Introduction to Landscape of the Mind

Gallery Name: Landscape of the Mind

Where it is located: The Mind

Who runs the gallery: Pod #4

What type of work you show: Photographs, Sculptures, Drawings, and Paintings and a Live Exhibit.

Exhibition Intoduction

Title of the Exhibition: Lost in a Dream

List of Artist: Vincent van Gogh, Louis Wain, Salvador Dali, Bryan Lewis Saunders, Sergeev Vladimir, Yoan Capote, Andreas Gursky, Rook Floro, Rodney Lough Jr., Jee Young Lee.

Exhibition Statement: This exhibition is about expressing "a state of soul" or emotion in an artistic medium.  To almost treat the mind as a physical structure, exploring depths of the thought process, good or bad.  These works all manifest and portray aspects of the mind in very different ways, the personality of the artist bleeding into their work.  For some the backdrop to their mind may be a serene oasis - an escape or safe place, others it could be a hell - representation of a tortured soul.  Landscape of the mind is almost self explanatory: just as each landscape is organic to it's environment, each piece reflects the artist who made it as well as the person who chose it.

Wheatfield With Crows

Artist: Vincent van Gogh
Title: Wheatfield with Crows
Media: Oil painting on double square canvas

Dimensions: 50.2 cm x 103 cm (19.9 in x 40.6 in)
Date: July 1890

Artist Information:

Vincent Willem van Gogh, born March 30, 1853 – July 29, 1890 was a post-Impressionist painter of Dutch origin whose work, notable for its rough beauty, emotional honesty and bold color, had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. After years of painful anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness, he died aged 37 from a gunshot wound, generally accepted to be self-inflicted (although no gun was ever found). His work was then known to only a handful of people and appreciated by fewer still.

Artist Statement: 
"They depict vast, distended wheatfields under angry skies, and I deliberately tried to express sadness and extreme loneliness in them"

"I am almost certain that these canvases illustrate what I cannot express in words, that is, how healthy and reassuring I find the countryside."
  
Kathleen Erickson finds the painting as expressing both sorrow and a sense of his life coming to an end.

Background Information on Piece:   One of van Gogh's most famous paintings, it was made in the final weeks of his life and is subject to the most speculation of any of his works.
 During his time in Auvers, van Gogh painted numerous landscapes in the same size as above on elongated canvases.  Jules Michelet, one of van Gogh's favorite authors, wrote of the crow: "They interest themselves in everything, and observe everything. The ancients, who lived far more completely than ourselves in and with nature, found it no small profit to follow, in a hundred obscure things where human experience as yet affords no light, the directions of so prudent and sage a bird."

Connection to theme:  The reason I chose Van Gogh for the first piece in this exhibit is mainly the brand recognition.  Van Gogh's signature style is instantly noticed by practically anyone who has seen a painting, but still carries much significance despite being wildly popular.  The style exhibited here, known as impressionism, manages to evoke an array of emotions through a simplified landscape.  The path leading to nowhere gives "a heightened sense of isolation", and the dark clouds and murky sky compliment the feeling of uncertainty and loneliness.  This painting was made during the final weeks of Van Gogh's life, and is argued by many to be his last work.  Knowing this was made by Van Gogh in the final moments of his life make the themes of death become so much more alive, epitomized with the birds representing death, rebirth, and freedom.

Van Gogh is perhaps the most accessible choice to introduce the unfamiliar to our theme, Landscape of the Mind.  The medium through which Van Gogh chose to express himself represents his personality and arsenal of emotions felt at the time, effectively capturing an emotion in time forever.

Mischievous Cat

                                                         Artist:  Louis Wain

Title: Mischievous Cat 
Media: Colored Crayon 
Dimensions: 9"x6 3/4" 
   Date: 1902

Title: Paisley Pattern Cat
Media: Pencil
Dimensions: 10"x7"
Date: 1929

Swans Reflecting Elephants

Artist: Salvador Dali
Title: Swans Reflecting Elephants
Media: Oil Paint
Dimensions: 1' 8" x 2' 6" (51 cm x 77 cm) 
Date: 1937

About the Artist:
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marqués de Dalí de Pubol , known as Salvador Dalí, was a prominent Spanish Surrealist painter born  on May 11, 1904 in Figueres, Spain.  Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters.  His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to an "Arab lineage", claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.
Dalí was highly imaginative, and also enjoyed indulging in unusual and grandiose
behavior. His eccentric manner and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention than his artwork, to the dismay of those who held his work in high esteem, and to the irritation of his critics.

Artist's Statement: Dalí explained his process as a "spontaneous method of irrational understanding based upon the interpretative critical association of delirious phenomena."

Background Information on Work:  This painting is from Dalí's Paranoiac-critical period. Painted using oil on canvas, it contains one of Dalí's famous double images. The double images were a major part of Dalí's "paranoia-critical method," which he put forward in his 1935 essay "The Conquest of the Irrational." Dalí used this method to bring forth the hallucinatory forms, double images and visual illusions that filled his paintings during the Thirties.

As with earlier Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Swans Reflecting Elephants uses the reflection in a lake to create the double image seen in the painting. In Metamorphosis, the reflection of Narcissus is used to mirror the shape of the hand on the right of the picture. Here, the three swans in front of bleak, leafless trees are reflected in the lake so that the swans' heads become the elephants' heads and the trees become the bodies of the elephants. In the background of the painting is a Catalonian landscape depicted in fiery fall colors, the brushwork creating swirls in the cliffs that surround the lake, to contrast with the stillness of the water.

How it Relates to the Theme: I chose this piece, because to me Surrealism is the epitome of our theme, Landscape of the Mind.  Dalí's character and personality carry into his work, regardless of the medium he chooses to express himself in.  The twisted and melting landscapes he produces are far from unoriginal, they are the product of a unique mind, and a reminder that reality is only how we perceive it.

Drug Induced Self Portraits

 

Artist: Bryan Lewis Saunders

Title: Top right=Hash, top left=crystal meth, botom right= cocoaine, bottom right=bath salts Dimensions: 8 1/2" x 11"

Media: metallic crayon

Date: 2001

Background Info on Artist: Ryan Lewis Sanders was born in 1969 in Washington dc is a performance artist and performance poet known for his disturbing spoken word rants, tragic art performances and stand up tragedies.

Information On Piece:  March 30, 1995, Saunders began drawing at least one self-portrait every day for the rest of his life. For 11 days in 2001, he started an experiment were he took a different drug everyday and painted a self portrait under the influence. This artist is part of landscape of the mind because not everyone has a happy landscape some people tend to fall into drugs or abuse alcohol and use art as an escape.

Still Donnets

Artist:  Sergeev Vladimir
Title: Still Donets

Media: Painted On Oil/ Canvas  
Dimensions: 35.4” X 42.1”
Date: 2002

Artist Biographical Information: 
 Sergeev Vladimir was born in 1950 in Kazakhstan. IN 1976 he finished the Alma-Ata Art School, in 1984 –Kharkiv Institute of Industrial Art. Since 2000 has been a member of the National Union of Ukrainian artists. Since 1974 he has participated in exhibitions. His works were exhibited in Kiev, Kharkiv, Canada, Italy, Germany, and also were sold to private collectors in the USA, Russia, Canada, and Italy. Vladimir Gennadjevich Sergeev died in 2005.

How It Relates to the Theme:
When I saw this piece it made me think of a happy place in my mind that I could visit whenever I just need a break from reality. The painting itself also gives off a relaxed feeling when I look at it because it looks so cal and peaceful. It also Captures the realism of the landscape really well.