Famous People - Jorge Luis Borges, Georgia OKeeffe, Zdenek Pesanek - Research Paper Example

Question One: Jorge Luis Borges Jorge Luis Borges, who is today celebrated as being the drive behind the “Google Doodle”, is well known for his fiction writings which tend to be speculative fiction writing. The image resembles Borges' own work, which is a glance into the future from the view of man alive, many years, before development of digital computers. Borges was born in Buenos Aires, although he later on moved with his family to Switzerland. At his tender age, Borges was taught by his parents at home until he reached the age of 11 with a large home library which was at his disposal, Borges was able to learn and to speak a number of languages; something that he mightily appreciated later on in life. Although Borges was an Argentinean writer, as well as a philosopher, he spent many years in Geneva; he was sickened by the continuous failure of politics, leading to his fiction that delved into real ontological mysteries from the viewpoint of an evolutionary (Alazraki 12). The Google Doodle illustrates a complex image of an aging man overlooking illustrious architecture in the rear of the glass. A close study of this illustration portrays a library on the right, as well as views from “The Garden of Forking Paths,” which a short story is written by Borges describing the future in a number of ways. Considering that Borges had never benefited from the marvels of a digital computer, his illustrations of a far-flung future tend to contain a patently retro feel. According to Borges, the nature of space, reality and time tend to realms with enormous possibilities, leading him to questioning the idea of life as being either a linear process or just a singular path in time (Bloom 79). Borges goes ahead to suggest that every decision is at the core of a system of recursive splitting paths, an ever-persisting moment, as well as the place of choice with intense future impact and connects to all precedents, thereby making history impenetrable and the future incomprehensible. In 'The Garden of Forking Paths', the book deals with decision making, as well as the discovery and accumulation survival 'know how' by the creating and testing ideas in reality, along with the imagination. According to Borges, people learn through the investigation of the legacy of ancestors, innovate through imagining future opportunities but either survive or die here and now. Although there is a mystery concerning the meaning of time, as well as diversity, through ignorance, people are driven to making choices between the forks, competing alternatives, if they are to survive; this story is concerned with choice and not time. Apart from that, intelligent design tends to be an experiment rather than a solution since truth can only be disclosed in the future. Therefore, generating, as well as testing in the imagination entails real physical arrangements in life, the brain and dreams, and not in different books; hence survival depends on people’s imaginative experiments! Question 2: Georgia O’Keeffe Georgia O’Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and was a female artist, an icon of the twentieth century, as well as an early avant-garde artist of American Modernism (Keeffe 3). The works of Georgia O’Keeffe and her cultural impact are preserved by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This museum is the only research center globally which dedicated to intellectual study in American Modernism. Visiting this museum or any other place where her work is publicized indicates why she was the first woman who had a solo exhibition in 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. From the Faraway, Nearby, 1938 For some time, O'Keeffe had been doing some experiments relating to compositions that intermix skeletal along with landscape imagery, with little or no regards to their comparative scale, size or perspective. Giving each item in equally sharp concentration, she concealed the spatial differences between what is seen as being near, as well as what is far. In this portrait, an enormous animal skull relaxes tentatively on the thin strip of land below, emphasizing the strong comparisons between the color and shape of the huge antlers along with the hilltop peaks. In spite of her style of painting, which is hyper-realistic, there is the absence of verisimilitude to the view (Keeffe 32). Apart from that, the animal skull with its exaggerated number of antlers tends to be an imaginative invention; therefore, combining these images into a distinct composition, appears to be O'Keeffe's way of summing up her feelings in relation to the Southwest, which she describes as being a beautiful, yet untouched lonely-feeling place. Black Place II, 1944 This is one of O'Keeffe’s favorite painting sites, which is located in a place called the Bisti Badlands found in Navajo country, almost 150 miles northwest of O'Keeffee's home in Ghost Ranch. This place was a stretch of deserted, gray and black hills, which she described as a “mile of elephants” when seen from a distance. Being a place that is segregated far off the road, as well as away from all civilization, it was the best place for O'Keeffe and her assistant Maria Chabot to make a number of camping trips in the 1940s. According to Chabot, the painting represents black, grey and silver hills along with arroyos of white sand twisting around them, with white and pink strata passing through them; flowing downward, one after the other. For a period of fourteen years, i.e. between 1936 and 1949, O’Keeffe’s visits to the Black Place ignited a torrent of work, which was never comparable in her entire career since between 1944 and 1945 alone, she was able to complete six canvases, which included Black Place II, which was one of the extraordinarily large pastel, and at not less than nine pencil sketches (Keeffe 65). Sue Jenkins Wine and Cheese in Provance Lemons on a White Plate Sue Jenkins was an art teacher, as well as a painter from California. A closer look into her work leads to the description of her entire work as being delicious; this is following the fact that most of her paintings concentrate on food, even though there are other lavishing paintings, an example being the one she calls the Wine and Cheese in Provance. The colors that Sue utilize in this portrait i.e. the creamy whites with a touch of light blue shadows, along with the pinks and yellows tend to be the colors of cake frosting or candy; which quite frankly appears to be darned eat-able. In this portrait, a part of that impact comes from the white highlights, which are seen all through the majority of her paintings, thereby bringing out the essence of everything having a clean, as well as a fresh look. Although many artists think that using white color was not noteworthy since they have been discouraged a number of times to desist from using it, Sue dismisses this fact by clearly indicating that white can be an extremely touchy subject. This is because, using white to lighten colors can either dull down or neutralize an artist’s work, but, on the other hand, white by itself or just slightly tinted, tends to be a tremendous color too (Jenkins 54). A good example in this case is the painting referred to as Lemons on a White Plate; here, the lemons look sturdy enough to be eaten surrounded by extraordinarily clean, slightly bluish white. Apart from that, the painting is straightforward i.e. three lemons, a white plate, and a few yellow reflections, which ties the two together. Question 3 Zdeněk Pešánek Zdeněk Pešánek. Torsos of Men and Women (1936) National Gallery, Prague In most case, objects which tend to provide some inner light fail to do so, and, therefore, they need artful interpreters to function on their behalf; this turns out to be the role of the artist i.e. an illusionist of colour. When a light artist intends to create an art, i.e. by participating in illusion through their work, then one of the ways in which they will accomplish this is through the exploitation of reflection and refraction in order to convince the audience that the color is incorporated in the object (Pešánek & Jiří 24). Pioneer of Artificial Light Art like Zdeněk Pešánek elaborate the colossal connection which artifical light holds for almost a century. There is no possibility for a person to look at Pešánek’s work on display and fail to think of his modern Siegfried Kracauer who envisaged of electricity and light as untainted flows. Even before, Dan Flavin discerned the fluorescent tube; Pešánek was already utilizing neon along with other artificial media to create Light Art. Pešánek projected light by the use of what he referred to as a spectrophone, which led to him being asked by the organizers of the 1937 Paris World Fair to create two fountains of light with the help of neon tubing; apart from that, he was hired by the Prague electric utility to create light sculptures (Pešánek & Jiří, 98). Among the things, he created were his abstract Torsos of Men and Women, an art in which the illusion of movement was made by the electric circuitry exchanging power to the light tubes. This was an unusual kinetic light work since its time, which soon fell into the predictable hands of advertisers, thereby leading to Paris enduring the kinetic banality of the “Citröen” logo on the Eiffel Tower for a number of years. Pešánek is also accredited for making the kinetic light sculpture that decorated the roof of Edison Power Station in Prague. Work Cited Alazraki, Jaime. Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971. Print. Bloom, H. Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. Print. Hassrick, Peter H., Lisa Mintz Messinger, Barbara Novak, and Barbara Rose. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Georgia O'Keefe Museum, 1997. Print. Jenkins, Sue. How to do everything. New York: McGraw Hill, 2009. Print. Jenkins, Sue. Web design all-in-one for dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Pub., 2009. Print. Keeffe, Georgia. Georgia O'Keeffe. New York: Viking Press, 1976. Print. Keeffe, Georgia, Jack Cowart, and Juan Hamilton. Georgia O'Keeffe, art and letters. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1987. Print. Martin S. Jorge Luis Borges,. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970. Print. McMurray, George R. Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Ungar, 1980. Print. Pešánek, Zdeněk, and Jiří Zemánek. Zdeněk Pešánek 1896-1965: [katalog výstavy], 21.11.1996-16.2.1997. Praha: Národní galerie, 1996. Print. Pešánek, Zdeněk, and Jiří Zemánek. Zdeněk Pešánek 1896-1965. Praha: Národní galerie ve spolupráci s Gema art, 1997. Print. Robinson, Roxana. Georgia O'Keeffe: a life. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Print. Zemánek, Jiří, and Zdeněk Pešánek. Zdeněk Pešánek, 1896-1965. Prague: Národní Galerie v Praze, 1996. Print. Bottom of Form Bottom of Form Read More