Danny Greenberg Post Number One

Wow, I have a lot to say—

But before I forget, my flickr address http://www.flickr.com/photos/silenceofthedans/

Though people think I am, I am not necessarily an optimistic person. So when I first arrived in Italy, deprived of a night of sleep, recovering from the culture shock of the silence and efficiency of the Frankfort airport, and shlepping my bag over cobble stone streets I was not digging Florence. A few days later I had experienced some good food, great architecture, some trashy American Television dubbed in Italian, but I didn’t love the city yet. I started making mental notes of how Florence was different than the US, and I came across the obvious realization that Jana had told us about on the second day—‘Florence is all about the food.’ So when my suite was invited to eat dinner with the architecture suite, I decided to cook gnocchi with Monica, Felicia, and Josh. I quickly discovered that I loved cooking. That night planted the seeds for great friendships. Since then I have been having a fabulously fantastic time.

On another note completely…

Thursday night I walked home with a friend and we reflected on Jana’s and Regan’s classes followed by an unusually deep conversation—but for the sake of this blog I’ll paraphrase a few relevant ideas we discussed. Essentially we were trying to figure out why artists are so creative. I divided our final sentiments into numbers, and each point is built upon previous points.

1. Formal training in art through observation—drawing and sculpting from life—builds a unique understanding of the physical world around us. So from there artists learn to consciously control compositions to create a specific mood and relationship between the subject and the viewer, with both obvious and subtle uses of visual elements, creating a sophistacated work of art (this is what Regan discussed in her class).
2. Furthermore the act of creating art from observations allows one to draw visual comparisons between one object or environment to another.
3. This ability to note comparisons between dissimilar objects and or environments holds potential for the creation of a visual metaphor.
4. Metaphors are one of the most sophisticated methods of exposition and thinking. This is so because metaphores are used to explain complex, cerebral sentiments in more simple concrete fashion.
5. Thus the thesis is, through the act of observational drawing an awareness of subject matter is gained which leads to the ability to draw (no pun intended) visual comparisons. From there visual comparisons may be used to create strong conseptual, metaphorical works of art.

Maybe all of this is only relevant to me, but as an art and english major want to try to link the two.