Chapter 10: My Thoughts

You have to enjoy the simple things in life. Like the author talks about in the book, on how he was just waiting in line, with his son wondering around the store looking at Spider Man balloons and the gumball machines in the supermarket. He had started to talk about how we should enjoy the wonders in life. Since I am very inexperienced with the world around me, it makes me think about what it's gonna be like when I go out in the world alone. I don't really know what is gonna be out there for me, but I have a sure idea of what I want to do with my life. When I went to the city by myself with STAC, I started to notice the world around me more and more. I noticed all the forms of art around me when I was alone. It seems that whenever I am alone and free I always imagine certain things and how they are. When I am controlled,  I can only have those certain moments to myself at random times of the day that seem so small for me to recognize the world around me. I enjoy the small moments that someone would do something for me, or that I would do something for someone else. The world around me is changing rapidly. It's my time to seize it.

Chapter 9: My Thoughts

You must enjoy the journey of travel, for that is also an art that it being taken away from the world today. For many people when they walk around, their faces are always in their phones, looking at a screen for hours on end. What is the good  of looking at a screen instead of looking up at the fellow people's faces around you. This relates to what Walter Benjamin was talking about on what would happen to people if they were to ignore art entirely. It is not that art itself is getting ignored, it is that people would not really need to see the orignals that famous artists made. They would instead see recreations of it or buy them for their own homes. By the twentieth century, people started to see traveling art exhibits at the Metropolitan, etc. It would get packed and packed with people that would  want to see these new exhibits. It was especially good for art lovers that lived in the city to have the advantage to go to all these different art museums at their own fingertips. As much as the art world is improving, I feel when people could just go online to see a painting instead of going to the actual museum to see it. It scares me to know that people will not be able to enjoy the art of the world around them at all. This had all happned because of screens set up in the own comfort of your home in order to do work. Soon enough, it will be to see paintings and works of art. Musuems could go potentially go out of business. I would not want to see the Metropolitan Musuem of Art shut down. At the rate that Americans look at a screen, it's time to sometimes shut down and look at the art around you like old times.

Chapter 8: My Thoughts

Philip Pearlstein ( a day to day artist) reminds me of my cousin who lives in Italy. Her name is Paola and she is a fellow artist herself. She reminds me of Pearlstein because of how they have the same lifestyle. The author, Kimmelman , was basically restating what my cousin Paola does day to day in her studio. She has her own unique style of doing things. Paola has inspired me to trybti jump into making art, but every single time I try to, I could never actually do it. My art that I would create on a canvas could never be as original as hers. She has that certain stroke that wraps the whole piece of artwork together. All of her paintings have stories about them that are from her previous experiences and adventures in Italy. Though she spoke about telling me her adventures, but never got to it. It was all about her artwork. Her artwrok is a always a specific style that she gets inspired from in a mood that she would be feeling that day. Back to how she reminds me of Pearlstein, she always lives day to day with creating her original artworks. If you were to see what she creates, you would be enchanted not knwoing how to explain it. It would be that confusing to try and figure out. It would be a puzzle , just like how I think that Pearlstein's works are like. Working day to day in routine makes you more committed to getting a piece of artwork done. It shows a deep a passion that makes you want you to get it done once you start.Paola I believe has tried to do nudes before , but I have never seen them up close. So, I do not know if she still has them or not. I think that Paola is the next generation of Pearlstein by how close in working the same that they are.

Chapter 7: My Thoughts

I had to keep rereading the second page of the chapter to actually realize what Douglas Mawson ( an Australian explorer) went through on his expedition to Alaska. What he did was so insane to not only go on the most treacherous route on the expedition, but to actually have limited people with you to travel on that route. He had one of his men die with most of the supplies, so him and Xavier Mertz ( an experienced mountaineer) to survive on only so little food. What would be the whole explanation behind all of this? It was all for art. Mawson chose the form of art that he would be remembered for doing by being the most brave to go to Antartica. If he survived the trip that he had all planned out, he would have one heck of a story to tell. One story that would be his own original creation, his own work of art that he wanted remembered. This turned out to be more dangerous than picking up a chisel to make a sculpture or painting on a canvas. A 35 year old man survived in the Antartic for more than a year with struggling to survive and having fellow workers die all for his orginal creation of art. Once he told his story, people had kept him remebered as the one of the greatest explorers that would be remembered forever. The thing that I do not understand is that why would he do this in the first place? To me, he may have done this to keep himself from going insane. Yet again, I could be worng. With other famous artists, they did complete certain pieces of art in order to go on the brink of being nuts. Well, would you look at what art does to you.

Chapter 6: My Reflection

Women have an effect on the art world, such as how Charlotte Salomon,( a young Jewish - German female writer) who taught the world about love before the Holocaust. It makes me so proud to have women finally come to mind instead of men come to mind when it comes to independent modern artists. Women never really got the same respect that men always got during those certain centuries that you lived. However, when women started to get more respected around the world, people undertsood how highly improtant a woman is. We always would remember a man's name for any thing in history such as our Presidents, war heros and people that changed the way America was about slavery, etc. It makes you realize that women never got remembered for any thing like that. Instead they were the average housewife, taking care of the children and waiting for their darling husband to come home so that he can eat her pork roast right out of the oven. Now that I read this chapter, Women have started to make their mark on the world, the art world, one word or one stroke at a time.
Also, the fact that all of these old artist who painted masterpieces can have viewers of these documents see soemthing fresh every time. Every decade that the art world changes, these old time favorite works of art spring back to life to show today's artist the history of art. They connect with a painting that they see and that makes them connect with their work more and more. Artists that have lived many years ago that leave their legacys behind in their work let people have insight of how art once was. Modern artists today take risks in the art world which gives them the ambition to see how people will act when they see a different kind of art. For example, Pollock took the risk to show his original work of art to the world by creating art of dripping it onto the canvas. Suddenly, that sparked a new era of how the art world changed forever. The same thing that happened for women to create an new era of art forever.

Chapter 5: My Thoughts

I can't stop thinking about the museum that they mentioned that is the Mount Vernon Museum of Incandescent Lighting. While I was reading, I started to visualize all of these bright lights illiminating this tiny room in the bottom of his house. It seems a little strange to have about 75,000 lightbulbs in cases all around this tiny room, but I admire the fact that Dr.Hicks( the collector) would have done this. He as an artist, strived to collect as many lightbulbs as he could. Each lightbulb he collected has a story attached to it in some way. In other words, he brought all of these light bulbs together in one tiny room to be shared with the public.This then turned into his story of 'the man who shined the way ' or something like that. Dr.Hicks seems to be the kind of outgoing type that has a loving quirkiness about him. I would have loved to meet this fellow artist, who's art like others may start of small and then end up into something big. 

I always wanted to start my own collection of some kind of object. First , I tried those Dum-Dum wrappers on the lollipops you would get. So, I tried to start to collect them and lost interest soon after a good three weeks. I only had 25 of them, but sooner or later the collection had dissappeared out of sight. Second, I tried to collect Snapple bottle caps. I have a good amount of them now, but I am still working on it. I collect them for the facts underneath. I want to get 723, for that is the highest number fact I ever got. Lastly, I wanted to really see if I could actually collect something because I had to share with the my 1st grade class something I collected.  I started to get stumped on what I could collect, but there was no purpose to collect Qtips or even gum wrappers. It was getting to the point  that I had no idea what I wanted to collect. Until finally, my mom told me why not photos? No wonder we kept photo albums! We collected pictures over the years of me growing up as a child. Every single time we would take a new picture, it was a new addition to our collection. That was my art when I was a child, collecting photographs. 

Chapter 4: My Reflection

Life is a work of art. In my experiences  everything and anything that you do to yourself and others around you in the world is art. It just dawned on me while I was reading it the middle of this chapter, that when Johnson died, he planned it to be the biggest work of art he had ever created. He planned out the exact moment that he died because he realized how people would look out into the waters off of Long Island to find this body floating out there. This appears that people would look at this as an inspiration to create such art as putting their own self in their artwork. By using the world around you, you get the urge to create. Art is a vision that can be carried out without lifting a paintbrush or a chisel to scuplt. For example, if an artist places themselves in a scenic location and then has viewers observe him, that in itself can be perceived as art with little effort. It is sensational way of how to take the world by storm by transforming their minds into thinking in a new way of how to view art. By thinking this way, Johnson wanted to be remembered. He wanted to never be forgotten by anyone on the face of the Earth. By trying to be remembered like Michelangelo or Picasso, he did his greatest piece of artwork yet. He created artwork in how he died by using the world around him to leave an impression on the world to get people to never forget him or what he created.

Chapter 3: My Reflection

What is modern art? I've always thought about how artists would actually just think of anything out of the blue, put it on a canvas and then call it "art". Is it really that easy? I have learned in my  STAC class about Pollock, the abstract artist, is how he made art through apparently random paint drips. Basically, this was a creation of his very original imagination. It looked so easy to do in the movie that I saw in class, but the amount of concentration on the actor's face  proved to me that maybe it wasn't as easy as I thought. It seems to be THAT easy, but at the same time not SO easy because he put so muvh effort into it.
Another artist named George Bellows that I read about asked  if an artist were to put horse manure on a canvas and call it 'modern art', would the art world have to accept it? Of course, there is someone always answers yes. In some way, it seems to me that anyone could create anything original and call it "art". The one thing that I have observed about abstract art is that some people find it absolutely while others find it absolutely repulsive.There are so many different and varied expressions of art that may be beautiful in the eyes of the beholder. It can mean one thing to one person and a different thing for another person. For me, anything can seem beautiful such as nature, my family, the world around me. It just makes me wonder to be in someone else's shoes for a change. If I were to think that something is beautiful and in the view of someone else it wasn't, how would I come to terms with that?

Chapter 2: My Thoughts

As I read in Chapter 2. most people entered the Kodak world as amateurs. Some did not know how to take pictures while others made it seem to be all a joke. It makes me think about what is the actual story behind all of these photograpahs that people take. They are formal curiosities.These kinds of photos make people laugh. Others make people cry. Some people have a personal intake on a certain photo. If I ever lost a photo, the person that saw me in it would wonder who I was and where I came from. All they would know about me is what I look like and the date on the back of it that is was taken. This person would then infer the rest of what happened that day. We would never have any contact, but in their own mind, they could imagine me as the perfect friend. But in the end, they would never actually know me ya know? It seems to be a whole big world out there that is just sitting there waiting for me to explore. And in just a couple of years, I will be there. Off to college. set out on the world.

Chapter 1 of the Accidental Masterpiece: My Thoughts

I admired the Chapter overall for what it tells you about the world around us as a whole. It dawns on me that some people think that art is just a simple thing that could be a hobby for a person that they could do for hours on end, but I find it to be something more than that. Art is a passion. A way of life that can't be ignored and that is all around us everyday of our lives. We seem to run away from it further and further, but it will eventually catch up on us in the end. Some people embrace it. Other tend to ignore it. Many take it into a different view. I take it into the view that it has a certain way of sculpting people into who they are. I can learn a lot from this one quote in the chapter. It says," The beautiful is a promise of happiness." It means to me that any kind of beauty that you would see in the world comes from you being happy with who you are and where you come from. You need to be happy with your life in order to live with yourself everyday. After all, you have only one face to live with for the rest of your life by staring at it in the mirror.