Jesse Prinz on Art and Emotion

"Our experience of art is fundamentally emotional, and wonder is the key" 

Listen to the podcast here @ philosophy bites

Challenge: Death Masks pt. 1

Found these randomly on the internet, thought they were pretty interesting.

Nicola Tesla, 1943

Beethoven 1812

Isaac Newton

Dante Alighieri

Queen Mary

Goethe

More here:
http://library.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/aids/C0770/


P.S. I don't know if this was a specifically European-American practice, but the death masks are overwhelmingly white men...

Julian Barnes: "Art doesn't just capture the thrill...

... sometimes it is that thrill."


"Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting. But we are very far from reaching that state. We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions, to argue. Put us in front of a picture and we chatter, each in our different way. Proust, when going round an art gallery, liked to comment on who the people in the pictures reminded him of in real life; which might have been a deft way of avoiding the direct aesthetic confrontation. But it is a rare picture that stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only a short time before we want to explain and understand the very silence into which we have been plunged."

read full article here

Reflections: Teacups

Can't remember exactly when I made these but sometime between 2009-2011. The idea came while drinking tea with my parents. They had a tea cup with two walls such that the outerwall and the innerwall was separated by a gap. The effect was simple: insulation; when you held a hot cup of tea, or whatever hot beverage, your hands wouldn't get hot. Separating the innerwall from the outerwall allowed you to hold the cup regardless of the heat. I thought this was great. The piece that my parents had was pretty remarkable, something that I could probably never duplicate, and had a hunch that it was factory made. I was intrigued nonetheless and wondered whether I could replicate a similar effect. You can see them here. Some turned out alright, aesthetically, others not so much; they all achieved the desired function of insulating the heat.

So with the idea of trying to reproduce a certain function, and a particular piece as motivation, I abandoned the idea of trying to replicate its aesthetic or style, which allowed me to be creative in achieving the desired effect. I remember sitting down on the wheel and thinking about how I was going to do this double layered tea cup. I could throw one cup and then use a slab over it, carve it up and smooth the lip, which seemed like a bit more work than desirable. Yup, I'm lazy.

The next idea was to throw a very tall and thin cup and then fold it over in the middle creating two walls with a layer of air in between. I could then smooth the lip and the foot over and in its leatherhard stage I could carve the outer wall to make it lighter and accentuate the gap. I figured this was as good a strategy as any.

I made the first couple with relative success. The process wasn't difficult but it soon became a process of getting the aesthetics to a point where I was satisfied with the outcome. And to be sure, I'd probably throw away most of them. As I began carving out the outerwall, I really started to like the cave-like effect or even something like a termite mound:

 So I tried to mimic the colours:

It even reminded me of lava rock:

So I tried to mimic that as well:

There was also a point when I got really sick of the carving and making sure there was a layer of air between the first wall and the second. So I decided not to do any carving:

As you can see, there is a pocket of air bulging out the side of this piece. For the one's above, prior to firing it in the bisque, I would have carved that pocket out. If you click the link above, you can see pieces where the outerwall didn't quite make the separation I would have wanted.
 
At any rate, the inspiration of these pieces began with something factory-made in my parents' cupboard and progressed into mimicking something in nature. I think the piece - from this series of teacups - I liked the most is probably the one at the top of this post, glazed in purple. The rest I don't care so much about and, if I was a professional potter trying to perfect my craft, wouldn't think twice about tossing them.

Svend Bayer