The Eavesdropper

This painting was done by Nicolas Maes (1634-1693), this work falls in the category of 17th century Dutch genre painting. The website The History of The Netherlands wrote, "He was among the first Dutch genre painters to depict the domestic interior not as a shallow, three-walled box but as suite of rooms". At first glance, you can't help but look at the maid starring right at you, but once your eyes leave her, you get this curiousity of what is happening in the rest of the rooms. Upstair you have people preparing to have a social gathering or meal. The two rooms on both sides only allows you to see just enough inside to keep you curious and your eyes moving to the other rooms. All these rooms makes you feel like your in a maze. Regardless of the many rooms, the black and red colors on the people's clothes keeps you focused on the what's going on inside. Maes not only keeps your attention in the house, but he also has you looking outside at the big white house, which gives you an idea how big the house is you're actually in.

Other Dutch genre painters like Pieter de Hooch's Easy Come, Easy Go (top) and Jan Steen's Company Making Music (bottom) also start to move out of the three-walled box to other rooms.

The name of Maes' painting is called The Eavesdropper. At least once in your life, you will definitely find yourself in the position of this maid. The maid comes down the stairs hearing the secret meeting between this couple in the hallway. Her shocked stare and cheesy smile allows the viewer to become part of her secret. The gathering upstairs has an empty chair next to a women who is probably waiting for her husband who is downstairs in this fling. The maid's finger up to her mouth is obvious that she is telling you to be quiet, but one interpretation explained it this way, that her finger is also pointing above her head to the bust of the Roman goddess Juno, who is known as the protector of women and childbirth, which suggest that the adultery is continuing. In my opinion, whether the woman is pregnant or not is hard to tell after knowing about Jan Van Eyck's Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife, which keeps you in the verisimilitude realm concerning her pregnancy.

There is more interesting things to draw out of this painting, but hopefully I have whetted you interest in Nicolas Maes' genre paintings.
Ruben Cimental

Jean Leon Gerome

These paintings are by Jean Leon Gerome (1824-1904), who was a French painter and sculptor. When I saw these paintings on the internet they caught my attention. During my art history class I saw many paintings of naked women, but these paintings have the sculptor kissing his work and getting a kiss in return, now that's loving your work. This had me searching for more answers about this artwork.

Gerome took this subject from Ovid's Metamorphosis Chapter 10 under the heading "The Story of Pygmalion and the Statue". You can read the story here. This Greek and Roman myth has many versions of the story that have come through the centuries, but the main point is that the sculptor Pygmalion falls in love with his own creation and the Goddess Venus hears his request of wanting a women like his work. Venus answers his request and this resulted in Galatea coming to life and a child being born. Read the above link to get the full force and details of the story.

I was also blown away to find that there was a 1948 film called the "Touch of Vensus" that followed this same subject of Pygmalion kissing his creation. Here is a short clip of that kiss to a statue.

Jean Leon Gerome wasn't the only artist and sculptor who did a piece on "The Story of Pygmalion and the Statue". If you took Art 5 these two names would be familiar, Honore Daumier and Francisco de Goya.

Daumier, who falls in the camp of Realism with his Third-Class Carriage, which portrays the working class in public transportation, also did this piece above. Definitely not your idealized couple, but it's a caricature of the story. The first thought that came into my mind when I saw this was two poor people that belong together. The bottom half of the sculpture doesn't show an idealized form, it shows a women with a big stomach and not the legs you would see in Gerome's painting. This drives home the idea my grandma used to tell me "tell me who you're with and I will tell you who you" including your dream girl. This is the working class at their best.

This piece above is by Francisco de Goya. Goya held no punches back, he has the sculptor's legs wide open to drive the hammer to the woman's privates. The woman has that expression on her face that reads "oh no!" When I saw this work of Goya it didn't really shock me because Professor Machado had shown us a book by Goya of his Los Caprichos, which is totally different and creepier than anything I have seen. Instead of the sculptor giving his creation a kiss, he is going to bring her to life with a scream! Sort of his MO.

There are more paintings, sculptures, drawings of "The Story of Pygmalions and the Statue" than I realized. In my opinion, I really like Gerome's painting better than all the others I have seen on the internet.

These couple of weeks I have off before going back to school is sweet, I get to read and check out stuff I usually don't have time for during the semester.
Back to my reading of Karl Marx by Isaiah Berlin.

Ruben Cimental

Steve Martin on Stephen Colbert

In case you missed it last week, here is the complete, unedited segment of Frank Stella, Shepard Fairey and Andres Serrano "adding value" to Stephen's portrait for Steve Martin. (13:19)

Chicano Art

Professor Machado's lecture on Chicano Art was interesting and it brought back memories of the artwork in my neighborhood where I grew up. This Chicano Art mural is painted on the side of a handball court that faces the street. This handball court is right in the middle of the park and has been there for a long time, approximately 40 years, according to my dad.

This art mural was important to guys and girls in our neighborhood. Although there were a lot of gangs in our small neighborhood, there was a respect considering the mural. NO gang would write their name or their club's name on that side of the wall. This is interesting because none of my friends or I had ever taken an art class but we realized that this mural identified who we were. As I look back this "wall" was more than just a mural to look at. In the 1980's there were benches in front of the mural, it was a place where you hung out with your friends, girlfriend, fight, party, eat, take pictures, and exercise (play handball).

A few years back the City of Colton wanted to remodel the park and put 3 baseball fields and other stuff for kids to play on, which was going to require removing the handball court. This decision by the city brought many of the old timers and friends of mine to go to the City Council and fight to keep the handball court. Victory to my neighborhood! The City had to work around the handball court. Actually the dirt in front of the mural is now part of the "New Baseball Field".

Finishing up this art history class with Professor Machado has brought an appreciation and an awareness of how important art has played in my life. This past Sunday my son took a picture of me in front of the Chicano Mural.

Ruben Cimental

MOCA Commissions Mural, Then Paints Over It

This just happened yesterday. I'm assuming the museum had a clear and strong contract with the artist that gave the institution complete discretion over the mural, otherwise this could be problematic. Read the complete article here.

It seemed a novel idea: In advance of its recently announced April 2011 show on street art, the Museum of Contemporary Art offered one of its walls to a prominent street artist.

The artist, an Italian who goes by the name Blu, finished the work. This morning, the museum painted over it.

The paint was hardly dry on the mural, which covered the entire north-facing wall of MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary with depictions of wooden caskets draped in dollar bills, when the museum literally whitewashed the piece.

ARTicles, Issue 5

ARTicles, Issue 5, is now available. Find your copy at the Center for the Arts and the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art or view it online at http://www.chaffeyarticles.com/ (links for all issues are at upper-right corner of page).

Issue 5 includes a review of Oklahoma! by Michelle Mora; two articles by Sheila Taylor on Leslie Dick's performance of Boundary Lines and the exhibition What My Family Looks Like at the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art; and an article by Jules Ebe on the recent More Than Four Walls event. Photographs by Andrew Portillo and Graphic Design by Daniel Carlos.

ARTicles is a student-driven publication of the Chaffey College Center for the Arts. It is published twice each semester by a consortium of students with a passion for arts, entertainment and culture. The content reflects a diverse sample of the cultural life at the college. ARTicles is generously supported by the Chaffey College Marketing Department.

It Takes One Block to Build a Great Wall

Artists of today’s time surely have gone a long way from the Renaissance Era. As contemporary artists have long ago ran out of art conventions to attack, one might ask: As we conclude 2010, what has been this decade’s defining style? To be frank I cannot really tell and I am not in the position to tell or even utter a guess what is the defining style for this passing period, and I am certainly not within the caliber of Clement Greenberg and Giorgio Vasari to give art critiques. Also, it may just be too early to tell. In today’s globalized world, it may even be harder to give a critique as to what has been the defining style in the last 20 years because we now live in a pluralistic society where ideas converge and are easily shared with the vast array of technologies available and being developed. However, a close examination of some of the recent artworks may help us define this period’s style, or if not us the future art critics.

Unlike painters 600 years ago who are mostly limited to brushes, a canvas, and an easel to make their oeuvres, the artists of today have a lot of mediums to put their creativity upon. In addition, contemporary artists are not restricted to follow art standards that give them more flexibility in manipulating their art piece. One such artist is Malyn Bonayog from the Philippines.

A fine arts graduate from the University of the Philippines, Malyn Bonayog is one of the many artists who experiment with new ideas and methods in painting. She has won many awards in the many art shows she has joined.

One of her works entitled Time Warp was shown in Art Gallery Manila and because of its uniqueness, it has garnered much attention and praise.

This work is an extraordinary “combination of photography and painting, the two media in an active mutual symbiosis.” The is the exceptional difference of Bonayog’s work among the traditional and even the paintings we see today - She uses photographs as part of her painting (in this case the background) and altered it with paint.

“The basic scene is a photographic rendering of old Intramuros, shown in perspectival view, with buildings on both sides with their particular architectural features and old automobiles parked along both sides of the road but seeming to meet at a distant point. The image, however, challenges the traditional optical view because it is divided into sections, each with its distinct pattern of fine colored lines, straight or wavy, but always equidistant like fingerprint patterns. According to the artist, these separate sections may represent different time zones in the history of the place. The wavy lines necessarily bring in movements and directions that increase the potential of the image. Completing the urban scene on another layer are people that appear to belong to different places and different time zones which indicate gaps and dislocations in the historical narrative despite the dynamic linear movements. The human figures themselves are of different ethnic characteristics. At the center, a city denizen in modern clothes seems to walk into a lumad from a different habitat. Even the two women walking on the left possess a faint anachronistic quality. However, the artistic device combines the synchronic of the same vertical time and the diachronic of horizontal movement in one cohesive and complex image. - (businessmirror.com.ph)”

Her works are often characterized as having wavy or straight adjacent lines like those found in a cage or jails as if to symbolize that these images “are trapped vestiges in their iconic representation of the past. (galerieanna.com)” Examples can be seen below:

An example of an artist who experiments on the uses of contemporary materials, Malyn Bonayog may not be the only one who has such an artistic mind. There may be hundreds or even thousands of them scattered in the world. Furthermore, with the entire world getting increasingly connected to the internet, it gets easier for works such as Bonayog’s to be seen in the different continents, influencing those who get the chance to view it, spreading and revolutionizing this idea in a new level. Looking at Bonayog’s work alone is of course not enough to characterize this decade’s or the last 20 years’ defining style, but it sure is a contribution to the art critics of the future that will define this decade’s art scene.

Paolo Daren M. Baluyot

Arts 5 Tuesday- Thursday

References: Quotes were from these websites.

http://businessmirror.com.ph/home/life/4620-space-and-time-in-the-latest-art

http://www.galerieanna.com/artists/bonayog.htm

Other posts by Paolo Baluyot:

http://tesserae.blogspot.com/2010/11/jackson-pollock.html

http://tesserae.blogspot.com/2010/10/spanish-heritage-in-philippines_24.html