On further reflection I thought it would wise to list down the learning activities explicitly that I would like you as module participants of TUOAAIM to engaged in to avoid misunderstanding of what I had mentioned during our tutorial 1 the other evening. The learning activities has two basic intentions, cultivating relevant areas in your personal development related to this module e.g. creativity, intuition, imaginative capacity, awareness of your own unconscious processes, humour and playfulness, etc which are essential and would contribute greatly to your development as a therapeutic practitioner of the creative arts. The other intention is through the learning activities you will begin to equip yourself with the skills and knowledge necessary to help someone towards therapeutic objectives.
Task 1 – Understanding artists and their art. Letting the ‘artist’ in you developed an appreciation and developing perceptual sensitivity of visual imageries.
Choose two contrasting pieces of work by any two famous artists. Research into the two pieces of work (they could be a style or genre that you like or are curious about) the medium could be a painting, sculpture, print, photograph etc. etc. Through your research into the brief background of the artist, the context for the piece of work, critical comments from art critics and commentators on the piece of the work chosen will hopefully deepened your appreciation of art and increase you perceptual vocabulary for art.
Your task is to offer a brief summary (no longer than two A4 page, use links if further information is interesting) of what you have researched, you don’t have to be original, just select and summarised what others have said and how the piece of art you have selected has come to be renowned, special or have made significant contributions to make to the art world and the diverse culture of humanity. This will posted onto your blog accompanied by the visual image of the work and artist. See may example below on Salvador Dali.
Salvador Dali
The persistence of memory
For a larger image of the above piece of work by Dali, click on this link
Bio
| Birth name | Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech |
| Born | May 11, 1904 |
| Died | January 23, 1989 (aged 84) |
| Nationality | |
| Field | |
| Training | |
| Movement | |
| Works | Face of Mae West Which May Be Used as an Apartment, (1935) Ballerina in a Death's Head (1939) The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946) Galatea of the Spheres (1952) |
Painted in 1931, landscape of Port Lligat, the town on the Mediterranean coast where Dalí spent much of his life. The province of Catalonia, is noted for its sheer cliffs and craggy outcroppings of rock. While the cliffs in the painting’s upper right hand corner provide some specific features in the landscape, the absence of other characteristic landmarks is significant, as Robert Radford has noted:
“Certainly the bare, hard outline of the cliffs and the crystal light of the sky are there, but the empty, desert-like expanses of the painting are much closer to the
topography of the mind, to a dreamscape. The viewer’s anxiety is fermented precisely through the lack of clues of distance, of recognizable landmark, of time of day, of temperature—it could equally be as hot, or as cold, as an unknown planet. We are in an arena of silence, a frozen nightmare, in which nothing moves or makes a noise.”
James Thrall Soby, at MOMA, “space is manipulated to suggest an infinity against which the drama of his objects and figures is projected” . While the seascape, cliffs and sky occupy the top third of the painting, the bottom two-thirds feature the famous larger-than life watches: one melting over the truncated branch of a dead olive tree, one melting over a large step in the painting’s left hand corner, and a third drooping over an amorphous shape appears to have been washed up onto the beach. The fourth watch is closed, and its cover is swarming with ants. Dalí called his surrealist paintings “hand-painted dream photographs,” with its clear, crisp details and almost invisible brushwork. —intended the dreamlike scene to seem as real as any other.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this painting is the ants and the fly which
alight atop two of the watches. The presence of the objects and the living insects
allude to the tradition of still-life painting. As indicated, the watches symbolize
the passing of time, which is distorted, as memory comes to the fore in sleep. But
the insects provoke a more subtle reading of the painting in which time reveals the presence of death. Here they symbolize decay, a modern Memento Mori or Vanitas.
SYMBOLS
The Watches
The ants, the fly, the olive tree, the steps, the amorphous shape on the beach—but none are of significance as the watches themselves. The effect they have on the viewer is twofold: watches are not only potent symbols of “time’s winged chariot hurrying near,” but their content is seemingly contradicted, and made doubly meaningful, by their softness. The resulting effect—that of time and machine coming apart—challenges our belief in a rational, natural, orderly and rule bound world. It evokes the seemingly universal human preoccupation with time and memory. Dalí juxtaposes two ordinary symbols of time: clocks and sand; but in Dalí’s arresting vision the clocks are melting over a vast and lonely beach that resembles the sands of time. To emphasize the painting’s temporal images, he also incorporates a swarm of crawling ants, whose uniquely shaped bodies resemble hourglasses. Sand, hourglasses, and watches all connect below the threshold of awareness till the viewer’s mind swings around to focus on the very nature and meaning of time. This surrealistic painting mesmerizes us because it translates an idea into symbols when conventional words and phrases have never been sufficient. The fact that the watches are soft—that they appear to be melting like cheese, or wax, or gelatin—seemingly contradicts the significance of time itself, rendering both time and the machine that measures it ineffective and irrelevant. “The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order” The evocation of softness is one of Dalí’s most brilliant and compelling inventions: his soft objects are powerful and disturbing images of entropy—that fundamental physical process by which all things decay in time.” The cosmic sense of this is further heightened, by the fact that philosophers of the enlightenment had conceived of the workings of the universe as akin to that of the mechanism of a watch.
The Self-Portrait
The center of is a relatively amorphous shape that appears to have been washed onto the beach. With its closed eye and oversized eyelashes, and with a relative lack of other identifying features, the self-portrait seems to emphasize sleep, positioning the painting’s dreamscape as a concrete realization of an unconscious world. The sleeping figure in the foreground suggests that this landscape is an interior vista, accessible only through sleep. The figure's embryo-like shape suggests Dalí’s fascination with the psychoanalytic theme of inter-uterine memories embedded in the unconscious”. This “embryo-like shape” refers to Dalí’s professed memories of intra-uterine life and suggests the trauma of birth. A watch sagging across [it] and another hanging from a plinth evoke the feelings of timelessness associated with the experience of pre-birth. The title of the painting thus refers to prenatal memories and its subject is ‘the horrible traumatism of birth by which we are also expunged from paradise.’ Another commentator argues, “In this picture, the figure is an identification of defeat, death….one can’t ignore the fact that the limp figure in a wasteland of ants, flies, a dead olive tree and useless clocks has quite possibly seen the end of its days. The portrait casts a shadow of mortality over the dreamworld Dalí has created, reminding us that, like the melting watches, our time is running out.
Ants & Flies
As symbols of decay, ants and flies are common in Dalí’s work of this time and
comments such as “The insects are rendered with such precision that they become almost machine-like,” which is an intriguing twist to a painting in which machines have in turn assumed the organic properties of living creatures.
The Olive Tree
A traditional symbol of peace, hope, and healing in Western cultures, the olive and the olive tree was a significant image for Dalí as well. A major agricultural product of Catalonia, the olive makes its appearance in early works
Later on, Dalí would nickname his love partner Gala “my little olive,” acknowledging the life-nurturing qualities that she brought to their
Relationship. In this picture, however, the olive tree is dead, reinforcing the sense of death that one might get from the painting. It was suggested that the “denuded” tree is “in reference to the Spanish Civil War”, and alongside the useless and impotent watches, the lifeless self-portrait, the barren beach, the ants and the fly, it helps to create, in some readings, a landscape fraught with despair—not so much a “dreamscape” as a nightmare.
Steps
The presence of the two “steps”—the large brown one in the lower left-hand corner, and the less prominent blue one at the horizon on the painting’s left side—is one of the more perplexing aspects. In other paintings of the time, like
Dalí paints steps as part of a visual language of Freudian symbols. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud spells out the signifying nature of steps.
Steps, ladders or staircases, or, as the case may be, walking up or down them, are
representations of the sexual act.
For further detailed commentary click on this link
