which motivated me and my work because the most important key was to simplify any complicated logos or design problems. He was born in Brooklyn, New York on August 15, 1914 – November 26, 1996, died of cancer and born as Peretz Rosenbaum. From 1929 to 1932, Paul Rand studied at the Pratt Institute, in 1932-33 at the Parsons School of Design and from 1933-34 at the Arts Student League. The Swiss Style of Graphics Design was created by Paul Rand (with other designers). Some samples of his many posters and corporate identities contain logos for IBM, UPS and ABC. Rand embraced logo designing at a very young age, he painted signs for his father’s grocery store, but his father did not believe art can provide his son with an appropriate income.

When Janet Abram asks why Rand became a designer, he replied “I didn’t choose. God chose”.

Rand never changed his style, what he did was clever in advertising, his work was visually inspiring.  Rand started his career with a small job; his responsibility was to put together stock images for magazines and newspapers, later then he got a job as an arts director for editorial magazines, for example direction and apparel arts.

reference:

http://www.paul-rand.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Rand

http://www.areaofdesign.com/americanicons/rand.htm

Identity

Throughout time a person’s individual identity is a term used to describe a person’s conception, uniqueness, and expression of their individuality or group relationships. One’s mind is reflected to contain of an unimportant element, separate from and independent from the body.  Moreover it is defined as the individual characteristic belonging to any individual or shared by a group or members. However, one’s identity occurs through ones identifications with others, primarily identity comes from parents/family, friends, education, environment, role models, gender, nationality and cultural identity. Throughout life we pass many stages and there are influences that influence all our identities together, more in a larger social community, for examples, the government, celebrities, artists, musicians, and most well-known to make an individual paranoid about their identity, is the media, i.e. magazines, television, internet, newspapers. The media or other things, can affect a person’s mental model of her/himself, self-esteem, self-image and individuality.

 ‘A person’s identity is defined as the totality of one’s self-construal, in which how one construes oneself in the present expresses the continuity between how one construes oneself as one was in the past and how one construes oneself as one aspires to be in the future’, Weinreich, 1986a.

‘In an essay concerning human understanding (1689) has been said to be one of the first modern conceptualizations of consciousness as the repeated self-identification of oneself’, On Identity and diversity (book 2 chapter 27)

Some individuals play a role (be like someone else), because they are not comfortable about themselves or think and care too much about how people see them. For example young people and violence, most young individuals like to be like what they play on Xbox or PlayStation, such as grand theft auto, it involves a lot of violence, money, women and more, so the young individuals think they can earn respect from their friends by doing those things, which is wrong.

‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely player: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts’, (Shakespeare) .




references:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/identity-theft

http://uk.ask.com/web?l=sem&ifr=1&qsrc=999&q=what%20is%20identity&siteid=41627709&o=41627709&ar_uid=B18E14F3-2EBE-4B04-ADD5-78CD31E7CDAD&click_id=752969D8-89D4-4597-B2EE-012F47DB869A

Semiotics

From my understanding and knowledge semiotics is the theory of signs, symbols and significations, they are elements of language or other system of communications. This was the learning of how meaning was generated, not what it is. I will be providing some examples below of the smallest to the more complex semiotic terms.

1. Signifier: This is a material that signifies such as a text on a page, an image or facial expression
2. Signified: It is the theory that a signifier refers to
3. Both combined together create the sign: Anything that can be used to communicate
4. There is also the symbolic sign: The relation between signified and signifier is purely straight and traditionally precise 
5. Following the above, there is likewise the iconic sign: The signifier resembles the signified, as In in a picture
6. Denotation: A literal meaning if a sign, i.e. the term ‘rose’ signifies a individual kind of flower

In many cases the signifier can stay the same and have a dissimilar meaning or it can have different signifier and have the same meaning (signified). Below are some examples.

Signifier = Same

Signified = Different

                Apple                    Meaning                              Temptation

                Apple                    Meaning                              Healthy

                Apple                    Meaning                              Fruit

 Signifier = Different

Signified = Same

                Apple                    Meaning                              Apple

                Pomme                 Meaning                              Apple

                Appel                    Meaning                              Apple

                     Sign

                                                             Signifier                                  Signified

                                                         (Sound image)                           (Concept)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem01.html

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/carfax/10350330.html