Creating Conceptual Art

Creating Conceptual Art

Creating Conceptual Art

Few artistic movements are surrounded by so much debate and controversy as conceptual art (Stanford.edu). The idea of taking another artists piece and after some rethinking and reengineering making it your own will tend to cause some controversy. In today's rap and hip hop genre there is a similar trend they call 'sampling.' The thought of this assignment is daunting, how does a non-artist that is not art savvy take an invitation to pick any piece of art from 1870 through 1930 and decide what would be a creative way to conceptualize it and ultimately make it one's own. There recently has been some body acceptance issues beginning to arise in the media, for example the story on the Today show recently featuring Amy Poehler (http://thelook.today.com/_news/2012/09/13/13844345-amy-poehler-tackles-the-tricky-issue-of-body-acceptance?lite) and at home with two teenage girls, one who thinks she is way too skinny and another who thinks she is way to plump.

The Original

The influence of new technologies on the visual arts is obvious to the untrained eye. Again coming from a novice it seems there has been a trend taking away from abstract and concentrating more on "in-fact." With the availability of digital cameras, an artist can snap a beautiful picture and have it on paper in a matter of seconds. Same goes for filming a deer running across a scenic meadow, what would have taken days or weeks before is now done in an instant and can be shared across continents within minutes. Vanessa Bell was born in Kensington on May 30, 1879 and after a hiatus from painting to raise her daughter. The painting "Nude c.1922-3" was an experiment by Bell in abstract and strayed away from her usual portraits of family and stills (tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bell-nude-n05077). The painting is 813 x 654mm oil on canvass. It is an abstract of a less than skinny professional nude female model sitting in a comfortable, fairly unflattering position on a chair. She is not particularly in any sort of suggestive or flamboyant pose but more of a subdued and reflecting one. Her gaze is downward towards the ground and her cheeks are red, suggesting maybe that she is embarrassed by the whole thing and is wondering if this was a good idea or not. The painting is warm and easy to look at with matching tones and neutral, for lack of a better term, coloring. In researching this painting there is not a clear and concise aesthetic movement represented. The painting is labeled as an experiment in abstract for Bell however when compared to the other abstract paintings this one seems on the mildest of the definition. This painting is believed to be done by Bell at the urging of a fellow painter and as practice more than to convey a particular message. The fact that Bell stepped out of her "comfort zone" and painted a model instead of her usual family and stills tells the viewer that she thought that this model was pretty and worth painting. This leads to where the second half of the report will take us.

Creating the Conceptual Art

In the fast moving world that exists today there seems to be an idea, especially with the younger generation of our society, that to be pretty one must also be thin. While searching the World Wide Web for a piece of art that stood out from all the rest from the time frame provided the Nude by Vanessa Bell c.1922-3 struck a chord. This particular painting struck the viewer with the beauty