The Gallery of Modern Art is honoured to present an exhibition called “Personal Narratives” which will open on the 2nd of October and will close on the 5th of November. The combination of words and images in contemporary art production is an extremely useful and powerful vehicle for artists to use in order to express their messages. The text can either support the image or contradict the image in order to demonstrate the transparency of either or both elements. Two artists who combine both image and text in their art are well known Australian and New Zealander contemporary artists, Gordon Bennett and Colin Mccahon. “Personal Narratives” is a must see exhibition as it displays Bennett’s and Mccahon’s clever use of both image and text to convey personal narratives. Gordon Bennet is an Aboriginal Australian who uses text to communicate personal issues of racism, Colin Mccahon is an artist from New Zealand who uses text to convey________. These artists have powerful messages to communicate and are doing it in a highly urbane and strong way. Gordon Bennett The Coming of Light (1987) Bennett’s art piece, “The coming of the light” (1987), explores the issue of …show more content…
the racist remarks about Aboriginals. In the art piece, Bennett demonstrates imagery, there is a mirror at the left bottom corner, this represents Bennetts own mirror. His facial features that reflect in his mirror are very distorted by words painted roughly. The jack in the box that is violently jerked from the box that contains himself, an Aboriginal figure, are represented by racist terms. Bennett uses text throughout the artwork, the letters on the box represent the building blocks of language that we learn when we are a child, the alphabet. The racist terms in the mirror start with the same letters, the attention is focused on the power of language, precisely the way it can be used to define people. His artwork represents the issues therefore frame the reference to his personal experience, these include on how social and cultural structures such as religion, language and history shape perceptions of race and identity. Gordon Bennett Self Portrait (1990) “Self Portrait” (1990) is created with many layers.
For example, the layers of dots symbolises the significance of Aboriginal dot painting. Layers of images superimposed with words. ‘I AM’ is borrowed from a well known art work, Victory over death 2, 1970 by New Zealand artist Colin McCahon. This rich interaction of words and images raises many questions. The simplicity of ‘I AM’ suggests a universality of thought. It is open to self revelation, self redemption and a myriad of rich images of self that can be built upon. McCahon uses ‘I AM’ to question notions of faith. Bennett uses it to question notions of self. ‘I am that I am’, Exodus 3:14 is God naming self. It is at once a name revealed and something like the refusal of a name. If God cannot be contained, can humanity be contained by stereotypes and
labels? Colin Mccahon McMahon’s, art work, “Victory over death 2” (1970), demonstrates the issues of personal identity. The work is outstanding as McCahon has given himself the freedom to embrace the text itself, from the cursive handwriting to the capital letters. The title of the work itself is disturbing as it exposes the pain these racial stereotypes create. Mccahon tries to destroy the stereotypes to question ideas of identity by using ‘I AM' which emphasises it and acts as a question with many possibilities and answers
“This is Our World” by Dorothy Allison is an essay that brings her own personal views to art and the impact that it has had on her life. She brings descriptive language to describe how the art can be compared to writing. The author persuades her audience that writing is more than just writing and it can be an eloquent and beautiful piece of art.
Composers use comprehensive variety of language techniques to engage their audience by creating convincing and extraordinary images. Distinctively visuals are created through the use of extravagant techniques and complex word choice, so it helps the audience to visualize the text and therefore share and also intensify their understanding of the texts. Two short stories composed by ‘Henry Lawson’ that use techniques and word choice to portray distinctively visuals are ‘The Drover’s Wife’ and ‘In A Dry Season’, these two texts are strongly opposite to the visual ‘Flatford Mil’ by English artist John constable. Both ‘The Drover’s Wife’ and ‘In A Dry Season’ use distinctive visuals to intensify the responders understanding of place, the situation of the story, where the stories are set. People, the characters of the story and how they progress throughout the story. Ideas, themes and ideology that the composer is trying to express to his audience. Henry Lawson creates images of isolation, stoicism and the struggles for survival in the unforgiving rural Australian outback in his two well-known short stories ‘The Drover’s Wife’ and ‘In A Dry Season’. On the other hand, the visual, ‘Flatford Mil’ creates images of peacefulness, clamness and freedom through the composer’s use of colours, brush strokes and positioning.
In eight quasi-connected stories, Susan Vreeland delivers a fictional lesson on aesthetics. Set amidst human sorrow and historic chaos, the narrative follows an imagined Vermeer painting from the present day through 330 years of its provenance--beginning with its willful destruction in the 1990s and concluding with its inspired creation in the 1660s:
For centuries, the narrative mode has been used as a rhetorical strategy to convey specific arguments about the sociopolitical situations that people have lived in. In the African Diaspora, narrative mode, perhaps better known as storytelling has allowed a traditionally repressed group of people like African-Americans to continue and further explicate multiple dimensions of identity, personhood and condition. Through the use of descriptive imagery produced through narrative mode, authors such as Paul Robeson and James Baldwin effectively paint the landscape of the time period in which they live to provide active commentary on the experiences that they faced within the status quo regarding the political identity of African-Americans.
Words and images are the couple that should never be separated. As mentioned in Scott McCloud’s, “Show and Tell,” we are taught from childhood that we should mature out from using images in our writing. Comics are viewed as amateurish in the professional field of English. We are continuously told that comics and usage of images in a text are pretty “childish” and should not be tolerated by the “higher” level of English. If the meaning of a text is transferred through the employment of images and words, then it is done correctly. Readers across the nation admits that demonstration of images and words in any literary work amplifies the understanding of the work, as also mentioned by McCloud.
Though people can look into color and composition, others can still even look into the source of the art itself. Cole goes deeper, delving into the source of the art, looking in particular into the idea of cultural appropriation and the view a person can give others. Though it is good for people to be exposed to different opinions of a group or an object, sometimes people can find it difficult to tell the difference between the reality and the art itself. Sometimes art can be so powerful that its message stays and impacts its audience to the point where the viewer’s image of the subject of the art changes entirely. Cole brings up an important question about art, however. Art has become some kind of media for spreading awareness and even wisdom at times, but in reality, “there is also the question of what the photograph is for, what role it plays within the economic circulation of images” (973). Cole might even be implying that Nussbaum’s advertisement can sometimes be the point of some media, and that sometimes the different genres of art can just be to make someone with a particular interest happy. One more point that Cole makes is that “[a]rt is always difficult, but it is especially difficult when it comes to telling other people’s stories.” (974) Truthfully, awareness and other like-concepts are difficult to keep going when a person or a group is not directly involved.
To begin with, I will discuss the distinction between 'graphic narrative' and 'graphic novel', followed by a definition of the latter. As a next step, the relationship between words and images is elaborated on, attempting to investigate the differences and correlations between words and images in order to have a better understanding how graphic novels operate. Then, a definition of 'intermediality', 'adaptation' and 'noir fiction' will be
A popular contemporary graffiti artist, Banksy, creates intriguing and intricate designs for public display on regular and everyday streets. His rising popularity serves as a catalyst for the renowned importance of the attainability of visual literacy. Visual literacy is the ability to understand and interpret the message of a visual image or object, and having this skill is becoming increasingly important in todays culture. According to Zemliansky, the first crucial step towards developing visual literacy is to treat visual messages as text and arguments. Although the message of most visual images are ambiguous, it is still logical to surmise that different ideas can stem from one image because of our varying perception due to varying experiences,
Many artists find themselves struggling to find their identity in the beginning and then when you have discovered yourself it can be hard to come up with ideas to fit the mold as what the public sees them as. This then leads to what people call the struggling artist’s life due to the fact that without making a product there is no income to flow into the household. These three authors: James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, and Johanna Spyri all went through the tough times of finding an identity or how to take personal experiences and then turn them into a story that readers would enjoy. Going
When writing any sort of narrative, be it novel or poem, fiction or non-fiction, scholarly or frivolous, an author must take into account the most effective manner in which to effectively convey the message to their audience. Choosing the wrong form, or method of speaking to the reader, could lead to a drastic misunderstanding of the meaning within an author’s content, or what precisely the author wants to say (Baldick 69). Even though there are quite a bit fewer words in a graphic novel than in the average novel, an author can convey just as much content and meaning through their images as they could through 60,000 words. In order to do that though, their usage of form must be thoughtfully considered and controlled. Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic memoir The Complete Persepolis, took great pains in the creation of her panels in order to reinforce and emphasize her narrative, much like a novelist utilizes punctuation and paragraph breaks. Through her portrayal of darkness and lightness, Satrapi demonstrates that literary content influences, and is primary to, the form.
Derk Backderf depended almost entirely on visual narrative and culture, which is anything where meaning is sought through images, to tell his story in his graphic novel My Friend Dahmer. He used words to tell his story, but he let the graphics speak to the emotions of the issues. He used the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words to help him inform and warn other people. His pictures depicted someone who looked fairly normal on the outside, but on the inside he was a monster who was trying to fight his inner demons through the abuse of alcohol.
Aboriginals are “artistic, there is always an urge to express their doctrines, myths, desires and experiences, when painting their body in design” (Ballard 2007 pg 6) Educators, as part of the curriculum in-corporate art especially dot painting of stories from the
Art is not useless as Oscar Wilde stated; nor is it the death of logic by emotion as Plato supposed. Art is an activist trying to inform and shape the social consciousness. Art by nature is critical and questions how the world is perceived. These questions are pivotal in creating change within society. The Armory Show, a major turning point in American art, for example, was inspired by shifting perceptions of the aesthetic and a stirring toward modernity. The Armory Show was an artistic rebellion against the juries, prizes, and restricted exhibitions that excluded unacademic and yet t...
visual narratives, from iconic to realistic, you can see the projective power of the image
"A picture can paint a thousand words." I found the one picture in my mind that does paint a thousand words and more. It was a couple of weeks ago when I saw this picture in the writing center; the writing center is part of State College. The beautiful colors caught my eye. I was so enchanted by the painting, I lost the group I was with. When I heard about the observation essay, where we have to write about a person or thing in the city that catches your eye. I knew right away that I wanted to write about the painting. I don’t know why, but I felt that the painting was describing the way I felt at that moment.