One cannot truly experience Impressionism without actually witnessing a painting from the movement in person. This became apparently clear to me after I visited the McNay Art Museum, located in San Antonio, Texas, and found myself before Claude Monet’s Water Lilies painted within 1916 and 1919. This grand piece is a prime example of the Impressionism period and allowed me to truly experience the movement and understand the techniques that comprised it.
I have been continuously stressed and constantly worked up all season worrying about my grades and attendance and all the difficult assignments I’ve been struggling to keep up with. It’s been really really rough…which is why I haven’t written a post all semester long.
Well, it’s over now…but it doesn’t quite feel like it.
I am so glad that it’s over. I can’t tell you how glad I am that its over, but for some reason it doesn’t feel like it.
I have stayed up so many nights, some in a row, and I feel so sleep deprived. This is finally my time to breathe a sigh of relief and take in the fact that I am done with everything, but for some reason I just can’t.
It’s probably because I am still really worried about my grades. This semester has been very challenging with my photography and printmaking classes. Both classes were not only very time-consuming, but were also very expensive, and very challenging in themselves. They also had very similar processes: both extremely repetition, as you make prints. I now know that I cannot stand making prints. I greatly dislike the process and having to repeat things over and over again to get the same result.
Anyways, those were the two hardest classes I had this semester paired with an art history, digital media, and an art theory class. Those other three were actually pretty easy, but the art theory class took a lot of outside class time and the digital media class was also pretty time-consuming. Since I love digital media and am very familiar with it, I enjoyed it, but I wanted to work on everything so much and make it perfect by really challenging myself rather than taking the easy route out, so that ended up taking a lot of my time, as well. Plus, there were just so many projects in that class…and in all of my other classes.
So I pretty much lived at the art building this semester. Night after night after night after night…I am so sick of the art building!
Yet, after all of the effort and work that I put in, I fear for my grades. I feel like this may be the first semester that I do not get all A’s and I will lose my 4.0 grade point average. I am very distraught about this, but I’ve really tried all I can do.
I’ve talked with my professors multiple times and have another appointment with one later today, so hopefully everything will turn out okay, but like I said, I’m really worried.
A man intrigued by the capture of time, Hiroshi Sugimoto is a well-known photographer constantly striving to freeze time within his photographs. Through his multiple series, Sugimoto takes several pictures within a common theme, exploring the use of shutter speed, focus, horizon line, perspective, contrast, and lighting in order to emphasis the passing of time or the contrast between life and death. He is most famous for his photos of empty movie theaters and drive-ins, lonely seascapes, posed museum dioramas, and life-like wax portraits and is well-known for using extremely long shutter speeds. Read more
Though many pieces of art today are meant for the enjoyment of others as they stand before the work and entertain their eyes, artworks from Ancient Times were often meant to involve the viewer as they enveloped him, astounded him, or even allowed him to become part of the artworks or the stories represented. When exploring the ancient artworks within the San Antonio Museum of Art, one piece playfully welcomes the viewer into Greek mythology as he stumbles upon the statue of a reclining woman. Placed upon a squat pedestal within the Ewing Halsell Wing, the Statue of the Sleeping Ariadne represents Greek myth as it imitates Greek sculpture through the work of a 2nd Century A.D. Roman. Though the artist who created the work may not be known, the myth that inspired the piece lives on.