Week 2 Reflections

I learned many news things these past two weeks, but the most important thing I learned was the definition of art. I loved the videos with the little clay characters. Art is anything someone puts together that one gets a reaction from the piece. Just like the picture Michelle put up with her parents, some people might just look at it as a normal picture, but to others a picture is worth 1000 words. I thought you needed to have prerequesites and what not for your piece to be considered art, but the last two weeks taught me differently. There are a couple things that I had trouble understanding and interpreting such as the art piece called Bushfire and Corroboree Dreaming by Erna Motna. This type of art, which is non-objective, is very hard for me to decipher, but hopefully as the weeks go on I will learn how to do that.

Getting Critical About Art

The Rocky Mountains Lander’s Peak by Albert Bierstadt appears to be a very original and vintage painting of how Native Americans used to live in this country before the Europeans took over their land and called it their own. It seems as if the Native Americans had their own tribes, or communities, and this tribe did not consist of more than 30 people. Each of the tribe members were very close and cared for one another and were more family members than friends. The jobs for the tribe members were probably the men would hunt and gather for food, while the women would stay in the teepee waiting for the men to come home to cook the food and the children would run around and play. They did not have to worry about half of the things modern day citizens worry about today. Such as their appearances, like their weight or the texture of their skin, or their hair because there was not a television for them to watch and tell them that how they looked was not good enough and needed to be changed. It seems as if living there was a paradise and everything was care free. These people were not worried about playing taxes by the end of the month for electricity or worried about playing their house bill on time because they were living a very simple lifestyle.
The subject matter of this painting is about nature. Everything in this painting seems very healthy and clean. It looks like a paradise with the blue skies and no pollution in the air so the Native Americans could breathe only pure oxygen. The snowcapped mountains would start to melt and the water would travel all the way down the mountain into the pool of water right next to the shore so the people would have fresh drinking water that is not contaminated with chemicals. The green grass and trees show that this place was untouched and no one tried cutting these trees down to build homes or buildings.
There are many questions that this painting asks, but the main question that it is asking, in my opinion is what happened to this simple, care-free lifestyle that has died very quickly within a century? How come we used to live a very simple and slow paced lifestyle with a lot of leisure time to a very fast paced lifestyle with no time to relax anymore? The message that this painting communicates to me is we need to take time and think that maybe the lifestyle we are living is not really the best way to live our lives. Before all this technology came about, family members would always be close together every day because they did not have a car or an airplane to drive or fly across the country, but these days we do and I believe that it is separating us from our family which is not healthy. Our family is the most important thing we have. Then the technology allows us to build tractors to cut down all those trees and build factories over this magnificent landscape and build factories that creates so much pollution and contaminates the air and the water so nothing is pure anymore. Nothing is the same as it used to be and it will never be like this again. So let us remember what we used to have before all this technology came about.

About Me

Hey everyone my name is Ryan Ferrer and I am 21 years old. This is my second year at Sierra College and I love it! In my spare time I love to hang out with my family and friends, and if I am not with them, I like to try and stay fit by going to the gym, playing sports, and basically just trying to stay active. I began appreciating art when I lived in San Francisco last year. I loved walking down Haight Street and seeing all the graffiti art work on the walls of stores. Now I am starting to like all types of art work, sculptures, paintings, etc. and cannot wait to learn more about all the different types of art work that I have not yet come across.