Fade to Black Video Response

Fade to Black is a stop motion video that was created by, Amer Al Barzawi. This short film focuses on a Syrian woman who grew up happily in Syria but later shows how drastically her life changes for the worse. In the beginning of the video, the woman is wearing brightly coloured clothes and looks joyful. Behind her is a background of a bright blue sky, sun, clouds and birds.There is also happy music and birds chirping being played. Everything seems to be going great until suddenly it starts thundering and dark clouds appear. Quickly, the sun and birds disappear and the background turns completely black. The video goes from being bright and happy, to dark and depressing. 

At one point in the video, there is a clip showing the woman being yelled at by a man, and what appears to be broken pieces leaving her. I believe this is a symbol showing that this woman's dreams, hopes, and freedom are now being taken away from her; leaving her to be controlled by the man. Later, another mean looking man puts a niqab on her, which she's struggling to get out of, and tries reaching out for help, but no one is there for her. She is now forced to obey their rules. The happy woman at the beginning of the video is now a terrified and helpless woman with no individuality or identity. Unfortunately, there's not much we can do except welcome the Syrian refugees to our country, and send out help. It's truly sad.

Paris Attack Artwork

Mrs. Rose assigned us a task asking us to find artworks responding to the Paris attacks that happened on the evening of November 13th, 2015, killing at least 128 people. I was extremely shocked to hear about this tragedy as I am sure many people around the world were too. Immediately, people started using hashtags such as #PrayForParis #PortOuverte and #jesuisParis to show their support for Paris. Social media outlets such as Facebook created a filter of the Paris flag to put over your profile picture and Tumblr changed their icon to show sympathy for Paris. Also, major cities such as Toronto, New York, London, Washington, etc. lit up their famous tourist attractions with the colours, blue, white & red to show their respect for the lives lost that night.

This made me wonder why this type of reaction didn't occur when the same thing happened a couple of days before in Lebanon when there was two suicide bombings in the capital, Beirut, or anywhere in the Middle East for that matter. The media was not nearly as responsive to these attacks as it was to those in France.

So I chose this art piece as a response to the crisis. 

Jerameel Lu is a very talented pencil artist & posted this image to show his disapproval of the media's response to the tragic attacks in Paris. He wrote on his Facebook page, "this piece is only against the almost unequal treatment of the world media on every terrorism attack." The world media only focussed on the attacks in Paris when the same thing happens in the Middle East on a daily & there's no filter on Facebook to show support, or no alternation on the Spotify front page or special hashtags used. Where's the international outrage? When it happens in those countries it’s a page 8 news in a C list newspaper, when it happens in Western countries it’s front page for years and years to come, and there are anniversaries for it. It just doesn't seem right to me.

#prayfortheworld

You are a book

Our first project this semester was to create a book that represents you. At first I was going to create a book that showed all my interests, favourite songs, quotes & movies, but I thought this idea was too plain, so I talked to my art teacher and we discussed some possible ideas of what a book can really be. After we talked about it, I decided to go with making a sketch book and sketch different drawings of the different times in my life. Since I'm not exactly comfortable with sharing my personal life with other people, I thought I would make the sketches symbolic to represent each part of my life. To help me with deciding what to sketch, I kept thinking "if I needed to get a tattoo to symbolize each time period, what would that tattoo be?" So this made me really think hard and decide what I should draw. 

Here are my sketches:

 

Series Idea

My idea for this project is to get three canvases and paint one picture using all three canvas.

My inspiration for this project came from a picture I found on Google that I thought looked super neat!

Here's the picture:

I am thinking of painting a sunset for the background and blending it into each canvas. I'm still deciding on which colors to use for the sunset, but this will help me with my blending technique. Once i have my background done, I think i'm going to paint a silhouette of some sort in the foreground. 

Salvadore Dali Response

When I watched this video, I was really confused as to why Salvador Dali would say such a thing, because he is an amazing painter. I think what Salvador Dali really meant when he said this was that intelligent people go too into depth when seeing or thinking about something. Therefore, they have too much going on in their mind and are not able to produce a beautiful piece of artwork because they overthink it. And someone who is a bit "stupid" is able to create a great piece of artwork because they don't think about it. It comes mainly from their imagination.

Salvador Dali, is an incredible painter. He should give himself more credit, and use a better choice of words when explaining why he's a good painter.

JR Art Analysis

When I typed "JR art" into Google images, this picture immediately caught my eye. There are so many different displays of women's eyes/facial expressions. This project by JR is called "Women Are Heroes", and celebrates the heroism of women living through hardship. JR's intentions for this project was to focus on the crucial roles that women endure in societies, and who find themselves victims of street crime, wartime, sexual assault, and religious and political injustice. This project takes place in Brazil, India, Africa, and Cambodia.

"I was interested in women because I realized in the projects I'd done before – most of the time in the kind of places I was going to – it was men on the street, but it's actually the women who are the ones holding the community together." - JR

What I really like about this artwork is how each woman shows a different expression and their eyes tell a different story. You can tell many things through a person's eyes whether it be happiness, sadness, or anger. The women in the photographs all show these various emotions, and have encountered many personal burdens.

JR's artworks always send a powerful message.

Here are more pictures from this project:

Lucas Blalock Analysis

In class, Mrs. Rose showed us a video about an "artist" named, Lucas Blalock. She also asked us write down what we thought about his art work on a sticky note.

Here's what I wrote:

I think Lucas Blalock's artwork is quite strange, I honestly don't think his art should be considered valid artwork. Basically, all Lucas does is use basic Photoshop tools, such as the eraser tool, brush tool, and clone stamp to modify pictures and calls it "art". I personally think that his pictures don't look very nice, Lucas just takes random objects out of his pictures, and adds lines and scribbles. Anyone can take a picture and scribble on it and call it art.