Art Five Years From Now, You Chat

Art

Five years from now, you chat with a friend about your favorite humanities class (this one, naturally). What were your favorite artworks encountered throughout the course that you will share with them? Why?

"The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali.

This is a painting by Catalonian-Spanish surrealist Dali. I could choose anything that Dali does to describe my favorite artwork, because I greatly admire his ability to create imagery and symbolism that blends nature with the supernatural. This painting is like a dream. There are elements of reality inside the painting, such as the watches and clocks, the landscape in the background, and the tree. However, there are also elements of the painting that are clearly unreal, such as the clocks melting. Dali is not too concerned about the accuracy of representation, as the perspective of the painting is wrong in terms of depth of field. However, the artist is not trying at all to represent the real world but only the inner world of human subconscious thought and memory. When we dream, we dream like this painting. There are always elements of the physical world in our dreams, but those elements are pieced together in unusual ways. Also, the animal in the middle of the canvas is unidentifiable. This corresponds with the fact that when we recall dreams, a character will be like a fusion of several people we know. Rarely are dreams linear or straightforward, which is why Dali's painting is also non-linear and not straightforward at all. Dali has helped me appreciate art, and has helped me accept art on its own terms. I am sharing this painting in the hopes that it encourages someone who does not appreciate art to see how expansive the arts can be.

2. "The Garden of Earthly Delights" by Hieronymus Bosch

This is one of my favorite paintings. It is a Flemish painting in "triptych" style, meaning that it has three panels. The left panel depicts heaven, the center panel depicts earth, and the right panel depicts hell. It is a colorful and chaotic painting with a lot of different elements and one must look very closely to appreciate "The Garden of Earthly Delights." The details are extraordinary, and really cause the viewer to engage with the canvas. It is almost like watching television or a movie, in that the attention is captured not just for a few minutes but longer to allow Bosch's phantasmagoric story to unfold. The right panel is the most captivating because it differs sharply in color scheme from the other two panels. The heaven and earthly panels have lively and cheerful blues and greens to denote live on earth. However, the right panel reveals the depths of hell with black and red tones. One of the strongest images or symbols on this side of the canvas is a space-age looking egg, broken in half. It is the largest object on that panel, and therefore the eye is drawn to it. It almost seems as if Hieronymus Bosch has created a world of fantasy and science fiction, centuries before the science fiction genre existed. I want to share this painting because I believe it shows how art can be timeless. This piece does not seem "dated," even though it was painted centuries ago.

3. "Black Sabbath" and "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath