Week 4

Inspiration: All images by Melissa Rathbone

Work

Reading Response: Introduction to "Crafting an Artistic Self"

A lot of this article re-affirmed one of my longstanding issues with art, especially modern art, where the knowledge of the artist is almost an absolute necessity to understanding the piece.

Being a lover of music, I have certainly done my homework into the lives of my favorite singers/musicians, but have never had a CD that made absolutey no sense without some sort of background on the artist. That's why they form bands, to exploit a certain persona that they can change for other projects.

Same with writers. Background is nice, but not necessary. It seems to me that visual artists are like runners-up in the artistic race. They can't make something that explains itself without context, so they get a pat on the back and "well it's okay you're a visual artist."

What I did like was the notion that an understanding of personal motivations is necessary for an artist. I don't think that Stan Lee needs to explain what he "meant" when he wrote Spider Man. That work is self explanatory. But I think he did need to look inside himself to be able to say what Spider Man would do, and what sorts of situations would occur in that specific world. I'm much more interested in forming a character and saying, "Now how would they do this?" And that requires an intimate knowledge of how YOU as the creator would do that, and WHY you chose that to begin with, so you work can avoid the pitfall of redundancy or tritness that, say, a band's 5th album, can fall into.