Sara: Post V

One thing I love about the city is that you can see into other people's homes so easily. Creepy, yes, but I like watching people when they have no idea they're being watched, that way they're being their whole selves, you can really get inside their heads. This is the view out of my bedroom window. I've never actually met these neighbors and I only kind of see them when they throw the dog or the garbage outside or when they stand in their kitchen staring into the refrigerator. I wouldn't be able to pick them out in a line up, but I feel like I know them... they're mysterious. In a way, these apartments are like portraits of the neighbors whose faces I've never seen and I enjoy drawing them.

Andrew Wyeth is my favorite artist and the reason I mention him now is because I think he is successful in bringing life to the inanimate objects (from houses and boats to tin cans and fruit) in his paintings and drawings. I think the amount of detail in his work shows the care and attention he gives to each object and it makes the viewer wonder why it deserved so much attention. In this painting for example, it seems to me like it is a portrait; whether it's a portrait of the house or of someone else is a mystery, and that's what keeps my drawn to his work. He often said that he viewed his own work as abstract and that realism was just his style.


Thoughts on Writing on the Wall:

I found this article interesting because I never gave the relationship between image and text much thought, or verbal and visual. Discussing how the invention of the alphabet changed transformed writing from pictorial to non-pictorial, then separating the acts of perception and conception and later relating them back to one another by saying that "writing is indeed visual language, that is, it is something which appeals to the eye as well as to the mind" is what I found most important.