Michael DeGennaro Unit 1 Summary
In this unit, we really were able to explore with the idea that art is a vehicle for expression that comes in limitless forms such as music, dance, doodling, drawing, painting and much more. It has a different connection with everyone.
Something that especially resonated with me was learning about Freire’s banking model of education. It is a concept in which the teacher is the active being and the students are passive “objects” in the classroom. The students are essentially sitting down and listening to a teacher making “deposits” of education into their head, which they memorize information, and repeat this process daily. Frier explains that this type of education allows for no intellectual growth in students, as they are simply intaking information that means nothing to them. It was interesting to conceptualize this experience, as in sophomore year of high school, my geometry teacher perfectly emblemized this model. We as the students sat down for an entire hour, No speaking, no questions, no interactions, listened to him talk about factoring polynomials , pack up, leave, and repeat this for an entire school year. We were overwhelmingly being fed geometric concepts. We didn’t make connections with the material being “collected.”
“Art is one’s own world of creativity”. From this basis, we were able to dive into the meaning of formal analysis, questioning and seeking answers to these visual and physical elements of a piece of artwork and determining the message that the artist is trying to convey. We were able to explore the different elements to look for in a formal analysis. Line including emphasis and contour, color including identifying different hues, space/mass including dimension, form (weight and volume), and scale in terms of relative size of objects are all elements that we as the viewers take into consideration. We got to explore these concepts by looking at ancient artwork in class, ranging from Mesopotamia to Egypt.
Shortly after learning about formal analysis, my family and I took a trip to the Brooklyn Museum, and I was able to practice my own formal analysis on Johnson, A Ride for Liberty — The Fugitive Slaves. The painting depicts a family of slaves on a horse, crossing battlefields from the Confederate South to the Union North in order to escape the treacherous conditions of life. The main focus of the painting is the horse, as it is placed in the middle of the work, and it is the largest piece in the work. The artist placed emphasis on it with his use of contrasting colors: dark colors in the horse against a light background. The artists light brush strokes on the horses tale, and its placement slightly above the ground, with legs in a galloping motion, indicates that it is running. The sheets on the horse are very silky and airy and the horse is very majestic and beautiful. This concept to me was interesting because it symbolizes something beautiful bringing peace and aid to a treacherous situation.
