Process

Chuck Close
Self-Portrait, 2004-2005
Oil on canvas
102 x 86

a) Chuck Close is representing himself by using a grit pattern in which each square is filled with ring-shaped colors. This gives an organic sense to the image. The whole image seems like a blurry figure on a photograph that has been zoomed in. In creating this artwork, Close puts the grid on his photograph and on the canvas and copies cell by cell. Only seen from a distance, the relative accuracy of the image emerges. His representation of identity is processed mechanically and somewhat inhumanly. His face is emotionless. However, partly because of his unique color layout for each cell, the finished work has yet a sense of human quality, which makes this self-portrait interesting.




Leonardo da Vinci
Self-portrait
Red chalk, c 1512 to 1515

b) Leonardo da Vinci was the oldest of the three great artists (Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael) in the High Renaissance in Italy. He was also seen as quintessential Renaissance man. The drawings of this period show distinctive traits such as the balance, proportion, harmony, regularity that define classicism, greater fluidity of figures, and use of modeling and perspective devices. The self-portrait in red chalk by Leonard da Vinci exemplifies the High Renaissance in terms of realism and humanity, which artists were most concerned with at the time of the era. Now we have contemporary styles like Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop art whose main theme is not realism.




c) This example of a ‘Graphic’ art medium is a woodcut by Katsushika Hokusai. This image is the most well known piece from the woodblock print series, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. He also produced another landscape series called One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji and published fifteen-volume collection Hokusai Manga in 1814, which contained about 4,000 sketches. I believe this sketch is one of the important elements of art making; therefore, it can be one of the things that this medium relates to illustrator though many people may not need any sketches before they use illustrator. Ukiyo-e, “pictures of the floating world” often has a quality of linearity as this image does. Colors are applied later after curved or outlined with black, thick line. This medium could be translated with illustrator for those reasons. The most striking to me about this medium, looking at this work by Hokusai, is the vigorously depicted waves and the splashes, which seem to move lively in the pictorial space. The dramatic movement of the highest wave that is about to strike the boats conveys a sense of excitement and terror. In contrast, the Mount Fuji remotely sits in the slightly off centered pictorial space produces an air of tranquility, which is also