Artist of the Week Suggestions

Hello All,

Thanks for a great class today!

There seemed to be a lot of questions about where to find artwork whose primary subject is line.

I've compiled a list of ideas below to help you on your search. Remember, you need to post at least one image, well cited, along with a paragraph outlining both your reaction to the piece and a brief formal analysis. You should then check back to the cite regularly and comment at least three times on other student's images. Contact me with any questions. Good luck!

List of possible sources:

-go to the library or any bookstore and look up general art history survey books; flip through the images and see if anything jumps out at you

-visit a gallery in town

-visit the Met or MOMA, if you're in the city

-visit the Dorsky Museum on campus

-use any of the artists listed in the power point presentation I gave this morning

-use an artist listed in the syllabus (even artists listed under different assignments not having to do with line may have work relating to line)

-visit the websites of major museums and scour their databases. You could try the Metropolitan Museum of Art http://www.metmuseum.org/, The Louvre http://www.louvre.fr, the Whitney http://www.whitney.org/, the Boston Museum of Fine Art www.mfa.org, The Art Institute of Chicago www.artic.edu, and hundreds of other museums around the country

-if you find an artist you like, check to see if they have a website, many contemporary artists have galleries online showcasing their work (for example-- you may see on a gallery or museum's website that they're hosting a certain artist's retrospective, but they have no images. in that case, do some digging and try to find the artist elsewhere)

-try ArtStor, an online database of artwork at www.artstor.org, accessible through any SUNY connected computer. You'll be asked to create a username and password, then you'll be able to search their image database that is art-only

When you're writing a short formal analysis of your image, consider the qualities of line we talked about in class. Are the lines in your image:

-Calligraphic

-Gestural

-Contour

-Hatched

-Implied

What is the emotive quality of the lines? How is this affected by the material used to create them (ie. charcoal, ink, graphite, etc).

What is the line weight and does it vary? How does this imply emotion or affect an illusion of space?

Are the lines geometric or organic? Are they stable and balanced or erratic and energetic? Are they diagonal, horizontal, or vertical, and what does this say about their expressive quality?

Hope this helps! Have fun! I'll keep an eye on the blog and post comments as you add content.