Blog 7

Art is everywhere we look in our society. It ranges from downloading music to the great interest in arts and crafts and the increase in do-it-yourself projects with the downturn in the economy. There is so much to choose from when it comes to music, movies and books and the art in museums. Art can be a means or escape from every day burdens and the unpleasant things of life. It should be more than just amusing. It should engage and promote thoughtfulness and challenge people’s lives.

The creativity of art engages people. It helps focus community building on strengths and passions, rather than on deficits and negatives. In Raleigh, NC for example, a public art project highlights the work of local artists on the sides of Capital Area Transit (CAT) buses traveling through the city. One of the goals is to increase opportunities for Raleigh citizens to engage in the arts.

We shouldn’t get caught up in whatever powerful media corporations dish out and go with what’s popular at the moment. We do this by voting with what we will pay for and watch.

Take for example the new Pepsi logo that’s showing up all over; tops of taxis, subway stops, and billboards. Pepsi paid several million dollars for the design group behind it to write a 27 page document using comparisons with everything from the golden ratio, the Mona Lisa, the Parthenon, to the earth and its magnetic fields, and the solar system. So far, the reviews have not been favorable. It seems to be just a variation on the previous logo:

Blog 6

Poor Vision Leads to Great Art

While passing through the Lane Medical Library at Stanford, I noticed an exhibit on eye diseases and how it gave some of the great painters a different vision of their work. The exhibit is the work of Dr. Michael Marmor of the Dept. of Ophthalmology at Stanford. It features impressionist painters Degas (who had retinal disease) and Monet (who struggled with cataracts). The exhibit pointed out how dark and muddled later paintings of Monet’s famous lily pond reflect symptoms of cataracts. And Degas’ later paintings became so blurry it’s difficult to see the artist’s brushstrokes. Dr. Marmor notes that such artists as Monet, Degas, Rembrandt and Georgia O’Keefe all reached their heights of artistic vision as their ocular vision declined.

Rembrandt lacked stereoscopic vision. According to an article in Science news, an analysis of his self portraits reveals that his eyes tended to gaze away from each other and not focus on a single point. As a result, he lacked depth perception so this may have actually helped him render 3 dimensions onto flat surfaces. A person with normal vision is often instructed by the art teacher to close one eye in order to flatten what they see. You can see in his self protrait above how his right eye looks straight at the viewer, but the other eye looks off to the side.