Painting: Salvador Dali “Persistence of Memory” (1931 )

The painting, “The Persistence of Memory,” by Salvador Dali is a classic and is one of my favorite paintings.  At first glance, you see the colors blue, orange and yellow. Immediately, the painting creates an atmosphere of serenity for the audience. The color scheme of the sky indicates that the sun is rising or setting. It is either really early in the morning, or it is in the middle of nightfall.  But then, as you analyze the painting further, you begin to notice a few irregular characteristics. The setting that Dali paints is unrealistic. The painting illustrates four melting clocks in the desert. The melting clocks is a symbolism of how time is stopped in this world. Salvador Dali also drew a desert alongside a body of water and a beached whale in the middle of the desert. One of the clocks is actually on the whale, which is probably sleeping. The painting is purely impractical and fictional. It most likely takes place in a fantasy world or in a dream. The way I interpret it is that the melting of the four clocks symbolizes the distortion of time in our dreams. The reason why I like this painting is because of how I can relate to it. Whenever I dream, I find that my dreams last longer than real time. For example, when I hit the snooze button sometimes, time in my dream seems to stand still. Those five minutes in real time lasts about an hour worth of time in my dreams. The message behind this is so true and subtle. This is one of my favorite paintings and I cannot help but feel calm whenever I look at it.

-Calvin Yu

Jasmine Estevez

Pablo Picasso; Woman Plaiting Her Hair

This painting was created by Pablo Picasso in the year of 1906. It is of a woman wearing nothing. She seems to be slouched on her knees touching her hair which is really long. The painting captured my attention because she wasn’t what people would call perfect nowadays but I loved it. This is what people should look up to. You shouldn’t be ashamed of your body but love yourself the way you are. The lady in the painting doesn’t look happy nor sad. I feel like she’s in front of a mirror fixing her hair and just staring at her body. Her bottom half is fading away or probably covered with some sort of robe. All the artist is really concentrated on is her bodies top half. This painting is a great portrait of what we humans look like and are. We aren’t perfect people who sit up straight and have perfect bodies. Everyone has their own flaws and you just have to accept it or live with the disappointment. While looking at this I wondered what Pablo was thinking about when he drew this. Was this his ideal picture of a women drawn on paper. Artists I believe draw what they see or feel and maybe he knew of someone who expired him to draw this. The painting is just focused on her touching her hair meanwhile the background is just a cloudy looking color. So you don’t really care about the background when looking at Pablo’s painting but you are concentrated on her. She’s a thick woman with long hair and then you begin to think and really look into her face just to try and figure out what this painting is really portraying to us. Over all the Museum of Modern Art had many great paintings and even sculptures that I enjoyed looking at. Some just stood out to me more than the others like this painting.

Gustave Klimt- Hope II 1907-08

This painting is done with oil, gold and platinum on canvas. It depicts a pregnant woman with her breasts exposed and a skull on her pregnant belly. She is wearing a long colorful detailed robe and there are three other women under her robe with their eyes closed and their hands up. The four women look like they are praying which evokes feelings of hope. The praying and the closed eyes evoke feelings of calmness and peace.

What captured my attention about this piece is detail in terms of color and pattern on the robe and the dress. The robe has a pattern of gold circles and smaller circles overlapping. The dress is yellow with patterns of beautiful blues and pinks. It is really interesting how the woman and the 3 other women are one unified single form of the painting. The colors are also really bright, which also symbolizes hope, and the background is just a rich shade of green. It shows how special and important the process of motherhood is.

The skull and the mother’s pregnant belly represent two parallel ideas of life, birth and death, the circle of life.  Interestingly enough when Gustave Klimt was working on Hope I, his one year old Otto died suddenly. Klimt lived in Vienna around the same time that Sigmund Freud and his ideas on family and sexual drives were starting to get popular. Around this time period, pregnant woman were also rarely depicted.

-Michele

Claude Monet was a famous French painter during the movement of impressionism which involved capturing the soft, light, and natural forms of life. Many impressionist artist often used soft, short paint strokes, neutral tones, and blended colors to give the paintings a look of effortlessness while still having the effect of realism. Claude Monet had a series of paintings called “Water Lilies” in which completely define the impressionistic movement. The use of cold colors give the painting a calm and soothing feeling and does not consist of more than at least five colors. The blending of colors and the gradation of the paint give the painting a sense of dimension and softness. The white creates an illusion of sunlight reflecting off the water while also highlighting the key features of the painting-the water lilies. The fact that the painting is called water lilies, there seems to not be many water lilies which I believe gives it a much more natural and realistic view and gives viewers a different perspective, as if looking from afar. A few of other Monet’s water lilies paintings do give a closer and much more detailed look at the water lilies. This painting is one of my favorite paintings that is the main reason I choose to analyze this painting.

This is a painting created by Jackson Pollock, he is well known and influential American artist and known best for his drip paintings in the abstract expressionist movement. When I first encounter this painting, I was amazed; the complex of the painting and the colors are just really appealing to the eyes, the line movements, the dots and drips seems alive and full with energy. Because the painting is huge we know that it needs tremendous amount of work to construct a painting this size; Jackson said that when he was constructing this painting he was “lying flat on the floor”, “on the floor I am more at ease” and  “I feel nearer, more a part of the painting since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.” Art work like this requires the full devotion of the heart and passion of an artist because it isn’t like landscape painting where you can just mimic what you saw, you need the creativity and imagination instead. Many people at that section actually lie down on the floor and tried to feel what Jackson felt while looking at this painting up close, unfortunately I wasn’t able to capture the scene when I took out my camera. Overall, I picked this painting because it is unique and it really opened my eyes.

Kiara Marmolejos

Pre modern piece: Vincent Van Gogh. 1889 Portrait of Joseph Roulin

This portrait automatically made me feel very light hearted. There are bright colors such as green, pink, orange and yellow that contrast nicely with the portrait colors and flesh tones. The main color is green and is very warm and inviting. The portrait has an imaginative background and a realistic person in the center. It is difficult to tell weather the background or the portrait was painted first.The floral-printed, abstract background evokes feelings of happiness yet still forces most of the attention to the person in the painting. The reason for the emotions of happiness is simply due to the color scheme. The man in the painting has rosy cheeks, squinty beautiful green eyes, and a huge beard. The texture of his pale face and furry beard both seem very soft and you can see light bouncing off of him in all directions. There is even a pink glare on his beard, which softens his manly face a lot. The man named Joseph in the portrait reminds me of Santa Clause in a formal suit. He looks joyous and content not because of his expression but because of the colors. The fact that the artist chose such bright colors like blue, green, yellow, and pink shows that he must be fond of the subject. There is also a considerable amount of texture on his beard which shows that the artist paid particular attention to the details of this manly beard.He sees the subject as a respectable person since he drew him in his suit. And secondly, this person must be dear to him because of the vibrant setting that the portrait seems to have. It immediately gives off positive emotions about the subject. It is possible that he may not be friendly at all, but obviously Van Gogh thought differently as depicted by his glowing and radiant portrait of Joseph. Overall, the portrait reveals a soft, calm, and beautiful side of Joseph Roulin’s self (shown by the brightness and choice of color). It turns out that Joseph was a close friend of Van Gogh, which might explain the positivity. The most interesting part of the portrait is that the emotion does not come from looking at the sitter. Rather the feeling comes from the independent vivid color in the background.  This is juxtaposed to the sitter’s serious countenance. It is said that this portrait was done after Joseph received a better job moving up from a postman. Van Gogh’s was fond of Joseph and it is even possible that this painting was done from memory. This is very different from Van Gogh’s usual landscape paintings. It makes sense that the man in the portrait is a working class man that Van Gogh was friends with in South France because this was done in the 1880’s. The 1880’s was the time of the second industrial revolution and is also called the “Gilded Age”. This period of rapid economic boom in america yet slow growth in Europe could have guided Van Gogh’s choice to paint a working man he respected.

Language is the powerful weapon that allows us to communicate with those around us. Yet, even with the expansive abilities that language provides, we still find ourselves lost at specific moments in our life. During moments of elation or violence, our ability to communicate becomes foreign to us. We begin to flop like a fish out of water, scrounging for a word like a blind man and his socks.

Marlene Nourbese Phillip discusses these ideas of language in her words, Discourse on a Logic of Language, a powerful poem of racism, sexism, and the inability to identify with oneself. It is evident that Phillip doesn’t consider English to be apart of her roots, but apart of the anguish her people underwent before freedom arose. By providing a masculine tone to the foreign language, she draws from the white men who oppressed her people, exploiting them. She softens her own tongue over the comforting word mother, claiming she has none, further emphasizing her inability to recognize her family tree.

This inability of recognition is similar to Frederick Douglas’ narrative, who also felt no motherly connection to his mother. “Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with the much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.” (1.4) Douglas connects to Phillip through their lost identity, but also though their shared anguish on the English language. When he learned to speak English, although it opened a new world for Douglas, it also opened a burden of understand which Phillip conveys, the realism behind the life of slavery.

Maribel Peralta

Hybrid assignment

10/18/2015

ENG 2850/KTA

In the Discourse on logic of language by M. Phillips there is a message being sent across to inform us about the determinability that language had on the lives of slaves. It sends a very impactful message across because as we see while reading the Narrative of the life of Fredrick Douglass we see how language played its part in the mystification of slavery. Back then slaves where not allowed or even taught how to read and write, this kept them oppressed and under the power of the white man. This poem is very informative in the sense that it keeps on repeating the following melodious line “English is a foreign language … anguish…father tongue”. This brought to me the idea that she might be saying this to indicate how slaves where exposed to listen and understand another language that was not originally their own. And of course they have no mother tongue because as mentioned in (Douglass, 1) “…before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it…” Stating the practice of severing that human connection between mother and child and replacing it with the brutal image of owner and property. In the poem Phillip manipulated the sounds of words making it more musical. When there is no more language to describe what it is the message is delivering she replaces words with personal information. This is also done in the novel. Before Frederick understood the language he would hear the slaves sing and it would be seen as a joyful act from the master in charge of them but after he understood he saw that this was more of a out cry for help and that these melodies revealed the deepest sentiments of the slaves. I really enjoyed when Phillips incorporated actual studies such as the one done by Dr. Broker on the size of the brain and how that proved intelligence. And how if the slave where caught speaking they would be severely punished. All of these where methods to keep institutionalizes racism in the minds of the slaveholders. By saying that because the size of the brain in African American was different there of than that of the white man it gave them the validity to his false assumptions. In (Douglass, 15) when Demby is shot in the head the excuse that was given to the slave master was also another example of the torture these slaves had to endure because of the institutionalized racism build in the system of these slaveholders. It states (Douglass, 15) “if one of the slaves refused to be corrected, and escaped with his life, the other slaves would soon copy his example; the result would be, the freedom of the slaves, and the enslavement of the whites.” This was a huge fear on behalf of the white population because the slaves did outnumber them by a lot. The detachment though from having any type of connection with anyone was really what kept him or her oppressed for so long though. I noticed this soon after I was reaching the ending of the novel, (Douglass 55) “It caused me more pain than anything else in the whole transaction. I was ready for anything rather than separation.” This message is also embodied into the message of the poem in the multiple choices that questions the use of the tongue, is it to taste, a form of speech, or an organ of oppression? I believe Frederick notice the mystification of the human language as a for to dehumanized the slave culture. When he learned to read this was a time of revelation for him that set the motion for his path to freedom.

In many ways, language is the root of understanding one’s own existence. Marlene Nourbese Phillip emphasizes this idea by denying English as her “mother tongue”, rather referring to it as her “father tongue”. At face value, the poem highlights the same ideas as Frederick Douglas’s Narrative, including the devaluing of slave’s life through the stripping of his or her family’s culture and practices by changing their names and forcing them to speak English. Phillip’s discontentment in English can be seen as she goes from failing to enunciate “language” to “languish” to finally saying “anguish”. In her eyes, English is associated with pains and sorrow that befell her people in the past.

Upon breaking down the poem further the idea of a “mother” and a “mother tongue” begins to represent more than just a language that Phillip grieves for, but more of the essence of what a mother represents, which is stability. This symbol is apparent as Phillips goes from saying that she has “no mother tongue” to “no mother to tongue”. Though only a one word change, the statement goes from saying she has lost her culture to saying that she has lost her source of comfort and security.

This symbol of the loss of mother parallels the reality Douglas was born into. As a child, he was separated from his mother, which was a common practice for slaveowners to do in order to manipulate a slave through emotional isolation. Much of the practices that went along with slavery often aimed to keep the slaves low in spirits to actively repress any possible mutinies and rebellions amongst their workers. Both works echo the idea that the history behind English in conjunction with slavery is nothing but hardship and forced ideology that the white man’s forced words and culture were worth more than those of the slaves.

In Phillip’s “Discourse on the Logic of Language” the poem focuses mainly on communication and the lack thereof. The repetition that ends up transitioning to new words really emphasizes the continuous conflict between the different cultural languages. “…not a foreign lan lan lang language languish anguish a foreign anguish.” This part of the poem really stood out to me because it shows us the lack of knowledge the slaves had by using the phrase “foreign anguish”. This was a very troublesome transition for slaves because it was not what they were ever used to. There is an evident conflict between finding balance from her culture and the new culture she is experiencing, and for all slaves for that matter. His poem relates to Frederick Douglass in the sense that they are both slaves who had a different culture imposed on them. They were both forbidden to know the lives they came from. He was an oppressed slave who felt lost because ignorance was strongly used towards the slaves. With all this being said, knowledge freed Douglass from being lost in the mindset of being a slave.