Initial Response - Blog 1

            I think that when it comes to artwork representation is everything. What a piece of art represents comes from both the artist herself and the audience of the artwork.  An artist creates their artwork based off of some mental representation or abstraction. The audience then determines whether or not the piece of art adequately represents what they want it to.

For an artist, the piece of artwork must represent what the artist wants it to represent. This could be anything from a sketch of a landscape or a painting capturing the inner struggle of the self, which may distort the external image of the person to the audience and make them look abstract instead of realistic. While I cannot speak for every artist, I know that many do not want to show, sell, or give away artwork that they feel is incomplete, not their best work, or does not represent them fully. If artists did not have an image in their mind when they were working on their project, then they would not know where to go or whether or not they liked their work. Of course this is not always the case. Authors like James Joyce and William Faulkner wrote novels in stream of consciousness in which they supposedly wrote what immediately came to mind. However, even then the words and phrases they wrote down would be representations of their individual consciousness.

While for the most part the artist has some mental representation of what they are creating, the audience forms their own opinion on the artwork based on the accuracy and adequacy of that representation.  What the artwork represents is up to the opinion of the viewer. One might find an artist’s self-portrait spectacular and therefore the function that the self-portrait represents is accuracy or lifelikeness. However, the viewer may find that the value or function of a particular artwork is representative of the artist herself or the historical context surrounding the artwork. The painting may represent high social class and wealth, intellectuality, or hold some personal significance. For example, the price of any Cézanne painting automatically increases due to his fame as an artist, while a child’s first finger painting might mean more to the child’s parents than it would to anyone else. Most people who know some art history would more than likely find that Cézanne created some spectacular works of art, but to the average person the beautiful and perfectly technical brush strokes of any Cézanne painting may mean nothing to them if they have no point of reference. To the average person, Cézanne’s paintings of fruit (like the one below) may only represent oddly shaped apples and nothing more.