Magritte and Second Quarter
Rene Magritte (1898-1967) was a famous Belgian painter in the Surrealist movement. You know these guys - they made dreamlike paintings in realistic ways, like the famous melting clocks by Salvador Dali. Magritte liked imagining in this dreamlike world, although he believed that dreams only serve to wake us up. He is often called the most simple as well as the most disturbing of all the Surrealists. And he's also my assigned artist for this quarter's Intro To Design class.
Magritte has incredible paintings that could/should be as famous as his contemporaries - a castle on a rock hovering over the ocean (Le chateau des Pyrenees), eerie pre-WW2 aircraft made out of everyday objects like windows and a coat hanger (The Black Flag), a man with a floating apple covering his face (The Great War), and a simple beach scene with candles acting like snakes (Le Meditation). But Magritte had his idiosyncrasies too. He worked on the dining room table and cleared his paintings for mealtimes. He hated to travel and only owned a car for five days. He lived in Paris for three years with the other major Surrealists, got into a fight, and came home to burn everything that reminded him of Paris - even his overcoat. In a popular photo, he's wearing a tuba on his head. Quite the tortured artist.
So what's a typical Magritte painting? He used everyday objects in unfamiliar ways, like turning table legs into trees or setting a tuba on fire. He played around with interiors and exteriors - sometimes he'd paint an artist easel into his work and you're not sure where reality ends and the painting begins. He liked juxtaposing weird things, like a train coming out of a fireplace or a reversed mermaid with a fish head and human legs. He often covered up key elements of a picture with something strange like an apple - how are we so sure there's really a face behind it? He actually didn't want his paintings to make sense, although many of the recurring images can be traced back to his childhood.
Intro To Design is shaping up to be my favorite class this quarter. Taught by Shawn Brasfield, each student picks an artist from a paper bag during the first class (everyone from Picasso to Basquait). We're working on creating logos, letterheads, business cards, envelopes, posters, and more based on our artist. Today I got to paint a self-portrait in the style of Magritte using oil-based paints on a canvas. Pretty amateurish, but the process was a lot of fun.
My other classes are going well too. Actually, I have a photography/writing class that has yet to meet because the instructor is off somewhere snowboarding. But Typography II is taught by a German guy with long hair and an earring named Holger - he's the man. For Color Communication, taught by Martha Gill, I went out and took pictures of two places: a local music store called Earthshaking Music and a cool new coffeehouse called the Bear Rock Cafe. We're now in the process of creating a color palette that represents our establishment, which we'll later use to create a promotional mailout or series of postcards. And an Adobe Illustrator class rounds out the schedule on Thursday nights, which means I have Fridays off. Which means I really need to go to the grocery store because I just made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich using Eggo waffles.
A full-blown review of Owsley's The Hard Way will be up next Monday.
Tuesday, January 13 at 9:41 PM
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