Arshile Gorky
Gorky was born  on April 15, 1904 in the village of Khorgom which was on the shores of Lake Van. He fled during the Armenian Genocide, along with his mother and sisters. After his mother's death, when he was 16, he came to America.
He went to The New School Of Design in Boston Massachusetts. In the 1920s, his work was impressionist and postimpressionist. In the 1930s, he first experimented with cubism, then surrealism.

Grattage involves placing textured materials under a canvas or paper and making impressions of the texture, sometimes by scraping off layers of paint. Grattage was used by surrealists such as Max Ernst and Joan Miro.

I have not paid close attention to my dreams in the last several weeks. A couple of months ago I had one that I still remember sort of clearly, but it is not very coherent or significant.
 When the dream started I was walking into a place like a supermarket with my grandmother on my dads side. In the "supermarket", there were elderly women at booths and they advised  my grandmother. From there the dream shifted and I left the "supermarket". I was then in a square with my friend, and there were monkey bars around the square with some sort of structure in the middle which forced anyone who wanted to go around the square to use the monkey bars. There was somebody at the far corner of the square timing the people and telling them when to go. From here the dream shifted again and I jumped over a train in a sled.

Final Blog

This trimester I was most happy with my second piece. I worked in a medium I had not really used before, and by my standards it came out pretty well. I was also happy with my first one because I have never done anything with any sort of collage before.
I was unhappy with what I thought was going to be my first piece, which was a painting. I was unhappy with this because I have a lot of trouble with painting, so it came out pretty poorly.
I feel like I did make some progress over the trimester. For the first two weeks or so, I had a couple of vague ideas, but had a lot of trouble coming up with any artwork to go with them. When Kristen mentioned something about dreams, I decided to use that.
My first piece tries to communicate the warped perspectives we can get after waking up from a vivid dream and/or the time when you are half asleep and in two frames of mind at once. The second piece is about lucid dream which is communicated by the string going from the back of the head to the outline of a person. The third one was about a dream I had which involved being stuck on a train. I feel like the last one is not something other people could get just by looking at it. I am working on my final piece right now.
I would give my blogging effort a 4. I think the blog was helpful because it forced me to look at different artist I would not have otherwise.

Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) was a French-American Artist. She was able to take classes in exchange for translating, and put herself through art school this way. Some of her more know pieces were cells and Maman.
 Cells featured personal items of hers as well as items with an emotional significance.






Maman featured several versions of a giant spider, and  was an ode to her mother.

Maxime Defert was born on May 11, 1944. She is a French painter who has made Geometric composition paintings. These interest me because I like to doodle with geometric shapes and sometimes use them in backgrounds.

Andre Breton was a surrealist/writer, and he wrote the "Surrealist Manifesto". His work was very expressive and he often worked with the human body.

Salvador Dalí 
Salvador Dalí (11 May 1904 – 23 January 1989) was a famous surrealist. During World War 2 he and his wife, Gala, retreated to America, moving back in 1948. He studied in Madrid Spain. I chose him because he tried to analyse the subconscious parts of the mind, which I find interesting. 

Lee Bul
Some of Bul's more known works are the Cyborg Sculptures. She says they bring forward "our fear and fascination with the uncategorizable and uncanny". This fear can be found in many people and probably fuels the desire of many to label everything. She worked on her Cyborgs from 1997 to 2011. The two originals were the red and blue cyborgs, and many of her cyborg sculptures are misshapen and often seemed to be missing limbs as well as heads.

Arlindo Bartista makes pieces based off of his sometimes lucid dreams. This is similar to what I am doing, and I find his art very interesting.

I have had hard time coming up with an idea that I genuinely want to use. Kristen mentioned something about lucid dreaming the other day, and I have been writing down my dreams for a year  or two. I think I may try to illustrate my dreams, or try to put things that only make sense in dreams,  things dreams help to make sense of, or the immediate aftereffects into art somehow.

The artist I chose this week was Paul Klee. He deeply explored color theory, and I need to learn more about using color.

Dorothea Tanning was primarily a surrealist. She was also a poet. She was self-taught, and lived to be 101, which is pretty cool in itself.