Natural Artistic Style, Essay Example

Georgia O’Keeffe typically remains known mostly for her simple evocative floral paintings featuring white, off-white, orange, or yellow, and graceful touches of green, white, and black. Her natural artistic style endears her to children, but the surrealistic, vivid movement of color in her paintings continues to make her utilization of the artistic space and her techniques unique to her.

Although I don’t really have a single favorite artist or work of art, Katsushika Hokusai’s “Mount Fuji in Clear Weather” inspires me. I see the paintings as being in the fall, with the sulfur smells of the volcano mixing with the smell of rain and that fallen-leaves smell. Perhaps it’s the shade of blue in the sky that makes it seem like fall- added to the fact that the weather is still clear and the clouds contrast sharply with the tone and lines of Mount Fuji. There are no dark mushroom-clouds above the volcano, but the white contour lines below its peak suggest that the possibility of eruption never fully subsides, and the reversal of color enhances that suggestion. Also, at the volcano’s base, brushes of what appears to be charcoal give the impression of that rough, ashy hardness of volcanic rock. It creeps just up to the base of the red, and I feel that a person standing there would hear a slight rumble or feel a little quake and be fooled into staying. There is clear weather, after all. I see danger in what seems a placid landscape, so it seems that the title of the painting is metaphorical as well, a note that clear weather may allow us to see things differently but also distract from the harsher facts of life.

For the Many eyes assignment, I utilized the above short analysis of Hokusai’s painting and generated a Word Cloud which looks like this:

According to Lakoff and Johnson, metaphors involve a conceptual, cognitive warfare which defines the way life is perceived and, in turn, effects the ways in which we affect the world which we have build around our awareness. The authors argue that even evidence is subjective in that they may be compromised by unrecognized bias or unrecognizable factors impacting the results. Scientists attempt to minimize this effect with double-blind procedure and control experiments, but the experiment itself has an effect upon the realism of the results. Lakoff and Johnson present conceptualization and cognitive processing in much the same way. (87-88)

Particularly, the authors compare debates and conceptualization to warfare. Not only are there victors and the defeated, but there is also a struggle to determine the righteousness of a concept within a larger sociocultural understanding. Parents often argue about which concepts are most beneficial to their children- on issues ranging from methods and frequency of discipline to the value of arts, sports, and academics to gender expectations. Such questions are, metaphorically, addressed by the parents’ experiences and their concept of righteous culture. (88) The authors reiterate the importance of these concepts by comparing theories to building, ideas to food, people, plants, commodities, resources, money, or cutting instruments, etc. Love is war, madness, physical force, etc.; these are universal concepts which are applied more forcefully in time periods which embrace these views, which brings us back full circle to the authors’ other metaphor of ideas as fashion. (89-90)

Works Cited

Hokusai, Katsushika. “Fuji in Clear Weather”. Retrieved 3 July 2012 from < http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&biw=320&bih=416&site=webhp&tbm+isch&sa=1&q=hokusai+volcano&oq=Hokusai+volcano&gs_l=mobile-gws-serp.3..0.146036.149210.0.150326.8.4.0.4.4.0.582.582.5-1.1.0…0.0.sx61jRIXMiY&mvs=0#i=3>.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. “The Metaphors We Live By.” The Production of Reality: Essays and Readings on Social Interaction. Chapter 10. 5^th ed. 1980. Web.