Poe @xgloomy-nights - Tumblr Blog

my blue and yellow

everything i wanted to be in the cup in my hand, i find it in the cup that sits on the table in front of me. staning the papers that were laid out beneath it. i look hopefully inside the cup in my hand. it is the most favourite utensil of mine. its handle is broken and it has cracks at the edge of its mouth. still i do not seem to care and hold it layering both of my hands clenched to that cup. even though it sometimes leaves stains on the collar of my shirt due to its uneven cracks. it sometimes also burns out my hand due to the hot coffee in it. it doesn’t have a handle, remember? that cup is still so dear to me. it is blue in colour. i look at the cup that sits on the table desperately wishing to be picked by me. it is yellow. i feel bad for that cup for it has all the things that my blue cup lacks. it is new with soft edges and a very fine handle. i eye the insides of my blue cup and it suddenly shatters in my hand leaving me bruised. blood slides down from my fingers and i can taste the feeling of abandonment. again. my blue abandoned me yet again. i cry and fill up yellow with my tears. it stays calm and collects everything without complaints. i don’t pick yellow up. i am scared of abandonments. i ask yellow how long will it stay? how long will it wait? “you know waiting is so beautiful if it ends with you” yellow has this carved besides its handle. and i tear up again. i look forward to the day i can pick up yellow without any hesitation. when i can fill it up with my favourite desserts. i really hope blue is at peace though. i miss blue. it is still my favourite cup.

absolutely-rad-boy-number-one

What is Aesthetics? A Study of the New Art Movement that Art History is Looking Over

It started on tumblr [citation needed], we've all seen the "a e s t h e t i c" tags and all the blogs dedicated to the many many different types of aesthetics. I have spent the better part of 4 years collecting, studying, and categorizing theses aesthetics. I do have a formal education in art and architecture so I sort of know what I'm talking about. I'd like to share with you what I've found. I've also made a chart (link) of my findings. This chart is very rough and not meant to be taken as fact. It is how I've categorized almost 700 different aesthetics but that is not even close to how many there are. I do plan on expanding it more. If I get some attention, maybe I'll make more posts that dive deeper into defining this new art movement.

In short, today's use of the word "Aesthetic" is a noun that refers to a title/word given to a specific atmosphere, emotion, feeling, or vibe that a collection of images evokes when viewed together. A comparable approximation would be a "mood board".

Anything can belong to a particular Aesthetic; an art piece, a song, an entire show, an outfit, etc. In my opinion however, its very rare that a singular work can express an entire aesthetic. As stated, an aesthetic is a very specific emotion. Thus, in most cases, a singular work (work here referring to any form of expression) is likely to be interpreted in a multitude of different ways. The only exception to this is if a particular aesthetic is based on a very specific motif found in a particular work that is unique to only that work and from there new pieces can be made that also carry that motif or relate to the original work that the aesthetic was built upon. This will be discussed later. Not every genre of art can express an aesthetic, for example, some aesthetics may not translate very well to fashion, imagery, music, etc. That is to say that it may not be possible to express the emotion evoked by the aesthetic through other mediums other than the original medium the aesthetic was created in.

In summary, an aesthetic is a collection of images that evokes a specific emotion. Most often, this emotion is evoked through the combination of particular motifs found in each work that contribute to an overall "vibe" or atmosphere. These motifs can then be used to create new original works that belong to this aesthetic.

There are a multitude of categories of Aesthetics that I have identified and some of them may seemingly contradict this definition. We will discuss these later. There is also much overlap between specific aesthetics, it is extremely common to find that an art piece may belong to multiple different aesthetics.

This is a very brief definition of the movement. But to fully grasp the depths of this new art movement, we will need to discuss a lot of art history and definitions.

smii-doodles

Isn’t it funny how you can probably tell a lot about what an artist looks like based on features they subconsciously add to their work?

Like how artists with thin hair probably don’t draw many characters with thick hair bcos they’re mentally referencing themselves for what a hairstyle would look like. Or artists with a very unique nose shape will draw characters with that nose shape a lot cos it’s just a normal nose shape when they have it. Or how artists with moles or freckles probably add those features more often than artists without. Artists who wear glasses probably draw specifically the glasses style that they wear more than any other because it’s the easiest to get reference for

…And you can also generally tell what an artist DOESNT look like by features that look awkward in their pieces. Like when a characters hair looks like a solid piece rather than looking like there’s a head under there bcos that artist so clearly didn’t get a reference for what that hairstyle might look like irl. If a chubby character looks really unnatural it’s probably bcos the artist isn’t chubby and hasn’t done their homework. If a character has facial hair and it just looks bad then they probably don’t have facial hair because otherwise they’d probably have more experience drawing it.

It really makes me think a lot about subconscious biases I might have in my art without realising and abt how we accidentally create representation of ourselves in our character art when we don’t see our features represented by media.

djvpensayosehistorias

On Art History

Art history is the knowledge and study of art. To interpret and analyze art, its characteristics, its reason of being, its function, it has to be placed in a context, and it is the context of its production that informs about its value as human activity. To do history about art is to relate it to the culture that produced it, to learn about its geography, to place it in the chronology of its evolution. Art history, then, follows a methodology that aspires to be as scientific as possible, and so it adapts to evidence, emerging technologies and evolving sensibilities. Kleiner outlines several criteria used by art historians, such as age, style, subject matter, authorship, and patronage, to learn about an art object or an artwork’s history, about what it represents about its culture and human history at large.

Art is an activity best defined by its function: it communicates, it expresses a message. To somewhat narrow it down, art pertains to culture, which is largely understood as all human activity. Before what anthropology considers civilization, there were examples of people creating iconography, communicating a message that might have had some relevance, some practical function, as it is speculated. Art too can be created for mere pleasure, as the manifestation of personal will, of identity. Whether art is an individual or a group benefit, it is not an either/or question. Art is a social activity. It can take the form of small objects or large buildings, it can be manifested in many aspects of society. As it is a social activity, it has value: material monetary value and intangible cultural value.

Art is in dialogue with other disciplines of knowledge. When doing art history, it is important to determine when an artwork can serve as an historical object - because it is part of an antique infrastructure or it depicts a historical event - and when it serves a communicational purpose that is not historically accurate. It can represent ideas - or ideals, more precisely - just as it can represent observable reality. Emmanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware conveys not a historical occurrence, but an idea about a historical figure. This same dynamic applies, more clearly, in representations of mythology and religious texts, which are taken as different from historical facts, yet they serve an ideological purpose, and they can inform much of a society’s history.

Art history is a discipline that intertwines the often literary and subjective world of art and the scientific exercise of history. The purpose of art history is, as it is of any research, to better understand humanity using the totality of the past, the cumulative corpus of creative activity. It examines perspectives, ideologies, temporalities, norms, hierarchies, and therefore it is a valuable branch of the social sciences.

Reference

Gardner, H., Kleiner, F. S. (2017). Gardner's Art Through the Ages: A Concise Global History. United States: Cengage Learning.

the-happy-princes-sketchbook

Football Field Confessional

Ekphrastic poem

Did Jesus love his father

when he woke up with scars on his palms

and blood in his eyes?

Did instinct tell him to be good,

even when his body bore

the holes of human hate?

Sitting on the bleachers, cheap

liquor hot in the pit of my stomach,

I can’t find him to ask.

I don’t feel so good, I want to tell him.

You’re supposed to make sure I’m not alone.

The rage in me is ancient, Roman;

the same kind that killed Jesus.

I want all the men who punch holes in walls

and put their hands on little girls

to die slowly and painfully.

I want the boy who fucked me

into a dirty yellow mattress to come

back home so I can tell him

I never loved him.

I want his brother to come back

so I won’t have to see the half-mast flag

on his mother’s rotting porch.

I want to find the edge of the world

in California, where I know there is love

and so many other bright, wonderful things.

altrbody

Abstraction:

"Abstraction is flying. Abstracting is ascending to higher and higher levels of conceptual generalization; soaring back and forth, reflectively circling around above the specificity and immediacy of things and events in space and time, from a perspective that embeds them in a conceptual framework of increasing breadth and depth, a framework without horizon, ceil-ing, or basement; a framework composed of increasingly comprehensive concepts that generalize over increasingly comprehensive classes of things, organize them relative to one another, unify them into a coherent tapestry, a dizzying object of contemplation the details of which stun one into panic by their connectedness, significance, and vividness.

Abstraction is also flight. It is freedom from the immediate spatiotemporal constraints of the moment; freedom to plan the future, recall the past, comprehend the present from a reflective perspective that incorporates all three; freedom from the immediate boundaries of concrete subjectivity, freedom to imagine the possible and transport oneself into it; freedom to survey the real as a resource for embodying the possible; freedom to detach the realized object from oneself more and more fully as a self-contained entity, fully determined by its contextual properties and relations, and consider it from afar, as new grist for the mill of the possible. Abstraction is freedom from the socially prescribed and consensually accepted; freedom to violate in imagination the constraints of public practice, to play with conventions, or to indulge them. Abstraction is a solitary journey through the conceptual uni-verse, with no anchors, no cues, no signposts, no maps, no foundations to cling to. Abstraction makes one love material objects all the more."

--Adrian Piper

From Adrian Piper: Reflections 1967-1987, Alternative Museum, New York City April 18-May 30, 1987.

#art

mr-orion

Idk who needs to hear it but if you have Aphantasia you can absolutely do character art. Don't let it discourage you. Especially since a good portion of art advice won't fit you and will leave you feeling like its your fault.

I have Aphantasia, its super hard to put characters in poses from my mind. I cannot draw cartoons or exaggeration well, its very hard because I do not see the drawing until it is on the page. I use so many construction lines and blocks of color and always need a reference to base my character poses on. I cannot imagine things artistically before they're on the page and it is super frustrating.

You can still do it with Aphantasia though, it just takes practice. So many of your sketches without references are going to look awful despite you knowing the proper proportions of the human body, it doesn't mean you don't know what you're doing.

It just means you need to give yourself extra help. You're not lesser or bad for not being able to draw on a whim or not having these intricate details. Trust me, I've struggled with thinking that.

The best thing you can do to work with it is collect so many references, use a pose software (like magic poser), and absolutely screenshot and collect art that has a creative element you struggle with. (For me its color, backgrounds, and splash text.) Also, maybe practice abstract art. You have a brain unhindered by a visual expectation, I recommend it. For me I like to do surrealist/abstract pictures of water and space. It takes technical skill but everyday is a good day to start practicing.

Having Aphantasia is a neutral thing. It's not bad or good, it's just there. That bad part is not acknowledging that you work differently so you need to adapt differently.

#art

eu0n1a

character building questions (pt2)

Does your character have an ego? Write a short scene in which their ego is at its peak-halfway through, their ego take a battering and see how it manifests itself in their behaviors.

Write a short scene in which your character allows their anger to get the better of them. Does it erupt onto someone else, or is it internalized?

Write a short story about the stupidest thing your character has ever done. Were they honest afterwards? Did they make it into a joke and take ownership of their blunder, or did they retell their story in a way that made them out to be a hero?

Write a short story about your character in which they interact with the symbol of their star sign - i.e. if they are a Sagittarius, they interact with the archer, or are the archer themselves.

Write a short story about your character's spirit animal.

Write a short story about the hardest thing they have ever done.

What are three positive personality traits your character has? List them, then write a short story where all three appear

Write your character's bucketlist. Pick one item from the list and write a short story or scene in which they complete or fail to complete it.

Describe a garment your character has bought but has never had the courage to wear. Write about the event that they want to wear it.

What does an average day look like for your character? Write a scene in which you disrupt this day and take your character on a journey = (i.e. introduce and inciting incident)?

#aesthetic #art

smoothlysassysavagery

Open Wound

Open wounds. What are open wounds? A taunt not forgotten. A joke that hit a little too close to home.

Anxiety. An open wound to live with, your entire life. You might get used to it gradually, but it's always present at the back of your mind

Burning like embers after a bonfire, and if added a little more wood, it would burn a little too brightly, a little too painfully.

And the smoke makes it a little harder to breathe, the initial smoke that is. Later on, you would need oxygen masks for it.

And when your chest tightens a bit too much, when the wound is poked a bit deeper, and you really cannot breathe. It gets harder and harder, more difficult, like an out-of-body experience.

You watch and watch, helpless to do anything because what can you do? how could you stop it? how could you hope for it to stop, when it hasn't for years.

But then it does. Slowly, steadily, like a train coming to a stop. And then it's gone and there's relief. Relief as it's gone and relief that I don't have to feel like that anymore.

Until you do. Until you do again the next time ⁓SS

#artists on tumblr #art

blackhole-ntp

The problem with "I could do [X popular modern art piece]" being responded to with "then go ahead and do it!" is that I think the point that a lot of people are making is not so much "this artwork has no value" but rather "modern popular art is a heavily gatekept industry that you cannot enter into without requisite pre-existing social cachet".

So even if someone is technically/artistically able to create something on the level of a gallery piece (and, to be honest, I think substantially more people have that ability than anyone would be likely to admit) they do not exist in an environment where they have the financial freedom or recognition for that to be possible or worthwhile.

I assure you that there are millions of people who absolutely could and would want to make Pollock style abstract paintings or giant time-consuming sculptures made with garbage or whatever, but they're currently stuck in a low wage job and if they quit in order to make their masterpiece then nobody would bat an eye and they would go broke because they wouldn't have the sociocultural weight to impart that special numinous reverence that "high art" is granted, and which makes it financially viable as a thing to spend your time doing.

It is also true that a lot of people who have that cachet are able to spend their time making pretty much whatever, and will still be able to support themselves even if the art itself is fairly mediocre outside of the time dedicated to its creation.

Anyway, I feel that people are perfectly valid in feeling a sense of vague resentment at that when they visit galleries holding paint/canvas combinations that sell for more than they will earn in several years. I mean it speaks to what society is implying about their worth as a person. I don't think that it's as much about arrogance and entitlement as people like to pretend, because a lot of that comes from buying into the mystique of the Worthy Artist anyway.