Cubism

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We don't see too much of Jenny these days. She is working to get her art portfolio done for the St. Francis and Bowling Green U. portfolio days. Admission to the art schools are on the line as well as scholarship opportunities. Yesterday I brought her a Subway sandwich as she was staying at school to work on a painting. It's a large very detailed painting of a crystal oil lamp. It looked good so far, but with the detail she's putting in, she has many, many more hour to go. In the showcase in the art hallway was a painting she did of a Hawaii sunset we saw - again, very detailed in the tree branches and how the sun light hit the water - it is good. The new art teacher at school is pushing the kids to try methods they haven't done before to stretch their comfort zone and one assignment Jenny had this year was to do a painting in the Cubism art style. I got to see it at school yesterday and it's really striking and totally different than what she usually does. She added organic materials to the picture (sand, leaves, sticks and twigs)which gives it a nice texture.

For those of you who would like to learn more about Cubism, here is what Google says:
Cubism is the most radical, innovative, and influential ism of twentieth-century art. It is complete denial of Classical conception of beauty.

Cubism was the joint invention of two men, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Their achievement was built the foundation of Picasso's early work then developed to a Synthetic Cubism. As the various phases of Cubism emerged from their studios, it became clear to the art world that something of great significance was happening. The radical innovations of the new style confused the public, but the avant-garde saw in them the future of art and new challenge.

Proportions, organic integrity and continuity of life samples and material objects are abandoned. Canvas resembles "a field of broken glass" as one vicious critic noted. This geometrically analytical approach to form and color, and shattering of object in focus into geometrical sharp-edged angular pieces baptized the movement into 'Cubism'. A close look reveals very methodical destruction or rather deconstruction into angular 3-dymensional shaded facets, some of which are caving others convex. Cubism distrusts "whole" images perceived by the retina, considers them artificial and conventional, based on the influence of past art. It rejects these images and recognizes that perspective space is an illusory, rational invention, or a sign system inherited from works of art since the Renaissance.

Instead of an image of external world we are given a world of its own, analogous to nature but built along different principles. Cubism seeks to reproduce different perspectives or forms simultaneously, as they might be seen by the mind's eye. It attempts to mimic the mind's power to abstract and synthesize its different impressions of the world into new 'wholes'.