Month: December 2020

Vladimir Kush

(The David Hockney Blog post fit better as the 5th blog post so I am making up for the 4th blog post here.)

While I am not certain if I am allowed to do my blog post on this Artist, Vladimir Kush is an extremely witty and talented surrealism artist of our time. Born in Moscow, Russia 1965, at the near end of the Surrealism movement, Kush studied at the Surikov Moscow Art Institute and later immigrated to the United States where he made a name for himself. His work is most known today for their playful and creative juxtapositions of nature and man made items, calming scenes and elegant compositions. I particularly admire his work for the smooth and flawless application of paint and excellent rendering of natural elements such as water, smoke and clouds.

One of the pieces that caught my eye when doing research on this fantastical artist was his painting “Sunrise by the ocean” shown above. Many of Kush’s paintings feature beautiful renderings of sunshine or sunsets, more spectacular than found in any photographs. At first glance, it is easy to decipher a cracked egg with a shining egg yolk and the egg whites pooling out, but upon further inspection this is not an egg but the makings on a man made building and the setting sun. Not only is the painting nice to look at, but also leave the interpretation up to the viewer as to what Kush wanted to say. Is this a picture of mankind building up to cage the sun? Or has the sun broken free? Perhaps the link between the egg yolk and the sun speak to rebirth and life?

Kush draws on inspiration from the great surrealist master, Dali, in his paintings. Like Dali, the subject of the butterfly is often used in his works as a representation of transformation or metamorphosis. In comparison to Dali’s work, Kush’s pieces are much more representational and focus on recognizable objects as the subject of his paintings. This lighthearted and purely aesthetic qualities to his work help to make it that much more accessible to the public, allowing him to open up a studio in Hawaii later in his career.

Although Vladimir Kush is not as old as many of the other surrealist artists we studied, his work takes a mind blowing modern twist on the work of the past. I am very excited to have found an artist such as him and think his work is a great example of learning from the past masters and bringing them to the present by using different techniques or with different presentation. This blog post is much too short to display all of his spectacular works but I hope to share my discovery of this artist with others in the future.

(If this is not a suitable example of a surrealist artist, please let me know Jeff and I can redo/ make a new blog post to fit the requirements better. I just really, really enjoyed his work and wanted to share!)

Cites Used:

Surrealistic Paintings by Vladimir Kush

https://kushfineart.com/about/

The Dirty Thirties

Invention of the TV

Before the coming of World War II, multiple new inventions such as the television were being created. In 1927, Philo Taylor Farnsworth invented the first electronic tv at the age of 21. While the television was invented so early on, it was very expensive and hard to acquire in most households. The tv boomed in the 1950s after the war was over and electricity was more common in every household. So what form of communication was used during WWII? Radios were the most common form for entertainment and news broadcasting before and during the war. Propaganda was spread even faster than with posters like in the previous war and citizens from all around the globe could tune in to the news.

The greatest thing since sliced bread…

Sliced bread was another one of the ground breaking inventions of the 1930s! (Well not really) Otto Fredrick Rohwedder is credited with the invention of the first ever bread slicing machine. Before that, bread was always sold as a solid loaf and customers would simply cut the bread by hand themselves. This invention led to the future popularity of “Wonder Bread” in the United States. As for the famous saying, quoted by the comedian Red Skelton “do not worry about television. It’s the greatest thing since sliced bread,” we still use this saying today to describe great inventions. You might wonder, was sliced bread really such a big deal then? And the answer is yes! It is not the invention of the product so much but what it signifies. The first commercial sliced bread, Wonder Bread grew to such large scale and mass popularity due to the mechanical invention of the bread slicer and the industrialization and convenience it represented.

Geo-Politics of the time- Why was this era called the Dirty Thirties?

The 1930s were not a great time everywhere in the world. With the Great Depression having just hit the United States after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and places like Germany riling up for the Second World War, it was a tense time to say the least. For countries in dire situations with lots to gain, a Great War was a strategic move but a large gamble to see who will come out on top. During this time, Mao Zedong was also testing his political footing in China. While he would not come to power until closer to the 1960s, he would lead to the Chinese Cultural Revolution and many other revolutionary events.

Cites Used:

https://www.knowitall.org/document/television-invention-kids-work

The Origin of Bread and the Phrase “The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread”

The History of Chinese Scripts and Printing

Project Rationale: For this project, I dove into the history of typography in China and their evolution in printing. I wanted to display the different materials Chinese was written on or printed with as a texture on each shelf. One of the most prominent things to me when I did my research on Bi Sheng and his invention of movable type was the countless shelves of little printing blocks printing shops had to own. I chose to depict the different artifacts in a shelf like format here to mimic this and have the reader’s eye follow from top to bottom. An illustration of Bi Sheng holds a printed book as the result of this evolution of typography in one hand and one of his printing blocks in the other.

I would give myself an 8/10 for this project. While in a poster format like this, I may have crammed too much information into the piece, I am very happy with the combination of material and information on typography I conveyed through the piece. Even at a quick glance, the infographic is interesting to look at and should draw a viewer in for a better look.