Art & Visual Cultures

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Comment by Matt Finch on October 1, 2015 at 10:52am

Hi all, just to say the State Library of Queensland in Australia has just launched a free online comic maker which I've blogged about here at MCPOP - http://mcpopmb.ning.com/profiles/blogs/fun-palaces-free-online-comi...

It's a nice way of getting students to make sequential art without panicking about the quality of their drawing. A quick and easy digital activity which focusses on
visual storytelling. Well worth checking out!

Comment by Ryan Goble on January 2, 2013 at 11:08am

Hi Amber - glad you dug  10 year old British schoolboy hailed as 'next Picasso' if you have not had a chance you should "view all" in the discussion forum above and see if you can find any other "treasures" - or at least cool ideas:) Happy New Year!

Comment by Amber Miller on January 1, 2013 at 7:50pm

@RyanGoble,  Thanks for posting the BBC link about the 10 year old boy who embodies a Picasso like style!  I think it would be inspiring to show this video to my middle school students.  Keep those up and coming kid artist videos streaming!!!  THANKS

Comment by Margie Arnett on January 20, 2012 at 12:35pm

I'm looking for some articles on visual learners - simple studies.  Any ideas?

Comment by Ryan Goble on July 30, 2010 at 10:33pm

Ugghh, this video is not embeddable - 10 year old British schoolboy hailed as 'next Picasso' - really stunning art!

Comment by Ryan Goble on July 30, 2010 at 8:14pm

Mike this is great - why don't you give it a catchy title and move it up (maybe add a cool Dali image) above to the "discussion forum" that way the writing won't get buried down here. It will also have a URL so I can share it as a blog on a Monday!

Thanks for all your great writing!

Ry:)

Comment by Mike Gange on July 30, 2010 at 11:00am

By Mike Gange

I have always been fascinated by the work of Salvador Dali. One of Dali’s biggest and in my mind, one of the most memorable paintings hangs in The Beaverbrook Art Gallery near my home. “Santiago El Grande” is a striking image, and I could spend hours just sitting in front of it, interpreting some aspect I had not seen previously. I remember reading about Dali when I was in high school, and being fascinated by his bohemian lifestyle and surreal view of the world.

Given my interest in Dali, then, I made it a priority to visit the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla. This is the largest collection of Dali’s work outside of Spain, and it is certainly impressive for several reasons.

First of all, the collection here is huge. I lost track of the number of rooms that each housed twenty or thirty works of art. Secondly, the media Dali uses is also diverse, including oil on canvas, glass, wood, cork, cloth, and various collages. And the various sizes of Dali’s work are also impressive, some are huge, some are fairly small, comparatively speaking.

“The Persistence of Memory” is on display in this exhibit, on loan from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, often called the MoMa. Although I had seen reprints of it, I had never seen the original. It is one of the smaller works, measuring only about 10 inches by 16 inches. I was surprised at its power and its size. In case you don’t recall the title, this is the painting with the melting watches, which I think has been reprinted into art books and history texts alike. Seeing this diminutive painting and its well known image, I was reminded of seeing the “Mona Lisa” in Paris, a long time ago. It, too, is much smaller than its reputation.

Dali uses light and shadow in interesting ways in a lot of his work. And he often uses stairs, which Elizabeth, the tour guide of this museum, said was a Freudian interpretation for sexual imagery. Not all of the paintings were as surrealistic as “The Persistence of Memory.” There were several portraits of well known figures, such as Jack Warner, of Warner Brothers, and Lawrence Olivier, and they too have their characteristic Dali interpretation.

Something I did not know was that Dali always wanted to get his work – or at least his written work – into a film. He met with Harpo Marx frequently in the late 1930’s, trying to get the Marx Brothers, people he admired very much, to create a surreal film using his script. Part of his work did make it into film; not surprisingly it was in a film by Hitchcock that Dali found acceptance, albeit for a mere three minutes. In the 1948 film “Spellbound” Dali was asked to create the dream sequence that is related by Gregory Peck to Ingrid Bergman. The scene is on display at this museum, played over and over on a huge canvas. It is clearly Dali-esque.

One of the biggest paintings on display here is “The Hallucinogenic Toreador” which Dali painted over a two year period, and was completed in 1970. It has so many double images embedded in it that it takes a long while to see all that was put there to be interpreted. A lengthy viewing brings a shifting of images of Venus into a Toreador, with a skirt becoming a cape in one instance and another skirt becoming a green tie with a white shirt in instance. In my mediocre prose, I hardly do the work justice.

Dali’s vision of the world could only be said to be ahead of his time. He loved to play with technology in his artwork, and one of his works shows a telephone with a camera for an eye, peering at a passerby.

Several black & white photographs of Dali by Andy Warhol are also included in this display. After I left the display, I got to wondering if Dali and Marshal McLuhan had ever met — after all they were contemporaries — and what they would have said to each other. I think they both understood that the medium is the message.

Comment by Ryan Goble on June 27, 2010 at 10:09pm

Hey Katherine, I'm pretty overwhelmed by maintaining this site and the day jobs at the moment, but I'd be happy to do anything I can to support your work through MC POP! Thank you for sharing your work, I look forward to hearing more about it as it develops. I love interdisciplinary approaches to art and art history!

Comment by Katherine Bolman on June 27, 2010 at 9:48pm

I spend a lot of time with the Met and I used to teach there when I lived in NYC.
The Museum Box is new to me. I will work with it a bit now.
Thank you and might you want to be on my team?

Comment by Ryan Goble on June 27, 2010 at 9:41pm

Also, have you seen the Met Museum's interactive Timeline of art?
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/

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