Author Archives: Phillips

Joan Miro was a Spanish artist born on April 20th, 1893 in Barcelona. He specialized in painting, sculpting, and ceramics. Miro lived for 100 years, and in those years, he produced many fine pieces of art like “The Farm”, “The Harlequin’s Carnival”, and so on. Many of these pieces are surrealist. The piece of art I chose is called “Portrait of Enric Cristofol Ricart”. The reason I chose this was simply the unique design. Although considered modernist, it contained Japanese style art in the background, merging two different cultures. I thought it would be intriguing to understand it by digging a little deeper into it. This piece of art was completed sometime during the winter or early spring of 1917. Pictured in the painting, Enric Cristofol Ricart is the studio-mate, as well as friend. Essentially, this piece embodies Miro’s visual language. Miro’s visual language has been classified as surrealist and this piece brings out many aspects of it. Some of the highlighting traits of surrealist art are the abstraction of the items and characters, bright colors and brush stroke style. The painting context includes Miro introducing his own touches like the painter’s palette, and the waves of colorful lines that intwined into his black hair. The gallery consisted mostly of pieces that were difficult to make out at first glance. However, this piece was very straight forward. But upon closer analysis, it seems that there is more than meets the eye. I also noticed the clothing he was wearing. To me, it looked like a prisoner’s attire. I thought about whether or not that had something to do with Enric’s mentality about art. Although I doubt it was true, I couldn’t help but come to such a hypothesis. The way Enric’s face was portrayed using a wide spectrum of colors to shade it really caught my attention as well. His sharp features are highlighted with almost a brassy rainbow like range of colors. Despite all that in the foreground, the background is just as eye catching. Behind Enric in the top right corner, there’s a large Japanese style piece of art. I think it’s really cool that the two different cultures crossover in this painting. It’s something I don’t come across often. Some questions I have about this painting is what is the reasoning for the the attire Enric is wearing. I’m also curious as to why they included the Japanese part.

I picked this session because of my interest in music. I thought it’d be interesting to dig a little deeper into music theory. Strengthening my understanding of music would help me become a better musician in my past time. I play guitar in my free time and music theory would help me connect my hands and my mind. I also chose this session because I think music is such a great form of art. It’s essentially a universal language that the world can understand without having to actually know how to speak it. Music is not only thought provoking, but emotion provoking as well. It’s a great way to express your own feelings to someone else as well, whether it be happiness, sadness, anger, etc.

During this session, we learned about some basics regarding sheet music. The professor essentially gave us a crash course on sight reading and a run down of some simple instruments. After we learned how music is written to be a legible syntax, we used our names and the corresponding letters to the musical scale to create a “tune” that represented ourselves. She called it a light motif. Unfortunately, my name is Phillips and there is no notes that correspond to any of those letters, therefore I guess the tune that would be associated with my name would be silence. Although I did not have much to contribute to in terms of that activity, I found it pretty fun to learn about some of the instruments as it expanded my horizon on how different instruments can be and how it can really bring about a different feeling/tone. Much of what I learned in this session was already things I had learned throughout my time in high school because I was in band, and middle school/elementary school when I was in glee club. The things I learned though were refreshing and kind of made me excited to play instruments more often. I have been meaning to pickup piano again in my free time. We didn’t really get to making the Spotify playlist by the way, but it was still a very cool session. I had a ton of playlists based on motifs already so it was alright that we didn’t.

After carefully reading some of Wordsworth’s writing, it has become clear to me that he enjoys glorifying the common things in life and reflecting on these little things with his emotions. His lyrical ballads in “Lines Written in Early Spring” are very emphatic on the little details of nature. For example in the first stanza, he says “I heard a thousand blended notes, While in a grove I sate reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts, Bring sad thoughts to the mind.” I believe this is talking about the sound of birds and little insects chirping as he sits comfortably kicked back, thinking critically about how beautiful and natural nature. But that’s not all he feels. The “sweet mood” brought by the beautiful sounds of nature also bring contrary sad thoughts to mind. In the next stanza, it becomes clear that Wordsworth is describing mother nature to mankind. In the second stanza, I believe Wordsworth was trying to convey the message that nature has done its duty of being itself and giving humanity something beautiful to work with, but it pains Wordsworth to think about what mankind has turned itself into. The line “What man has made of man.” conveys this message. Throughout the rest of the poem, he continues to carefully take note of the other beautiful little things in nature that make it such an elegant phenomenon. but he repeats that specific line “What man has made of man.” again. I think it becomes even more clear that he emphasized this line by writing it twice because its one of the primary messages he wants the reader to take with him/her. I feel strongly about Wordsworth writing’s too. When I used to skateboard and go on little trips to places to practice this hobby, much of the time would not be spent skateboarding, but rather sitting and resting in between. But those moments where we sat and rested, I’ve thought about what Wordsworth felt. With the strong rays of the sun beaming down on me, and the insects in the grass humming and chirping, it’s truly a beautiful world. But when I think about going back to the city, where my community/society thrives, it pains me to think that much of the world is a very toxic place. I don’t mean to sound like a pessimist but human beings, even from the beginning of humanity, have really turned something so simple and beautiful to something so complex and hateful. The social and political conflicts that exist throughout the world, the ridiculous laws in place to control human beings because human beings cannot control themselves, it’s actually very sad.

Hello, my name is Phillips Li. I’m a junior studying Computer Information Systems. I’ve lived in NYC my whole life. Native to Queens, I went to high school in Brooklyn, and currently go to college in Manhattan. Before high school, I was a very awkward and introverted person. But being a commuter drastically change my life for the better, for it forced me to develop and hone my interpersonal skills. The most difficult transition I would have to say, was going from my middle school to high school. Very few people from my middle school actually left the borough. Not only did I have very little friends to begin with in middle school, my few friends that I did have remained in Queens to attend zoned schools. This meant that I was walking into a new building, new environment, and turning a whole new leaf all by myself. It was a very lonely but eye opening experience. The first two years of high school, I made it my personal goal to become a socialite within my grade. I was successful in doing so. The time I spent learning social queues was not time wasted because these skills carried on into college. It made my life significantly easier. Not only did I become a very sociable person, I became someone good enough at the trade that people around me aspired to be just as good. But being such a sociable person is extremely exhausting. It takes a lot of energy and focus and takes away from a lot of other great parts of life and I’m now on a little break from this. Purposely being a little more introverted, I’ve been focused on developing myself further by picking my guitar up again after over a decade of having it sit in the dust. That’s pretty much how and why I spent my break.