Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt's drawings, paintings,and prints focus mainly on women in their everyday lives, with a concentration on women as mothers and their children . Her images are often of intimate, personal moments. Many of her images are of recognizable, comforting, and familiar everyday events.

Artist's Website Through National Gallery of Art:
http://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/ggcassattptg/ggcassattptg-main2.html#overview

Review:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B03E1D9133DF934A35751C1A9659C8B63

Galleries and Museums:
National Gallery of Art

I first started to look at Mary Cassatt's work when I was in elementary school. I was constantly fascinated by her imagery, maybe because it was familiar and comforting. Many of her images are intamate portraits of women and children. Recently I began to look at her work again in relation to my project. My imagery deals with family and their most precious and personal moments. At first her imagery is what struck me, the actual subjects. After taking a longer look I began to pay more attention to her choice of colors and brushstrokes. She spent most of her life in Paris, and studied with Degas. Naturally, her style was largely influenced by French Impressionism. Her whispy, quick brushstrokes give a sense of immediacy. Her work isn't just about conveying the time and events that were taking place, but rather the feelings and emotions that were present in those private moments. This struck me as being similar to some of the pictures I have taken from my family videos. Each picture is a moment, frozen in time. One only gets the impression of that moment through my images. This is partly because of the distortion from the image being transferred from film to video, to tv screen and then back onto film or onto digital. In many of these photographs the image is hazy and sometimes hard to read. Even with this distortion, one gets a sense of emotion from the image. Impressionist were interested with recording the moment and the emotional charge of that moment, without adding intricate detail of the environment and subject. This is what I hope to accomplish with my work.

Legacy

"Little Candle In The Pulpit: The Sacred legacy of Memory and Genealogy In Li-Young Lee's
Book Of My Nights

Malandra, Marc. English Language Notes, Spring2006, Vol. 44 Issue 1, p19-27, 9p

In this article, Malandra discusses the importance of memory and family history in poet Li-Young Lee's work.
"Poet and memorist Li-Young Lee has frequently been singled out for his preoccupation with memory, with the fluctuating rhythms of personal identity as they engage the circumstances of an amazing family history."
She references Lee's poetry, as well as other writers ans students of Lee's work. One exapmle is a quote from Pierre Nora on family, memory, and history.
"Memory and history, far from being synomonous, are thus in many respects opposed...Memory is always a phenomenom of the present, a tying us to the eternal present; history is a represtation of the past. Memory, being a phenomenon of emotion and magic, accomodates only those facts that suit it...History, being an intellectual, nonreligious acctivity, calls for analysis and critical discourse. Memory situates rememberance in a sacred context."

Reading some of the excerpts from Lee's poems was very interesting for me. I love seeing how other artists, writers, poets, performers, or any other artistic person expresses themselves when dealing with memories and the past as a whole. I was also interested in how many artists, such as Li-Young Lee, see their geneaology and past experiences as sacred and dear to them. Family, history, and memories are things that all people can understand and relate to. The difference comes in how certain people relate and interact with these things.
My work deals heavily with family and memories. I hold these memories (photographs and family video footage) as sacred pieces of myself. This is what motivates me to work in this medium and with this subject matter. My viewers don't have to be part of my family or know any of the family history to be able to understand and appreciate my work. This is because the idea of memory and family is universal. I am working with a personal subject matter but am saying much more than how important my family is to me, as Li-Young Lee does wit his poetry. His work speaks on many different levels. It speaks to society as a whole and also has an undercurrent of religious symbolism. My work this past semester dealt with family and memory as well as Hindu and Buddhist concepts and ideas. I am using a subject that is dear to me as well as exploring what can be seen, taken, and learned about the world around me from these important, sacred memories.

Richard Bilingham

Bilingham is most recognized for his series on his mother and father, Liz and Ray. He began taking photographs of his parents to use as reference material for his paintings. These photographs eventually formed a series and a book, called "Ray's a Laugh."

A quote from Bilingham on this series:
'it's not my intention to shock, to offend, sensationalise, be political or whatever, only to make work that is as spiritually meaningful as I can make it - in all these photographs I never bothered with things like the negatives. some of them got marked and scratched. I just used the cheapest film and took them to be processed at the cheapest place. I was just trying to make order out of chaos.'

Interview:
http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/T/turner_2001/RichardBillinghamMain.htm

The Closest I could get to a Web Site:
http://www.designboom.com/eng/funclub/billingham.html
or
http://www.arken.dk/content/us/arkens_collection/photography_and_graphics/richard_billingham

Galleries and Museums:
Museum of Modern Art, New York. Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London

MOMA on Bilingham:
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/1996/newphoto12/index.html

I have been working with old family film footage for my senior portfolio project. I am interested in family history and interaction. My goal is to capture the rare and private family moments and show both the the beautiful and the darker aspects of these moments. I like the candid, raw, and unfiltered look of Bilingham's work on his parents. I can see both horror and a sort of raw beauty in his work. I find it interesting to see how other present day artists are representing their families through their art.