Artist Lecture- Katy Schneider

Katy Schneider visited a while back, and I wanted to make an entry about her lecture. She began by simply showing her work, and I wrote a few notes of what stood out to me before she began speaking. Her work in general tended to keep the texture of the paint, but it still managed to have a lot of detail. A lot of her work really captures scenes of life and the figure. Some appeared more like family photographs, with several of the figures looking straight at the viewer. There also seemed to be a large focus on children and motherhood. Her flower images also were often very centered.
When describing her work, she mentioned a few things that stood out to me. She said that her work feels more meaningful when smaller, and her goal was how to create meaning using a small space. This related to how she grew up in an apartment with a large family. She also felt she had more of a story to tell when she became a mother. She also mentioned that she preferred her work to be a focus on the everyday rather than just happy families, and she did this through various lighting techniques. Her work overall has nice contrast and color, and it was interesting how she worked with the concept of family without it becoming too cliche.

Artist Lecture- Gary Panter

I actually had forgotten to make a blog post about this lecture, but I did write some notes that I wanted to mention. A point that Gary Panter made that really stood out to me was the idea of making a list of what you love and hate to start any kind of art. We seemed to do this in illustration class, but it really seems like a good idea for creating other ideas for other classes. He also mentioned problems with society getting swirled too much into media, and how we should go to an earlier version of ourselves before we'd been so influenced by it.  This also brought up the other part he mentioned about for artists was that anything we learn, it would be best to learn the old fashioned way first. This stood out to me since I've always been so based on digital skills that I haven't been focusing on traditional mediums as much.

Gary Panter's work itself as he mentioned, has a sense of lonlieness to it, and it also seemed to play with humorous ideas as well. What was also interesting to me is that he liked psycadelic light shows from the 1960s, and the pieces he created and described really demonstrated his focus of painting with light. The 1960s aspect seemed to stand out in his work with a lot of the ideals at the time.

His work and lecture brought up ideas of reaching beyond the exterior of ourselves and viewing how we portray ourselves as humans in general. I really can relate to his mention of art not just being for selling, but it being a spiritual trip.