Blog Post #19: Experience With Art Objects

I have always been a lover of all things relating to the arts and I have been exposed to many different art forms since I was very young. Aside from going shopping for decorative pictures and posters and paintings at the mall with my mom, my first real experiences with were in elementary school when we would take field trips to places like Morrill Hall and the Sheldon. I was always interested in what we were seeing and I always wanted to learn more about how individual pieces were created. Then when I got a little older I started going to various art museums with my aunt who is much more of an art enthusiast than my parents. Then, when I was a sophomore in high school I was privileged enough to get to go to London with my high school marching band. One of our many site seeing activities was to visit the National Gallery (pictured above). There I saw hundreds of amazing art works and original paintings like “Sunflowers,” by Vincent Van Gogh. That experience really opened my eyes to the vast range of art that existed and how fantastic and varying art can really be.

Despite all of my art experiences, I’m not sure that any of my encounters with art objects have necessarily prepared me to take on this assignment. Looking at and appreciating art is very different from having to rhetorically analyze it and really get to an understanding of what the picture is trying to communicate. While I have spent a great deal of time looking at art, I haven’t spent hardly any time at all looking at a specific piece and trying to understand it’s argument, which is really what we are trying to do with this assignment.

I think that my previous experience with art objects has given me an appreciation for art and an interest to learn more about it, but has not given me any real skills or tools to use in relation to this assignment. I think the fact that I like looking at art will make the assignment more interesting, but certainly not any easier.