Steve/ Tony- Task 7

Andreas Gursky - Photographer
Gursky is a German visual artist known for his large format architecture and landscape color photographs, often employing a high point of view. Rhein II, an image by Gursky, was sold for £2.7m at Christie's, New York on November 8, 2011, becoming the most expensive photograph ever sold.
In one of my previous projects, location techniques, I was inspired by the flat, 2 dimensioned theme carried throughout his photographs. This inspired me to create a flat-like image, shot at dusk of the sea.

Original image of sea inspired by Andreas Gursky.

As noted above, Gursky uses large formats. This is relevant as most of his images are 10-foot wide. In most of his pictures, the way he digitally manipulates his images makes them seem quite unrealistic, but shows the artful planning of his manipulation processes. Whist taking a closer look at a group of his images, I noticed some similarities. One of which is symmetry and reflection. On more then one occasion, I noticed that the bottom section of the image is a reflection of the top. As well as this, some of the words colours etc in the images have been swapped around, The idea behind this, I think, is to play with the notion of order and artificiality in the image.

Andreas Gursky was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1955. He grew up in Düsseldorf, the only child of a successful commercial photographer, learning the tricks of the trade before he had finished high school. In the late 1970s, he spent two years at the Folkwangschule (Folkwang School) West Germany’s leading training ground for professional photographers, especially photojournalists. Finally, in the early 1980s, he attended the Staatliche Kunstakademie (State Art Academy) in Düsseldorf, where he studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose photographs had achieved prominence within the Conceptual and Minimal art movements. Gursky currently lives and works in Düsseldorf. Gursky takes his inspiration from a wide range of sources, for example a black a white photograph in a newspaper, the subject is then researched at length before the final photograph is shot and often altered digitally before printing. During the 1980s and 1990s Gursky's work took on an increasingly global range of subjects, and he presented his images on an ever larger scale.

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali was born in Spain in 1904. When he was a child, he showed strange behavior and often interrupted his class in school. As he got older, he started to paint pictures that came from his dreams. His dreams and his paintings were scary and unreal.
Dali went to art school in Madrid, Spain. He got kicked out, and never finished. He even spent time in jail. However, he continued to paint, and his art style became known as Surrealism. Salvador Dali drew everyday items, but changed them in odd ways. For example, one of his paintings is of melting clocks.
Before he died at the age of 85 in 1989, Dali had created works in film, ballet, opera, fashion, jewelry, and advertising illustrations.
Some famous works of his are:

The Persistence of Memory
Crucifixion
The Sacrament of the Last Supper

He once said, ' Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid. '
Meanings:
The persistence of memory.
The well-known surrealist piece introduced the image of the soft melting pocket watch. It epitomizes Dalí's theory of "softness" and "hardness," which was central to his thinking at the time. As Dawn Ades wrote, "The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order." This interpretation suggests that Dalí was incorporating an understanding of the world introduced by Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. Asked by Ilya Prigogine whether this was in fact the case, Dalí replied that the soft watches were not inspired by the theory of relativity, but by the surrealist perception of a Camembert cheese melting in the sun.
Soft watch at moment of first explosion.
He first painted the soft watch in "the persistence of memory" and it has a different meaning than in the "soft watch at the moment of first explosion." The soft watch itself is a surreal symbol which addresses the unimportance or the irrelevance of time during the process of a dream. The soft watch exploding addresses nuclear physics, Einstein physics and its relation to time. So in the exploding clock we can see time disintegrating, with einstein moving objects and the faster they move the slower they experience time. So Dali has moved that irrelevancy of time from the process of dreams to physics. Dali was an avid reader of the sciences and included many of its branches to his art from psychology, biology, chemistry and physics.

The persistence of memory 1931

Soft watch at moment of first explosion

Leonardo Da Vinci

In 1452, Leonardo Da Vinci was born in an Italian town called Vinci. He lived in a time period called the Renaissance, when everyone was interested in art. Even though Da Vinci was a great artist, he became famous because of all the other things he could do. He was a sculptor, a scientist, an inventor, an architect, a musician, and a mathematician. When he was twenty, he helped his teacher finish a painting called The Baptism of Christ. When he was thirty, he moved to Milan. That is where he painted most of his pictures. DaVinci's paintings were done in the Realist style.

Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull, and he outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. He made important discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics, but he did not publish his findings and they had no direct influence on later science.Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter. Among his works, the Mona Lisa is s the the best known and most visited, and also the most sung about and most parodied work of art in the world, and The Last Supper the most reproduced religious painting of all time, with their fame approached only by Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on items as varied as the euro, textbooks, and T-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number because of his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, compose a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.

Mona Lisa

The painting, thought to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, is in oil on a poplar panel, and is believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506. It was acquired by King Francis I of France and is now the property of the French Republic, on permanent display at theMusée du Louvre in Paris. The ambiguity of the subject's expression, frequently described as enigmatic, the monumentality of the composition, the subtle modeling of forms and the atmospheric illusionism were novel qualities that have contributed to the continuing fascination and study of the work.

La Scapigliata

The work is an unfinished painting, mentioned for the first time in the House of Gonzaga collection in 1627. It is perhaps the same work that Ippolito Calandra, in 1531, suggested to hang in the bedroom of Margaret Paleologa, wife of Federico II Gonzaga. In 1501, the marquesses wrote to Pietro Novellara asking if Leonardo could paint a Madonna for her private studiolo.

Leda and the swan

Leonardo da Vinci began making studies in 1504 for a painting, apparently never executed, of Leda seated on the ground with her children. In 1508 he painted a different composition of the subject, with a nude standing Leda cuddling the Swan, with the two sets of infant twins, and their huge broken egg-shells. The original of this is lost, probably deliberately destroyed, and was last recorded in the French royal Château de Fontainebleau in 1625 by Cassiano dal Pozzo. However it is known from many copies, of which the earliest are probably the Spiridon Leda, perhaps by a studio assistant and now in the Uffizi, and the one at Wilton House in England (illustrated).