Introduction
My name is Rusty Gray and I am a returning student seeking a bachelor's degree in Homeland Security and Emergency Management. Ultimately my goal is to find employment that allows me to help people and experience a variety of places and cultures. I have been married for a little over 20 wonderful years and have 3 children. They are all older now; one is out of the house, another is in college in the United Kingdom, and another is in high school. I have had many different career paths over the years, but I am currently coming off over a decade in operations for a Fortune 500 health insurance company. It is as exciting as it sounds.
The Old Guitarist, 1903 by Pablo Picasso, Pablo Picasso: 150 Famous Paintings, Bio & Quotes by Picasso. Available at: www.PabloPicasso.org (Accessed: 18 May 2024).
I used to paint in oils and sketch on occasion when I was younger. One of the struggles I had was duplicating the human form on canvas; mainly hands & feet, and the face. This led to a misguided appreciation for Pablo Picasso's work. His most popular works rather famously distorted these realistic details. Many decades later, I still hold an appreciation for the artist's work for very different reasons. The ability to capture emotion visually was most evident in his work during his Blue Period. This image captures perfectly the feeling I had working in insurance. While I don't paint or sketch much anymore, I do thoroughly enjoy viewing art. My wife and I try to visit a museum or art exhibit wherever we happen to be visiting. Most recently, we visited the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, CT and have plans to visit the Art Institute of Chicago in the next few weeks.
The museum in CT was a surprisingly robust collection of art.
ReplyDeleteI love the Art Institute of Chicago. Unfortunately, free Thursdays are now only available to Illinois residents and they have narrowed the list of cooperating Universities that allow free or reduced rates. Still worth the admission price. I love the John Singer-Sargent works they have there.
ReplyDeletePicasso's Blue Period is interesting to me. These pieces seem to have more and more depth the more I look at them (I checked out your link to see more). I haven't tried this, but I would expect it to be very difficult to use mostly one color in a work. It is a clever way to set the mood of an image or painting.
ReplyDeleteI too struggled when it came to the fine details of the human form while sketching. I would often scrap my work because I did not like how it looked. As someone who strives for perfection in artwork, it bothered me. That was a very long time ago. Now I appreciate whatever work I can make. Keeping a sketchbook and going over how I have improved over the years gives me great satisfaction.
ReplyDeleteI have never been able to get into Picasso. What I do appreciate about his work is his use of color. In this piece I think that the color choice evokes sadness as well as the form and facial expression of the subject confirms that. It looks like he is near a window or something. Perhaps the side of the road. I can't really tell exactly because Picasso really could have just picked some shapes. I had problems with hands and faces too. But what I found was the issue was scale. As a child while I was learning to draw with graphite I was often constrained to the 8.5 by 11 inch paper that was readily available to me. So that meant to get a person in the frame the way I wanted that meant I was working on a really tiny figure compared to my size as a person. What worked for me was to increase the scale of my art so that I could get the level of detail I wanted, but also ergonomically so that I could actually have room to maneuver.
ReplyDeleteHi Rusty
ReplyDeleteFirst, I would like to thank you for sharing this snapshot of your life and your relationship with art with me and the rest of the class. Your blog was very well written, and I could tell that you put quite a bit of time and thought into it. I heavily sympathize with the struggles of “duplicating the human form on canvas.” This difficulty is something that continues to plague my work even today. On the bright side though, these struggles seem to have introduced you to one of the all-time greats in Picasso. Thanks again for sharing, and good luck in pursuing your new degree!
Vaughan
Hi Rusty! Thank you for your introduction. I too am a returning student entering my second phase of life and trying something new. It sure is nice having older kids and a bit more time and freedom from when they were little! I appreciated that you found joy, appreciation and beauty in the imperfection of Picasso!
ReplyDeleteHi Rusty!
ReplyDeleteIt's nice to meet you, happy to hear you are back in school chasing a degree that will land you a job you will hopefully enjoy more. As I'm a business major I told myself I would never work in insurance because the art you choose to present is exactly how I think I would feel. I heard Chigao is a beautiful city with lots of artistic features to see.