What the hell makes me think I am an artist? – Art, artists and paintings, an article by Goff James

Posted on November 4, 2018 by Goff James

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”

James Baldwin

Working Title: African Art / Published Title: Women of African A

Image Credit

Image Source

https://www.departures.com/art-culture/women-african-artists

“…being different, going against the grain of society is the greatest thing in the world.”

Elijah Wood

Screen Shot 2018-11-04 at 11.25.50

Image Credit

Image Source

https://tjupiarts.com.au/artists/

“Art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness.”

Anni Albers

anni_albers_wall_hanging_1926_1

Image Credit

Image Source

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/anni-albers
Conceptualizing, visualizing, interpreting and creating through image making is primevally basic for art and the artistic process. Such images were created in the period before the invention of formal writing, and when human populations were migrating and expanding across the globe.

2013_2034.4260

Image Credit

Image Source

https://africanrockart.britishmuseum.org/introduction/chronologies/

The first human artistic representations, markings with ground red ochre, seem to have occurred about 100,000 B.C. in African Rock Art. This chronology may be more an artefact of the limitations of archaeological evidence than a true picture of when humans first used form to create art.

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.”

Emile Zola

Screen Shot 2018-11-04 at 10.30.48

Image Credit

Image Source

https://www.artsy.net/artwork/yayoi-kusama-i-want-to-sing-my-heart-out-in-praise-of-life-2

“I wanted to start a revolution, using art to build the sort of society I myself envisioned.”

Yayoi Kusama

Screen Shot 2018-11-04 at 11.58.05

Image Credit

Image Source

https://www.ancient.eu/image/2164/coatlicue/

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

Anais Nin

Look, look and look again… – Art, Artists and Paintings an article by Goff James

Posted on October 28, 2018 by Goff James

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.”

Joan Miro

Screen Shot 2018-10-28 at 09.53.58

Image Credit

Image Source

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/miro-women-and-bird-in-the-moonlight-n06007

“Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.”

Leonardo da Vinci

Automobile Leonardo da Vinci

Image Credit

Image Source

http://www.leonardo-da-vinci.net/automobile/

“I wanted to start a revolution, using art to build the sort of society I myself envisioned.”

Yayoi Kusama

yayoi kusama studio infinity mirrored room - filled with the brilliance of life 2011

Image Credit

Image Source

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/yayoi-kusama

Through analysis, comparison, symbolism and emphasizing of the visual elemental composition of form, art enables man to possess the essential mechanisms of perceiving, comprehending, understanding and interpreting. The relevant extracted data is then set out in terms of measured quantities and the found order is expressed in the individual’s analysis of the differing relationships of the inherent structures of that particular artistic form. Whether through communicating using semantic, syntactic or pragmatic processes.

“Humans see what they want to see.”

Rick Riordan

d7hftxdivxxvm.cloudfront

Image Credit

Image Source

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-8-female-surrealists-who-are-not-frida-kahlo

“All that can fall within the compass of human understanding, being either, first, the nature of things, as they are in themselves, their relations, and their manner of operation: or, secondly, that which man himself ought to do, as a rational and voluntary agent, for the attainment of any end, especially happiness: or, thirdly, the ways and means whereby the knowledge of both the one and the other of these is attained and communicated;…”

John Locke

Screen Shot 2018-10-28 at 10.32.27

Image Credit

Image Source

http://www.artnet.com/artists/julie-mehretu/untitled-2-EHXfwFxlbarZXN5h82YCDw2

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”

James Baldwin

Screen Shot 2018-10-28 at 10.43.02

Image Credit

Image Source

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/pollock-birth-t03979

“Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what [they] is.”

Jackson Pollock

Thank you for sharing your time with me.

Have a wonderful and peaceful day.

You are welcome to visit and join me by pressing the link below.

https://goffjamesart.wordpress.com

Art, Non-art or kitsch it’s a question of imagining possibilities. – Writing about Art, artists and paintings by Goff James

Posted on October 21, 2018 by Goff James

Winter Bears 1988 by Jeff Koons born 1955

Image Credit

Image Source

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/k/kitsch

“Everything you can imagine is real.”

Pablo Picasso

Screen Shot 2018-10-21 at 13.05.45

Image Credit

Source Credit

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/picasso-faun-revealing-a-sleeping-woman-jupiter-and-antiope-after-rembrandt-p11360

“Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.”

Magdalena Abakanowicz

Embryology 1978-80 by Magdalena Abakanowicz born 1930

Image Credit

Source Credit

https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/display/materials-and-objects/magdalena-abakanowicz

“The imagination is a powerful tool. An artist can use it to show others the world as [they see] it and to bring others into [their] dream of what the world could be.”

David R. Becker

Black-Daisy-1

Image Credit

Source Credit

http://davidbeckerart.com/

It is through the human brain’s capacity and ability to handle intricate processes of sorting, sifting and organizing visual stimuli that humankind is enabled to achieve insight into the ordered inter-relationships of our environment and consequently the manner in which we respond to the visual impulses received from without. It is this three fold process and inter-linking between the elements; interaction, interpretation and response that enables humans to attempt to discern and to make a statement about, the processes of the nature of things and their intense variations in all their passive and dynamic moods.

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will”

George Bernard Shaw

[The Perfect Wagnerite, words of the Serpent to Eve, 5:348])

“Go where the silence is and say something.”

Amy Goodman

Screen Shot 2018-10-21 at 13.28.58

Image Credit

Image Source

https://www.amygoodman.co.uk/Welded-Steel.html

“Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.”

William Blake

Screen Shot 2018-10-21 at 13.36.44

Image Credit

Source Credit

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/william-blake-39

IMGP5914a

Image Credit

Image Source

Museum Of Contemporary Art, Bangkok

Thank you for sharing your time with me.

Have a wonderful and peaceful day.

You are welcome to visit and join me by pressing the link below.

https://goffjamesart.wordpress.com

Are artists prisoners of their actions and beliefs? – Art, an article by Goff James

Posted on October 14, 2018 by Goff James

Goff James, Untitled, 2018

“An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success.”

Henri Matisse

The Snail 1953 by Henri Matisse 1869-1954

Image Credit

Image Source

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/henri-matisse-1593

“Art is standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world, and letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy.”

Albert Einstein

Working Title: African Art / Published Title: Women of African A

Image Credit

Image Source

https://www.departures.com/art-culture/women-african-artists

“My [paintings] have neither object nor space nor line nor anything – no forms. They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form.”

Agnes Martin

Humankind’s actions can be motivated by religion, politics or merely by the inner desire to create and serves mirror-like as a reflection of a particular moment in time. Whatever the particular individual circumstances are image making requires a personal, intellectual or emotional discourse between the instigator and his environment. Artists utilize particular techniques and methods, sometimes perfecting them or even inventing completely new ones, however without spiritual individuality, image making could not achieve anything other than just being non-art.

“Between the art and the artist there is no distance.”

Attributed to Rowan Gillespie

great-work-by-the-renown

Image Credit

Image Source

https://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g10536946-d14173696-i323544215-The_Blackrock_Dolmen_Sculpture-Blackrock_County_Dublin.html

kahlo-three_2576062c

Image Credit

Source Credit

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10087130/The-Indian-Frida-Kahlo.html

“Creativity gives hope that there can be a worthwhile idea.”

Edward de Bono

“I always wanted to have the courage to do totally crazy, impossible, and also wrong things.”

Isa Genzken

Thank you for sharing your time with me.

Have a wonderful and peaceful day.

You are welcome to visit and join me by pressing the link below.

https://goffjamesart.wordpress.com

How the hell does one represent an abstract concept… – Art, Artists and Paintings a review by Goff James

Posted on September 30, 2018 by Goff James

Goff James, Subconscious, 2018

“There is a powerful need for symbolism…”

Kenzo Tange

Screen Shot 2018-09-30 at 15.15.10

Image Credit

Image Source

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79855

Screen Shot 2018-09-30 at 15.28.42

Image Credit

Image Source

http://blog.artsome.co/bindu-in-contemporary-indian-art/

Concepts and the use of symbolism are a complex world wide phenomena.

Many put forward the definition that symbols can suggest;

“…ideas and emphasize the meaning behind the forms, lines, shapes, and colours…[used].”

https://www.theartstory.org/movement-symbolism.htm

That which in the Tate’s definition of terms as an;

“…imaginary dream worlds populated with mysterious figures from literature, the bible, and …mythology.[fired] by…psychological content, particularly erotic and mystical.”

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/symbolism

From a western perspective the word “symbol” itself derives from the Latin symbolum, a symbol of faith, and symbolus, a sign of recognition, in turn from classical Greek συμβόλον symbolon, an object cut in half constituting a sign of recognition when reassembled. The Asian Art Museum broadens this view by stating that;

“…an otherwise time-bound object…[can be transformed]…into one that symbolically creates eternal effects.”

http://www.asianart.org/regular/sacred-symbolism

Screen Shot 2018-09-30 at 15.42.27

Image Credit

Mariko Mori, “Compulsive Beauty” | © 360b / Alamy Stock Photo

Image Source

https://theculturetrip.com/asia/japan/articles/top-10-japanese-contemporary-artists-you-should-know/

“It is through symbols that… [humankind]…consciously or unconsciously live, work and… [have their]…being.”

Thomas Carlyle

roots

Image Credit

Image Source

https://www.fridakahlo.org/

“They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”

Frida Kahlo

Thank you for sharing your time with me.

Have a wonderful and peaceful day.

You are welcome to visit and join me by pressing the link below.

https://goffjamesart.wordpress.com

When does visual representation become more than a mere random process of mark making… – Art, Artists and Paintings a review by Goff James

Posted on September 23, 2018 by Goff James

Goff James, In The Beginning 1, 2018

“…photographs are a celebration of life, fun and the beautiful. They are a world that doesn’t exist. A fantasy. Freedom is real. There are no rules…”

Ryan McGinley

Screen Shot 2018-09-23 at 14.02.51

Image Credit

Image Source

/www.perrotin.com/artists/Ryan_Mcginley/158/dakota-hair/25500

Art in all its varied genres invites the onlooker to delve deeply within the image and in so doing;

“…create their own dimensions and find themselves in a special place that has been created.”

Andrew Rogers

Screen Shot 2018-09-23 at 14.14.19

Image Credit

Image Source

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/land-artist-andrew-rogers

Humankind appear neither content nor satisfied with visual representation being a mere symbol; the human intellectual process which involves perception and interpretation of an image is not content with simply symbolic strategies and requires more than a constructed isolated diagram of their interpretation of the mind’s image. Individuals, significantly at some point and somewhere early in the mists of prehistory discovered; whether by chance, by accident or deliberate intent to develop a means of marking witness to their existence and apparent values.

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”

Edgar Allan Poe

Screen Shot 2018-09-23 at 14.41.56

Image Credit

Image Source

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blake-oberon-titania-and-puck-with-fairies-dancing-n02686

As a filmmaker, I believe in trying to make movies that invite the audience to be part of the film; in other words, there are some films where I’m just a spectator and am simply observing from the front seat. What I try to do is draw the audience into the film and have them participate in what’s happening onscreen.

Peter Jackson

Screen Shot 2018-09-23 at 14.26.45

Image Credit

Image Source

www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/22/peter-jackson-lord-of-the-rings-director-first-world-war-film-schools-bbc

Thank you for sharing your time with me.

Have a wonderful and peaceful day.

You are welcome to visit and join me by pressing the link below.

https://goffjamesart.wordpress.com

What the hell is meant by inclusivity in an art historical world?

Posted on September 10, 2018 by Goff James

“Non-Western images are not well described in terms of art, and neither are medieval paintings that were made in the absence of humanist ideas of artistic value”.

James Elkins

Image Source

“A man doesn’t know what it’s like to be a woman; it’s that simple.”

Tracey Emin

Image Source

A comprehensive definition of art implies that artistic works have existed for almost as long as humankind from early pre-historic art to contemporary art. Art is a global phenomena and cannot just be restricted to the concept of modern western societies nor any innate patriarchal ideology .

Image Source

“We perceive our existence in space and time; we are here now and life is current but in this world where technology is constantly advancing, human nature is not. It is often the values of the past that are most relevant today.”

and …

“can be contemplated from two points of view- the mythological subject and that of the beautifully constructed …… form which requires a concentration of great ingenuity to bring into being a form from which springs new life. We are carried over great time and space from ancient cultures and civilizations. It is an exploration of meanings and powers from the past and their meaning for the future. From an artefact of an ancient culture that has meanings and powers from the past, through to the unspoilt vistas that has meaning for the future.”

Andrew Rogers

56-3663728-1433414702d4a333cfae93487baeea0623ac740783

Image Source

Thank you for sharing your time with me.

Have a wonderful and peaceful day.

You are welcome to visit and join me by pressing the link below.

https://goffjamesart.wordpress.com

Art and all that bullshit… – Art, Artists and Paintings a review by Goff James

Posted on September 5, 2018 by Goff James

Goff James, Victims, 2018

“The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.”

Jerzy Kosinski

©Jeff Frost, California On Fire, Detail – Video(2min.04sec.)2016, part of visual installation/Photography Exibition entitled Beyond the Air We Breath, MOCA Bangkok

“A picture is a poem without words”

Horace

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it”

Ansel Adams

When one thinks and speaks of Art, the first and broadest sense is the one that remains close to the older Latin word “tecnicus” meaning, which roughly translates to “skill”, “craft” or “technique”. Whereas the Greek word τέχνη “techně” is often mistranslated as “art,” but implies mastery of any sort of craft.

Consequently Art and Form can be viewed as a “holistic all embracing one” and the impact it might or might not have on the psyche of the instigator or the onlooker.

Mother and Child 1934 by Dame Barbara Hepworth 1903-1975

“Sculpture is not the mere cutting of the form of anything in stone; it is the cutting of the effect of it.”

John Ruskin

Mobile c.1932 by Alexander Calder 1898-1976

© Alexander Calder
Mobile c.1932, private collection, Image Source – www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/alexander-calder-848/who-is-alexander-calder

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”

Thomas Merton

Thank you for sharing your time with me.

Have a wonderful and peaceful day.

You are welcome to visit and join me by pressing the link below.

https://goffjamesart.wordpress.com

Artistic Representation – The processes of conceptualizing, visualizing, interpreting and creating…

Posted on July 29, 2018 by Goff James

Goff James, Untitled, 2013

“Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.”

Egon Schiele

Hand Print Painting, Leang Pettakere, C.35,000 BCE,

Image Credit – Unstated

Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caves_in_the_district_of_Maros

Link – Hand Print Painting

“Art, freedom and creativity will change society faster than politics.”

Victor Pinchuk

Conceptualizing, visualizing, interpreting and creating through image making is primevally basic for art and the artistic process. Such images were created in the period before the invention of formal writing, and when human populations were migrating and expanding across the globe. The first human artistic representations, markings with ground red ochre, seem to have occurred about 100,000 B.C. in African Rock Art. This chronology may be more an artefact of the limitations of archaeological evidence than a true picture of when humans first used form to create art.

Rock Art, Blombos Cave, South Africa, c.100,000-77,000 BCE

Image Credit – Unstated

Source – http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/africa/oldest_art/index.php

Link – Blombos Cave

“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.”

Henry Ward Beecher

Cueva de las Manos, Perito Moreno, Argentina, c.13,000–9,000 BCE

Image Credit – Unstated

Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting

Link – Cueva de las Manos

“Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.”

Jackson Pollock

Thank you for sharing your time with me.

Your comments with regard to this conversation would be most welcome.

Have a wonderful day.

You are welcome to visit and join me by pressing the link below.

https://goffjamesart.wordpress.com

Semantics, Syntax and Pragmatism – The processes of finding order…

Posted on July 22, 2018 by Goff James

Goff James, He, 2018

“Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.”

Willard Van Orman Quine

Barbara Kruger,
Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989

Source https://www.thebroad.org/art/barbara-kruger/untitled-your-body-battleground

“Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.”

Gordon W Allport

Thomas Hirschorn, Too Too – Much Much, 2010 (Installation – Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens)

Source https://www.artsy.net/artwork/thomas-hirschhorn-too-too-much-much

“A photograph shouldn’t be just a picture, it should be a philosophy.”

Amit Kalantri

John Baldessari, Two Whales (With People), 2010

Source https://paddle8.com/work/john-baldessari/24166-two-whales-with-people

Through analysis, comparison, symbolism and emphasizing of the visual elemental composition of art forms enables humans to possess the essential mechanisms of perceiving, comprehending, understanding and interpreting. The relevant extracted data is then set out in terms of measured quantities and the found order is expressed in the individual’s analysis of the differing relationships of the inherent structures of that particular form. Whether through communicating using semantic, syntactic or pragmatic processes.

“Humans see what they want to see.”

Rick Riordan

Marcel Duchamp
Fountain
1917, replica 1964

Source https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573

“All that can fall within the compass of human understanding, being either, first, the nature of things, as they are in themselves, their relations, and their manner of operation: or, secondly, that which man himself ought to do, as a rational and voluntary agent, for the attainment of any end, especially happiness: or, thirdly, the ways and means whereby the knowledge of both the one and the other of these is attained and communicated;…”

John Locke

Umberto Boccioni. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 (cast 1931)

Source https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81179

Further Reading

Semantics and Art

Pragmatism and Art

Thank you for sharing your time with me.

Your comments with regard to this conversation would be most welcome.

Have a wonderful day.

You are welcome to visit and join me by pressing the link below.

https://goffjamesart.wordpress.com

Art, Music, Photography, Poetry and Quotations

Artist by choice, photographer by default, poet by accident.

Tag Archives: Art History

What the hell makes me think I am an artist? – Art, artists and paintings, an article by Goff James

Look, look and look again… – Art, Artists and Paintings an article by Goff James

Art, Non-art or kitsch it’s a question of imagining possibilities. – Writing about Art, artists and paintings by Goff James

Are artists prisoners of their actions and beliefs? – Art, an article by Goff James

How the hell does one represent an abstract concept… – Art, Artists and Paintings a review by Goff James

When does visual representation become more than a mere random process of mark making… – Art, Artists and Paintings a review by Goff James

What the hell is meant by inclusivity in an art historical world?

Art and all that bullshit… – Art, Artists and Paintings a review by Goff James

Artistic Representation – The processes of conceptualizing, visualizing, interpreting and creating…

Semantics, Syntax and Pragmatism – The processes of finding order…