Anaysis of The Court House Steps by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith - Essay Example

Fig. Figure. 4-5" The Court House Steps by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith The Court House Steps by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is a valid art. This is because this art painting acts as an agent for the expression of emotions and ideas as well as means for exploring and appreciating formal elements for their own sake and representation. In other words, it acts as way by which a community develops for itself a medium for self-expression and interpretation. Smith created this painting with aim of passing some message to her contemporaries.

In this art work, Smith’s message was shaped by the materials, techniques, and forms of the art and the ideas and feelings it created. There is an understanding that is reached with the material Smith used to create this art work considering how she handled them in order facilitates viewer’s thought processes. Smith painted The Court House Steps in reaction to the conservation emergency created when a landlord bulldozed a boulder marked with petroglyphs from its escarpment site (Smith and Kastner 63).

He delivered the culturally significant stone to the courthouse to object legal arbitrations barring him from constructing a building on his land. The jagged angles on Smith’s work might be kiva steps bulging into high-rise buildings that grow and fall. Transversely, a series of orbs converges in a solar eclipse across the center.Smith and Kastner assert that, The Court House Steps is the most traumatic of all her paintings (87)” because “it documents a world spinning out of control” (87).

In this painting, Smith is seen to be lifting imagery from the natural world, and then changing it into modernism via abstraction. Her inhabited landscapes show the infinite human conflict over disputed lands. Her painting fuses modernist color and techniques with her unique visual vocabulary of crashing lines in a stirred expression of the human spirit. The work establishes Smith’s artistic voice, grounding it in modern abstraction, where she extends her native tradition through images of plants, animals and humans to bring the message home.

The idea that smith was communicating was that the petroglyphs were subjected to individual coming in and shooting in that area – getting rid of the petroglyphs from the lava escarpment.The Court House Steps is about uniting the traditional values in a very modern and fast changing world. In this painting smith informs us that world is complex and things will be changing very rapidly so we must prepare for the change and sometimes predict it. And we must work in a mixed way with some new things or ideally add in traditional methods.

This painting is just like the environments we work where people from different cultures work together and everyone have his task to do. We will need to combine these factors together and make sure everything works well. Just like this artwork, many different factors that are not linked can exist in one painting.In nut shell, in this painting we see distinctive difference between artistic animosity and the human desire to maintain the illusion of permanence, which is what makes the genre of abstract landscape painting, and Smith’s work in particular, unique.

In this work Smith portrays conflict and critical interpretations of contemporary life into her scenes of the natural world.Work citedSmith, J.and Kastner. An American Modernist. University of New Mexico Press:Albuquerque, 2013. Print