Guernica + Me
Pablo Picasso's piece Guernica was created in 1937, as a reaction to the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish civil war. Upon first viewing the piece it appears to be a greyscale painting, but when view with a more careful eye, grays become blue, and shed light onto the sadness Picasso felt about this tragedy. But the piece did more than shed light onto how Picasso felt about the war, it exposed the world to the war as the piece went on a brief tour to bring publicity and hopefully aid to the war. This piece grand scale also speaks to how heavily this war affected not only Picasso but the public of Spain. It also happens to be painted in oil paints, which wasn't unusual for the time period, but it speaks to the effort that Picasso went into painting this piece, as oil takes an extremely long time to dry and therefore is quite precarious to use.
The other assignment we were tasked with this week was creating a self-portrait.
Spring is coming. Self-Portrait, Viktor E. Popkov
Self Portrait with Small Monkey, Frida Khalo
Self Portrait, John Ruskin
The above are the inspirational photographs I found on Google Arts and Culture, however I didn't see a lot of representation of photographic self-portraits, and as a photographer I was disappointed by this. Because unknown to a lot of people photograph self portraits can be very moving. As the camera already offers realism, photographic self portraits usually speak to more of a conceptual value of who a person is and can most times not even feature the person in the photograph, or the feature slivers of a person depicting the parts of them they feel are the most crucial to their identity.
So for my self-portrait I focused on my eyes as my sight is my everything. It is the passion I have for photography, which led me to want to teach, and has changed how I saw the world and the diptych I've created represents the fear of losing that, and the reality that certain things are already (and will always be) lost to me.
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