Brief Comment

I enjoyed this reading a lot! The concepts made sense (at least I think they did), and the paper was well organized. I like that there were many works and artists cited that I could easily look up and view, with exception to the plates and one Dali reference I could not find. This reading helped point out less obvious aspects of design, which I found more interesting than Dondis’ reading of basics. Not to spite Dondis though, because his reading was also enriched with great content!

From the reading, this comment “What is odd about this criticism though, is that it misses the whole point of art. The purpose of art, surely, is not merely to depict or represent reality — for that can be accomplished very easily with a camera — but to enhance, transcend, or indeed even to distort reality.” stood out. I find that many artists who are not guided often have a hard time finding their own style and distinction from other media. It’s like walking in the dark with no lantern. You can feel the different styles and forms around you, but finding the path you want to walk is difficult. This summer, I played with the idea of realism through digital painting because I thought that it was what I wanted while feeling around online. However, after I kept creating realistic portraits, I wondered what I was doing and why. This led me into a crisis, which this line from the reading pointed out clearly. I was plunged back into the depths of finding a stylized form that played to my aesthetic and how I wanted to portray my reality. That’s why this line and the questioning in the beginning resonated with me so strongly.

Peak Shift Principle

This law interested me becasue of it’s open endedness. For the bird and rat example, the stimuli were concrete and controlled. For open pieces of art floating on the web, how does one recreate the same experience? For example, in what ways can an artist reward a viewer and how will they know which preconceived notions will be attracting in the first place? Since many cultures and even individuals create their own unique semiotic space, it would be a struggle to cater to everyone. I like the concept, I’m just interested in how it would play out in a more concrete human complexity example.

Also, they clumped in the subtracting and amplifying idea here, which I thought was a great observation of how details are abstracted in order to enter a symbol like phase. The comic book reading touched on this idea, but not from this perspective.

Problem Solving

The fifth law discussed, about problem solving, is something I would like to incorporate more into my own work. When scrolling through Google’s online art gallery, the descriptions almost always offer a deeper insight - something that wouldn’t be noticed alone without study. When I read this section of the paper, this memory came back to me. I have the issue of my work being too digestable, easily read and left. From reading this law, I’ve seen some ways to reinforce ideas, such as creating tension through contrast somewhere to keep the attention of the audience and draw them towards a smaller idea or detail.

Metaphor

Again, I want to use metaphor more in my own work. Metaphors in a way can be taken as a symbol when represented visually, and it has great potential to keep an audience guessing or to reward them tremendously when interpreting a metaphor in a reasonable way. Usually, art with metaphor are the ones often seen in museums, and it shows how important it is when evaluating (RIP) art. I also liked the perspective that the reading gave on metaphor removing detail. When I’m usually taught about metaphor, say in English classes, it is about adding more detail - to enrich the writing. In this case - it is about a shift in focus. I liked this distinction, and it was a good way to describe visual metaphor.