Through the Eyes of an Artist

Last Friday, I attended the Gen Ed Conference. The session I attended was called Through the Eyes of an Artist. The presentations were all analyzing different works of art, and why the artists created them. The first piece was entitled Peacocks and Peonies. They are two stained glass windows constructed by John La Farge at the peak of the American Industrial Revolution. The windows (which have a Japanese style to them) depict a peaceful and serene forest landscape. The windows themselves were extremely expensive, and the owner would put them up in their mansion as to “block out” the smoggy, polluted environment that the US had become on the outside. The second painting was Circe by Kauffman. Circe tells the story of when Ulysses (or Odysseus as he is know by the Greeks). Although in history, Circe is seen as a weak, deceptive woman that Ulysses triumphs over, Kauffman tries to show how Circe could’ve been the stronger and more dominant force in that meeting. One interesting theory behind the painting is that Kauffman was trying to use Circe to depict herself in the art world in the 18th century. The final presentation was on Delacroix and French the Romanticism. French Romanticism, as I have seen it, is a very liberal type of art, and common motifs of it are rebellion and freedom. For example, Liberty Leading the People is a very famous romantic painting in the Louvre. The particular painting that was used in the presentation (although the title slips my mind) depicted people on a raft, having to resort to cannibalism to survive. There were many different viewpoints on the painting. One, being that as you move up and to the right in the painting, the subjects become closer to God; another suggesting that since the “hero” of the painting was black and faceless, that everyone is equal once they’ve fallen to that level. I learned more than I thought I would at the conference, and actually enjoyed myself a bit.