In The Pursuit of Realism – Renaissance – Focus on the Pre – Raphaelite Brotherhood

A study in red chalk by Raphael for the Three Graces, 1518. picture from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Raffaello,_studio_per_le_tre_grazie_della_farnesina.jpg
This was not the PRB’s cup of tea at all.

This lecture began with the work of Renaissance artists such as Da Vinci, Raphael and Durer. But went on to go through many artistic movements bringing us up to Modernism. Which will be tackled in some form along with Post – Modernism in my next post. I decided to do a post on the Pre – Raphaelite Brotherhood, which was founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. There was four other members, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Fredric George Stephens and Thomas Woolner. But I am going to focus on Hunt, Rossetti and Millais. The Pre – Raphaelite Brotherhood or PRB’s work was viewed sometimes very harshly by critics (among them Charles Dickens) and the Royal Academy. The PRB rejected the work of Raphael and other Renaissance artists, hence the name, and sought as they put it in the manifesto to :

• “to have genuine ideas to express
• to study nature attentively, so as to know how to express them
• to sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parodying and learned by rote
• most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues “

Pre – Raphaelite Brotherhoods manifesto, 1848, from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Raphaelite_Brotherhood

The Scapegoat by William Holman Hunt 1856. picture from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:William_Holman_Hunt_-_The_Scapegoat.jpg

The themes that all the painters shared were nature, medieval tales and religion. Hunt painted many religious works, especially after his trip to the Holy land. It was this trip that inspired the painting of “The Scapegoat” in 1856. Prior to this Hunt’s work had been very occupied with nature but still inspired by classic tales and characters such as the fallen woman. He became famous for his religious works whereas his paintings such as “The Hireling Shepard” and “Awakening Conscience” were regarded as inelegant and unsightly.  A great attention to detail can be noted in both the work of Hunt and of Millais.

Ophelia by John Everett Millais 1852. picture from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_Everett_Millais_-_Ophelia_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

Nature was very important to the PRB and possibly one of the most lush examples of nature can be found in Millais’s “Ophelia” 1852, which depicted the suicide of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “Ophelia” is one of my favourite paintings, I think I saw it at a very young age and was captivated by the rich flora and the beauty of the model, Elizabeth Siddal, who modelled for the PRB and married Rossetti and was an artist herself. Millais was child prodigy and did gain the patronage of critic John Ruskin. Though this did not last due falling in love with Ruskins wife of five years Effie Ruskin whom was still a virgin. But that’s a story for another day.

Love, sexuality and symbolism was another key theme for PRB, especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I find Rossetti’s style quite different from the other members of the brotherhood, Millais in particular whose style is very classical. Rossetti style feels to me to be a precursor of sorts to Art Nouveau. I think its his reoccurring use of beautiful, goddess like women. Of which their were quite a few and many whom he had relationships with. There was Elizabeth Siddal whom he met in 1850 and married in 1860 but she died two years later from a laudanum overdose. Siddal was famous for her near death experience brought on by modelling for Millais’s “Ophelia”. Like most of Rossetti’s muses Siddal had brilliant copper hair and a pale complexion. Rossetti painted her as Beatrice from the story Dante and Beatrice.

Beata Beatrix by Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1867 – 1870. picture from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti_-_Beata_Beatrix,_1864-1870.jpg

http://fascinatinghistory.blogspot.co.uk/2006/01/dante-and-beatrice.html

Rossetti’s other models included Fanny Cornforth, Alexa Wilding, Marie Spartali Stillman, Annie Miller and Jane Morris. Jane Morris was the wife of William Morris the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement. The three were good friends but it could be described as something of a love triangle. Jane Morris shared the other models pale complexion but her hair was raven black. But like Siddal she was one of Rossetti’s great muses and beauties.

Proserpine by Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1874. picture from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti_-_Proserpine.JPG

The Pre – Raphaelite Brotherhood were controversial, disliked and avant – garde for their time in the rather stuffy Victorian London. Their lives and loves have been fictionalised many times. Their work was beautiful, naturalistic, religious and for the time just a little bit naughty. The PRB pursued their own kind of realism that was just a tad inventive at times.

References and Links to webpages that helped me write this post :

The Tate gallery. Pre – Raphaelites : Victorian Avant – garde. Available at : http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/pre-raphaelites-victorian-avant-garde

BBC news article on the selling of Rossetti’s Proserpine. Available at : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-25004793

MASTERS, T. Lizzie Siddal: Victorian model’s tragic story on stage. Available at :  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24803177

Desperate Romantics programme page. Available at : http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lvyq2

Wikipedia. The Pre – Raphaelite Brotherhood. Available at : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Raphaelite_Brotherhood

All of the above links were accessed on the 20.11.2013.

Printmaking – Mandorla

So I may have mentioned in one of my previous Kathe Kollwitz posts that I am starting my printmaking block in the studio. I’m doing lithography which I am really excited about as it is one of the mediums used by Kathe Kollwitz. The reason this is relevant to my lecture blog is that I was inspired by something I saw in my image lecture.
So we have to create imagery for our printing next week with a starting point of a random number, my number being 5. I googled the number five and began investigating many five related things. The one that connected to my lecture and that got me the most excited was the fact that members of the rosaceae family or the rose family all have five sepals and five petals (though cultivated roses can have many petals they retain their five sepals). The rose family is not just roses, it also includes apples, strawberries, plums and almonds. Now as I was investigating the shape of sepals and petals, I found myself at first thinking of Freud’s idea that eyes symbolises the vagina. The sepals have an oval shape thus this connection arose. But I was also reminded of another use of this oval shape from my image lecture two weeks ago. Where we were shown the art of the Dark ages. In many examples of Dark ages Christian imagery a form called a mandorla or a vesica piscis came up. A mandorla is a form of whole body halo or aureole in which Christ and the Virgin Mary are portrayed. The oval shape is created by the intersecting of two circles, symbolising among other things Heaven and Earth and it is often associated with rebirth, resurrection and the Ascension. Now the reason this fitted in so nicely with my floral, female idea was that mandorla is the Italian word for almond, the almond is part of the rose family. The almond has connotations of holding something precious making me think of wombs and the Virgin Mary. Further still the mandorla/ almond shape is viewed by many to be symbolic of the vulva and also a fertilised uterus. This goes back to the fruit and flowers which symbolise fertility and female reproductive organs. If found this whole research very exciting and interesting, mostly because everything seems to link in and reflect each other. Everything just fell into place. So far so good. I really enjoyed the lecture on medieval art as it is a very interesting and dynamic period in history.
I love the interconnecting symbols in religious and non – religious art. For example the mandorla not only exists in Christian art but also in Buddhist and Hindu art. Much like the mandala the mandorla could be argued as a universal spiritual symbol. The mandala is more common in eastern religions and in meditative practice. It is a joint symbol of the universe and the soul. But is also present in Christian imagery as the points of a cross can be smoothly joined by a circle. Which is the core of the mandala, which is a collection of concentric circles. I find it really interesting that simple shapes such as oval and circles have such a resonance with religion and spirituality. Even before I knew what I mandala was I was attracted to circular forms in art, as I found the shape and composition both calming and pleasing. This made sense when discovered mandalas and their significance. The image is a close up of one of my sketches for my printmaking project.
Here is a link to an interesting mandorla related post on the website the Theosophical: http://www.theosophical.org/publications/1348 accessed 23.10.2013.

Text: the Evolution of Written Language.

Yesterday, I posted a sign continuum, which leads into this next post all about text. A pictorial language like hieroglyphs is representative of certain things like a goat or a bit of grass but like in my continuum that I posted about yesterday this representative language transforms into a abstracted language that as to be learnt as it has no resemblance to what it really is. Hieroglyphs are  probably not the best example of a pictorial language as until the Rosetta stone was discovered nobody knew what they meant either.

Here is a wee link to the Arty Factory website : http://www.artyfactory.com/egyptian_art/egyptian_hieroglyphs/hieroglyphs.htm

Carrying on with hieroglyphs which in its day was a language of the elite and was generally unfit for general note taking as it was time consuming and complex. So Egyptian scribes created hieratic and then demotic which were further abstracted forms of hieroglyphs and themselves. Egypt needed these simpler, more abbreviated texts for trading and record keeping. Written text was needed by most settled human communities who traded. Through trade language spread and when the Greeks got a hold of demotic and other trade languages they created the first alphabet with phonetics. Which expanded further during the Roman empire. Examples of Roman typeface show spacing, layout, serifs and upper and lower case, this could be seen as one of the turning points for typography as an art form. Moving on from hand craved or written lettering which was inefficient and expensive came moveable printed text. The first example of this in the western world is the Gutenberg printing press which could make 240 impressions a day and was quicker and cleaner than the work of scriptoriums. However, this is not the first ever moveable text, the Tang dynasty in China in 868 AD had moveable wood block typing and even further back again to the Greeks and the Phaistos disc (1800 – 1600 BC) which despite being having disputed authenticity would be the earliest known example of moveable type. But back to Gutenberg and the age of enlightenment. Mass produced text is wonderful, books galore and in own modern age many other forms of mass communication. But have we become lazy, for example in this post spellcheck as told me my spelling is wrong several times and helped me fix it as well as auto correcting it, sometimes to the wrong thing. Walter J. Ong argues that text takes a living thought and objectifies it and at the same time makes us and text a little bit dumber. Which I can agree with as when I was watching Fry’s Planet Word he featured at tribe Asia which up until recently recorded all its history orally but with some recent generations being taught writing they found they could no longer remember as much as their forbearer’s had as they had become reliant on text. We probably are very reliant and trusting of text, probably because we are taught that it is important, it will help us and that it is part of life from an early age. Yet, it wasn’t always like that, we evolved and grew into it. When we first started using text it created a new kind of power, one that can be used wisely but also snobbishly.

Like uncle Ben said “With great power, comes great responsibility.”

Oh dear I just quoted Spiderman, I don’t even like Spiderman. I should probably stop now.

Also here is a link to the Fry’s Planet Word’s programme page : http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015h1xb

The picture is of the Norse Viking runic alphabet, which was briefly mentioned in the lecture. Some of the characters are similar to the lettering we use today.

All of the above links were accessed on the 19.10.2013.

Hand prints – its all about hands tonight

My first lecture of the semester showed us among other things cave art. Cave art is something I find really fascinating, especially the stencilled hand prints. There is something really powerful about them. they are a direct physical link to the past. The reason I’m talking about them today is that I read an interesting article on the National Geographic website, which I will link at the end, which concerned a recent study of cave art hand prints made by a archaeologist Dean Snow. Snow has examined and measured hand prints on cave walls from several different sites and concluded that contrary to belief, that three quarters of the hand prints belonged to women. Snow theory follows in the workings of John Manning, who worked out differences in hand and finger size between men and women. Now I’m kind of sceptical about this male/ female definite hand size difference. Manning worked on the difference between finger lengths whereas an evolutionary biologist by the name of R. Dale Guthrie performed a similar analysis but he measured the width of the palm from the thumb. He deduced that most the prehistoric hand prints belonged to teenage boys. But with all things prehistory we can only imagine their society and its structure, we will never really know. In my opinion the hand prints are like signatures. But why create artwork at all. Some believe that if the women created the artwork it would have a lot to do with the wellbeing of the group and to record events. However others believe that if it was teenage boys creating the cave art they would draw only what they liked, hulking animals and naked ladies, sex and violence in other words, which paints the adolescent male in very broad primitive strokes. Which links in to the outdated perception that cave art and sculpture, such as the Venus figures were prehistoric porn. This has pretty much been disproved as they were most likely fertility figures, made for good luck, protection, religion or spirituality. Most likely the handprints were made by men and women, it just so happens nobody’s said so before. I always assumed the hand prints were the artists (of both sex) making there mark or some sort of group ritual. In my mind cave art would have been a shared experience for an entire community.

National Geographic article: HUGHES, V. Were the first artists mostly women? Available at : http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131008-women-handprints-oldest-neolithic-cave-art/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_fb20131011news-caveart&utm_campaign=Content#close-modal

Also here is a link to a BBC clip of some very early cave art featuring handprints from the Altamira cave in Spain :http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18459492

All of the above links were accessed on the 13.10.2013.

I’d also like to say thank you to all the people who have liked, commented on and follow my blog. 🙂

More Pareidolia hunting.

A wee light switch face. can you see it? More to come.

Signs

At my last lecture we were asked to find a minimum of 10 signs and categorize them into icon, index or symbol. I have found 13 so far. 1 is no entry/ don’t do that sign off of the fire safety signs in my flat, I want to say its a mix of an index and an icon. Indexical, as we associate it with no entry but possibly iconic as its everywhere and is used on clothing sometimes. 2 is a wee sign off of my lunchbox which originally was a plastic takeaway tub. 2 I believe to be an index as its makes you think of food. 3 is the wee lion off of the egg boxes, he is an icon I think as he still has some resemblance to an actual lion but has nothing to do with eggs unless they are from Britain so that may actually make him a symbol but the lion is an icon image for Great Britain. 3’s a mish mash. 4 is one of the many signs next to the fire extinguisher, I thinks its an index as its fairly straightforward in what it shows. 5 is the running exit man from the cantina, he too is an index. 6 is the grill sign from the oven, now this could either be an index but it may also be a symbol as some ovens are different and you need to learn their signs. 7 is the whirlpool logo off of the fridge/freezer, I thinks its a symbol as its fairly abstracted and if you had never seen a whirlpool before you probably wouldn’t know what it was. It also as nothing to do with a fridge. 8 is a no bin sign off my laptop charger, its probably an index but could be a strange symbol if you didn’t know about batteries or laptops. 9 is a bin man sign from some food packaging, its an index, pretty straight forward, put your food waste in the bin. 10 is from the fire blanket in the kitchen, i’m not to sure of this one myself so to me its symbolic of something dangerous, but I think its an index about something to do with it being bad for your heart. 11 is the pregnant lady sign from the back of alcohol bottles and an index. Don’t drink and be pregnant at the same time, not good. 12 is the recycling triangle, an index to most but could be seen as symbol to those who don’t know about recycling or iconic as its kind of representative but kind of not but its used world wide. And finally number 13, the happy jumping person from a squash bottle, he’s fairly abstracted but still a recognisable human form, I think this little guys an icon. So there we go 13 signs categorized.

Continuum of signs

I have drawn my lovely continuum of a tree sign. Its not very complex. But hopefully you’ll get the gist. representational indexical tree image becomes iconic and then becomes an abstract symbol. Hope that makes sense.

Cognition

The second lecture of the semester was all to do with exploring cognition, which links in quite nicely  to cave paintings. Not only were we looking at cognition but also the study of semiotics. For example we were shown a series of works by Picasso exploring the form of a bull, in which he eventually narrowed down his perception of a bull to be a big body, small head and big balls, after this he then turned this simple form into his own signature. Telling us possibly that he himself is like a bull.  We were then shown an American Express ad campaign which used Pareidolia, which is when we see faces in other things like the surface of the moon, bath taps or clouds. This brings up the question of whether or not we as human beings are hardwired to recognise human faces. And I suppose in general we are from a young age bombarded by images of other faces and taught to recognise other people’s emotions from them. Of course in some cases the empathic quality is missing in individuals through circumstance. This ability to recognise faces probably dates back to before we had speech. However in this modern age where people are becoming more introverted by technology and constantly shown image or video of strong human emotion, are we now immune to its early empathic effects. Have we learnt to turn off to strong shows of emotion? That is a question for another day.

Signs are broken down into symbols, indexes and icons. A symbol is a sign that has lost most resemblance to what it means and they are often specific to a certain group of people. Which thinking back to one of my previous posts concerning cup and ring marks, and the possible existence of a prehistoric universal symbolic language. Would disprove this thought, meaning that a French prehistoric man would probably not be able to understand the cup and ring marks made by Scottish prehistoric man in Argyll. As they would be site specific to that culture. An index is a sign linked directly to what it is, like the stencilled hands in the Chauvet caves. They are human handprints depicting human hands or humans in general. An icon is something well known, and is representative of a resemblance, for example images of Marilyn Monroe are iconic. But some signs can be a mix of two of these categories and that’s when it gets a little bit tricky.

I shall move away from the sticky business of mixed up indexical symbolic signs and proceed into the fluidity of signs in the form a continuum.  It begins with a representational image such as a photograph or highly detailed drawing of say a tree, this image is simplified and simplified until it is the most basic image of a tree that a human being could recognise without having learnt some special knowledge. This recognisable image then becomes abstracted and is all to do with that individuals perception of what a tree is. For example it could be the Chinese character for a tree, a symbolic drawing of a tree or even a written description. Something that requires a separate knowledge. Hopefully in my next post I will upload I wee drawing of a continuum for you and some lovely categorized symbols. I have found a few so far and I may even search out some pareidolias. I better have my camera at the ready.

Here’s a link to a BBC article on Pareidolia : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22686500 (accessed 29.9.2013.)

The picture is a Pareidolia I found on a case.

rock art

Page 113 from Ronald W.B Morris’s “The Prehistoric Rock Art of Argyll” featuring the Ormaig Rosettes cup and ring marks. ( Dolphin press, 1977) sorry the picture is the wrong way round.

I’m writing this while I watch Stephen Fry’s : Fry’s Planet Word. I have also taken out many books on language and cave and rock art from the Library. During the lecture we were shown petroglyphs such as the Rinconada star being. I immediately thought of the rock art that I was surrounded by as a child, going to primary school in Kilmartin Glen in Argyll. I have very clear memories of climbing down into the empty underground burial cairns and tracing the craved stone circles on the cairn walls. These were no marks of mere vandalism made by the local children, they were ancient. To this day nobody really knows the real meaning or use of the cup and ring marks and other carves shapes on the cairn walls, standing stones and rock faces. One of the most beautiful examples of cup and ring marks and rosettes, are at a site called Ormaig. There are many theories as to what these cravings were used for. For a while they were believed to be sites used for sacrifice, but as no evidence of bones or other organic material has been found this theory has been abandoned. In the case of craved standing stones they are often thought to be related to sun worship or tracking to do with the solstices. On the other hand they could simply be way markers. However much evidence suggests that these sites such as Temple Wood, which is a burial site surrounded by a ring of smaller carved standing stones, would have a had a deeper spiritual meaning connected to the sun or moon. Cup and ring marks and other petroglyphs  exist all over the world. It is an interesting to wonder that if a prehistoric man from the same time frame as the making of the Kilmartin Glen rock art, but from a different part of the world came to Argyll. Would he be able to decipher the meaning of these petroglyphs. Would there have been a basic universal symbolic language. Could a prehistoric man from France read the signs craved on rocks by his fellow prehistoric man in Scotland? Are they a language or are they just prehistoric man’s doodles?

note: it appears the picture has righted itself 🙂 happy days

Links and References :

Here is a link to the Kilmartin House museum website: http://www.kilmartin.org/

Morris, R.W.B. (1977) The Prehistoric Rock Art of Argyll. Dolphin Press.

Fry’s Planet Word programme page : http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015h1xb

All of the above links were accessed on the 22.9.2013.

first ever blog post

so… blogging hmmm. This is a blog revolving around my communication design context lectures. It’s a project blog. So todays lecture was all about the Origins of Communication, the birth of symbolic language followed by a discussion. I found it really interesting, old pictographic codes and languages. At the beginning of the summer I went to London and went to the Ice Age Art: arrival of the modern mind exhibition at the British Museum. Cave art, like the drawings on the walls of the Chauvet caves in France is really just the beginning of prehistoric art. what really amazed me was a large boar sculpture, it was unusual in its size as most of the other 3D craved objected were small. Whereas this was almost life-size. We will never truly know what compelled early man to make these sculptures and painting. But there is something fascinating about, I especially like the stencilled handprints. they are so eerie and simplistic, a direct link to our ancestors. But are they the signature of those who created the paintings, some right of passage or prehistoric mans version of I was here. As this is a time before written word and in some cases before verbal language.

Even today the true purpose of cave art is unknown, what we know are just theories. Are they functional recording of real life events like a diary or are they symbolic representations of something deeper and less mundane. Or both. Right now my opinion is probably both.

well that’s my first blog post, I think I will go read some books and do some research.

The picture is a postcard I got from the British Museum and here are two links for the British Museum to do with the exhibition Ice age art: the arrival of the modern mind : http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/past_exhibitions/2013/ice_age_art.aspx and http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/past_exhibitions/2013/ice_age_art/about_the_exhibition.aspx

The culture show also did a lovely feature on the exhibition : http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qrmpz

Unfortunately the full episode is no longer available but there are still clips.

All of the above links were accessed on the 19.9.2013.