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Example research essay topic: Difficult To Understand Piece Of Art - 2,391 words

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Spirituality in Art Art becomes a spiritual process depending upon the degree of commitment that you bring to it. Every experience becomes direct food for your art. Then your art teaches you about life. Nick Bantock People do hundreds and thousands of things every day: get up, get dressed, wash up, have breakfast, get on a bus to get to college, write abstracts and essays, communicate with other people and hardly ever realize that any item of their usual daily program can become an art if they put all their heart and soul into it, dedicate their minds and bodies to it, start loving what they do. What is human spirit? Spirit is something people feel with, something that provides all emotions.

It is to some extent similar to a human stomach: people perceive events that happen around or with them every day as well as take in food, after that soul absorbs and grasps them as well as human stomach digests food, and in a while the emotions or reactions to the accepted events come out: people cry, laugh, sympathize, get offended, downhearted, happy, sad, etc. That is why human soul can be referred to as a kind of a machine that processes events, produces experience and gives birth to associations. There are very few people who came to understand what meaning or function human soul has. Real artists manage to achieve mutual understanding with their soul, which constantly helps them to create masterpieces that are meant to express their inner world. The saying real artists means those who do not paint for the sake of receiving money for their work, but paint for the sake of painting.

That is when painters long to art for the sake of art. For real artists painting is a kind of relaxation or catharsis. In other words they splash out their feelings and emotions onto the canvas, making it their diary or spiritual father. Tung Chi-Chang considers that: To transmit the spirit, there must be form.

When the form, the mind and the hand are in total accord, each forgetting the other's separate existence, then the spirit will reside in your work. Spirituality is closely connected with the religious concept. Spirituality in art supposes taking the religious approach into consideration. Talking about spirituality from this point of view, it is first of all reasonable to mention Salvador Dali.

In his book Diary of a Genius the artist admits that he didnt believe in God at first, but his opinion changed one day. Throughout his life span Salvador Dali was a believer and everything that happened to him was related to Gods efforts. Many people consider him to be insane. Maybe they are right, but anyway his paintings are a reflection of his inside, he painted every single association that appeared in his head, every feeling and every dream or vision he had. Salvador Dali is a painter who cant be referred to as one who painted for the sake of money, although he earned his living with his art. Irrespectively of that, he painted sincerely, not just to create something difficult to understand, which people often like.

Of course, his paintings are hard to fully understand without reading about them or examining them carefully. Human feelings are always very complicated and tangled, its not an easy task to tell someone about them or to paint, sing or write them down. And its even more difficult to understand them. Salvador Dali was very good at expressing his feelings and thoughts. That is why his paintings were always gifts of destiny. For example, when Dali was in the process of painting his Ascension of Christ, he was presented a rhinoceros horn and decided to depict it on the canvas.

Occasionally, he discovered that everything in the picture consists of similar horns some of them are bigger than others, some smaller, but they compose everything he was trying to portray Christs hands, legs, trunk everything was made of rhinoceros horns, which compactly lie together making the basis for the entire world around him. After this he started examining the world around him and discovered the rhinoceros horns all around in the basket with fruit, in people, even in his own faeces. To make his paintings more vivid, Salvador Dali preferred to paint from life. There is a fish in one of his paintings, which was painted from life. Actually, the fish wasnt alive in a few days, so he painted a dead fish.

The fish started to rot and flies started swarming around it occasionally landing on Dali's naked body (he painted naked). The painter wasnt quite satisfied with painting from life using a body of a dead fish. In a while Dali discovered that he himself had become a fish. It happened in a very strange way. The reason is that Salvador Dali had a kind of a disease he salivated when he painted and slept and had small wounds in the corners of his mouth because of that.

Once when he was sitting in his workshop a small part of the wound flaked away and fell down on his knee. He looked at it and noticed that it looked very familiar like the scales on the fish. He closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them again he saw the flaked part multiplying and spreading all over his body. That was the very moment when he felt like he was a fish. He who cannot become the object cannot draw it. Leonardo Da Vinci once said.

Its the best quotation to describe this situation. The main feature of Dali's spirituality is the fact that he believed that God himself sent him messages in the form of visions and transformations to help him create his masterpieces. This is the reason for Dali's paintings to be so complete and perfect. Dali's vision about the real Ascension can serve as a perfect example of Gods will. In one of his strange dreams Dali saw the procedure of portraying the real Ascension. He decided that the best way to do it is as follows: take five sacks of chick-peas and put them all into one big sack, after that it is necessary to climb three meters above the ground and rain the peas down from there, projecting a picture of Virgin Mary onto it.

In addition, it is essential to photograph the procedure upside down so that it would look like as if the peas go up, each with a small part of the picture of Virgin Mary on it. One major item of Dali's spirituality is that he painted only what was pleasant for him to paint and he penetrated fully into the object of his portrayal, which produced a perfect result. When Salvador Dali depicted Hitler he confessed, that it was a real pleasure for him to paint his back. Dali said, he felt the softness and tenderness his back had. Real spirituality means penetrating into what one is painting. Real spirituality is the highest peak of art.

This penetration led to a series of paintings dedicated to Hitler: "The Enigma of Hitler" and "Hitler Masturbating. " Dreams are pictures and children of our soul. Salvador Dali was a soulful painter. His eyes saw the world around, his soul interpreted it and his hands put it onto the canvas. Art almost never appeals neither to peoples eyes, nor to their hands, although it is created by the combination of both. Art appeals to human soul, thats why certain pictures arise certain emotions, make people think about them.

Wassily Kandinsky admitted: The harmony of the new art demands a more subtle construction, something that appeals less to the eye and more to the soul. This 'concealed construction' may arise from an apparently fortuitous selection of forms on the canvas. Their external lack of cohesion is their internal harmony. Their fundamental relationship will finally be able to be expressed in mathematical form, but in terms irregular rather than regular. Many critiques (Kandinsky, Rosenblum) are convinced that if a piece of art does not appeal to ones soul it does not deserve to be referred to as art. This is because people can never understand art; they are not able to understand why this or that painting comes up to their liking.

Its just the voice of the soul that sings in unison with the soul of the creator of the masterpiece. And that is a sacred thing. Artists, who manage to find common language with human soul, deserve to be worshipped. One more painter is worth mentioning - Barnett Newman. His striped paintings are considered some of the best done in the United States done in the last fifteen years.

One of his most famous pictures is Shining Forth (To George), which was shown in New York this year. The picture is very large: it's nine and a half feet high and fourteen and a half long. As the majority of his pictures, it is striped. All of the stripes run to the upper and lower edges. But the stripes are not all the same. There is a black stripe an inch wide less than a foot in from the left edge.

This one hasn't been painted directly and evenly like the central stripe, but has been laid in between two stripes of masking tape. In a foot from the right edge there is another stripe an inch wide, but this is one of reserved canvas, made by scraping black paint across a strip of masking tape and then removing it. The three stripes are fairly sharp but none are perfectly even and straight. This painting is an answer to the depression to which the painter was sent by the death of his brother George, who suddenly died. The name of the picture Shining Forth comes from his brothers Hebrew name, which was Zerah, which means to shine. The spirituality of this painting is rather vivid the painter experienced a deep stress and decided to depict it in his work.

The stripes on the canvas reflect the events that took place in Newman's soul as well. Generally, the world is a geometric system. Everything can be expressed by the means of geometric figures. Its easy to notice that people express many things they experience by with the help of geometric concepts. Lets take just a few examples: they say Ill be there on the dot or a square peg in the round hole, a square meal, and a square deal, eternal triangle, love triangle, dot the is, etc. To say nothing about the world around, even peoples appearance consists of figures.

Its the same about their clothes: people wear cone hats, jewellery around their necks, triangle- or round-toed shoes, read rectangle or square books, and do plant their houseplants in round, square or rectangular pots. Geometry itself played a great part in Barnett Newman's creative activity. He sometimes used triangular canvases, particularly in his works Chartres and Jericho (1969). In fact, it is difficult for many to understand the triangular shape of these works in any other sense except the shaped canvas of post-Stella and Noland popularity. What distinguishes Newman's triangular paintings from his others is primarily the obvious excitement of non-perpendicular, non-parallel relations between internal, verticals and external shape.

The triangle, a more fixed geometric gestalt than the rectangle, is broken with more punch. That Newman's interest in using a triangular canvas was related to his work on Broken Obelisk is not irrelevant. Shape is a kind of an indicator, which helps people to understand the state of soul, the feelings of the person, who created this or that piece of art. From this point of view art is similar to psychology, which also uses the geometrical approach.

People, who come to a psychologist or psychiatrist for treatment, are often asked to draw something on a blank paper and the doctor diagnoses the state of their consciousness by what they draw. Each figure has its own meaning. Thats why Newman's choice of rectangular, square or triangle canvas is not accidental. These figures, as well as the colors he uses and what he depicts help to imagine a more or less legible picture of his soul and feeling or intentions at the moment of painting. This is a way of expressing the painters soul and of course it is an integral part of expression of spirituality in art. In his Chartres and Jericho Barnett Newman writes: I knew that if I conformed to the triangle I would end up with either a graphic design or an ornamental image.

I had to transform the shape into a new kind of totality. His painting Shimmer Bright uses a perfect white square. Barnett Newman's vision of the world is a striped canvas. Indeed, many people think that life is a zebra: black stripes take turns with the white ones, forming their fortunes and misfortunes. Barnett Newman went even further than that; he crushed the world into pieces of many colors, trying to say that the stripes of destiny can be not only black and white. It is like the transition from black-and-white TV sets to the color ones, similar to the change from silent movies to the sound ones.

It is common knowledge that each color has its own meaning: blue means a dream, red means anger, green means life His paintings are a kind of an autobiography that enlightens the coziest corners of Newman's consciousness. His art is all about coloring his own life like a coloring book. One more important thing about Newman's paintings is their size. His paintings are usually large. It is a symbol of endlessness. Newman shows that sometimes it is difficult to draw a distinctive line between this and that.

Sometimes this line is almost invisible. Newman's endless pictures still have borders. Everything has its beginning and its end. Endlessness might be endless in reality. The fact that people are not able to find its end or verge does not mean that the end does not exist.

The ending endlessness of Newman's pictures is a personification of human life, which is to come to an end some day, though seems endless throughout our life span. Newman's confrontation with death is clearly seen in his 1958 paintings like Outcry. Barnett Newman is a...


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Research essay sample on Difficult To Understand Piece Of Art

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