Jackson Pollock

Abstract Art is art that is not an accurate representation of a form or object. The artist can represent objects in many different ways including the shape, color, and form. The artist takes the object and then either simplifies it or exaggerates it. Abstract Expressionism was the first major art movement that was started in the United States. It began in New York in the 1940’s. Abstract expressionist art, unlike regular abstract art, is more of a study in color and brush stroke. There are two types of Abstract Expressionism Art, color field painting and action painting. Color field painting artists are concerned with colors and shapes, while action artists are more concerned with paint texture and the movements of the artist to create the work.

Paul Jackson Pollock was a major artist in the abstract expressionism era in America. Pollock’s paintings were more about the motivation behind them, and processes that he took to make his pieces of artwork, rather than just the look of them, and this causes there to be deeper meaning when looking at the paintings. Pollock was an action artist. The types of actions Pollock used to make his paints were dripping and pouring the paint to his works.

Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming. Pollock began to study painting in 1929, at the Art Students League in New York. Pollock’s mentor was Thomas Hart Benton, who was a regionalist painter, but Pollock was also influenced by Mexican muralist painters Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros. By the mid 1940’s Pollock was painting completely as an abstract artist. Pollock would put his canvases on the ground to paint, and this way he could literally be “in” his paintings if he walked around them and worked from all four sides of the painting.

Pollock for several years had been undergoing psycho therapy for his depression, and it was thought that his depression was another reason behind his unique style of painting. Pollock would use his whole body to throw and drip paint onto very large canvases that he used for his paintings. This is what gave him the name “Jack the Dipper” and helped him coin the term action painting. Pollock wanted to abandon the European traditional of painting with easel and paintbrushes. European artist had set a standard for painting and Pollock wanted to be able to bring something new to the scene of art and how it was viewed, this is what made him turn away from easels and brushes on canvas.

It is really around 1947 is when all of Pollock’s paintings began to look like action paintings. Before 1947 his paintings are really just abstract paintings. All of Pollock’s paintings however have to be studied to even begin to make sense if they do at all. It is really the names of the paintings that give a person an idea of what to think of them. All abstract art is something that takes imagination to look at. Some of Pollock’s paintings had nothing to do with the look, but everything to do with the methods that Pollock used. The paintings Catheral made in 1947, Full Fzathom Five made in 1947, Painting made in 1948, and Lavendar Mist No1 made in 1950, are all paintings that make absolutely positively no sense what so ever, but if they were to be looked at without a name then they would just be a canvas with paint spilled on them. Pollock really shows his drip painting skills in his Untitled painting made in 1950, and Number 7 made in 1951. All of these paints are just emotion that is displayed on a canvas. There is not a true picture that is created, but the more you look at them and contemplate the names of the paintings, more you start to make a real picture out of them.

Pollock is maybe considered the greatest painter of the Abstract Expressionism art movement. Since this is the first big American Art movement, some people consider him to be the greatest American painter, but there are always going to be critics, so some people do not think he was the greatest American Painter. Unfortunately Pollock was killed in a fatal car crash in 1956, so he could not continue to add to his collection of paintings. Maybe he could have painted more pictures that eventually gave an insight to what he really meant or was feeling when he made his paintings.

When I first looked at the paintings that Pollock made I did not have much to say about them but “is this really art?”, but when I think about the worlds that artist create for themselves to live in, and how they paint those worlds for other people to enjoy, it makes sense that I am not supposed to understand art. Pollock did not make his paints so everyone could understand them, in fact I am probably more than sure he never wanted anyone to really know what his paints meant. Everybody has to make up their own meaning for abstract paintings.





Kramer, Hilton. "Jackson Pollock & the New York School, II." The New Criterion 1702 1999 April 24 2006 .

Pioch, Nicolas. "Abstract Expressionism: Jackson Pollock." The BMW Foundation 1607 2002 April 28 2006 .

Julie Hefferman: Self-Portrait as Dirty Princess with Tail

I went to the Ackland Art museum in Chapel Hill about a week ago. Of course I was lost when I got inside, because I was looking for the 20th and 21st century art pieces. I finally found the areas of the museum that held the art works that I was looking for, but not until after I got some of the free food that was on display. In the 20th century art room on the first floor there was a very interesting 3-dimensional technological computer piece that was made out of key boards and small, maybe three inch, computer screens. There were also other paintings hanging on the walls that looked like I needed to be a deep thinker or a philosopher to understand. As I walked around the room taking in each piece of art work in slowly, I came across the painting that I have posted above. The name of the painting is Self-Portrait as Dirty princess with tail, by Julie Hefferman. This painting was very disturbing, but beautiful at the same time.

When I got back to my room, I looked on the internet for the painting so I could study it longer and better in the comfort of my own room. But to my dismay I could not find the same picture in the museum, so the picture that I have up with my paper is not the exact same as the picture that is hanging in the Ackland Art museum. The picture in the museum is larger, and shows the princess standing in a ball-room. The tail had more animals lying around, and there was a giant dead squid coming from where the tentacles are at the bottom of the picture. The walls of the ballroom in the painting, had paintings on them that were covered by shadows, but one of the paintings on the wall, was a picture of an open fetal pig that is resembles the one that I used in my college biology lab for dissection. The chandelier is not as close to her head as it is in this picture, and the painting is gloomier, but the flowers surrounding the tail are very bright.
Julie Hefferman is an American painter. She went to University of California, at Santa Cruz, C.A. and graduated with a B.F.A. with honors in painting and printmaking. Then she attended Yale School of Art, in New Haven, C.T., and graduated with a M.F.A in painting. All of the Julie Hefferman paintings that come up on the computer look very similar. They are gloomy looking along the outside of the paintings, and the center or main focal points in the paintings are very bright. Most of the paintings titles start off with self-portrait.

I still have not come up with the exact reason of why this painting captured my attention in the museum, but there are things in it that stick out in my mind. The contrast of colors and tones may have been what made me stop and look harder and longer at this picture than others, or maybe the dead animals that surround the tail of the princess and her colors. Most of the time people do not think of death with bright colors. The fetal pig that is in the wall the original painting in the Ackland museum is interesting to me also because I took special interest in the dissection of the pigs when I was in biology lab. The caption on the wall beside the picture from the author, said that the painting represented the destructiveness of the wealthy of the time. So I guess that is what all the dead animals represent in the picture. The wealthy is being represented by the princess, and the tail represents the beauty and power that people had at the time, but also destructiveness and greed of the wealthy at that time.

There were other paintings in the museum that interested me, but none of them compared to the interest that this painting employed in me. The picture is beautiful, but has so much about it that makes it odd. Maybe I like it so much because like me, at first glance I am just like every other person walking around campus, but if anyone bothers to take a closer look at me and what I do and experience on a daily basis then I am similar to the picture. I challenge what is normal, and expected of me and this picture of Self-Portrait as Dirty Princess with Tail challenges what is expected to be seen in the picture.

Shotguns by: John Biggers

“Shotguns” is a painting that was done in 1987 by John Biggers. I like this piece of art work because it portrays how black people lived in the south after the civil war, and it also represents where I grew up as child. Shotgun houses are narrow, one story houses that have rooms usually lined up in a row. I like the piece because it gives an artistic view of the way if life in the past, but I can still relate it to how black people are living today. In some neighborhoods houses are still being built like this. Most documents and examples of shotgun houses are given from, examples of houses in New Orleans. There are houses like shotgun houses in every black ghetto, around the country, and not just in New Orleans. In my grandmother’s neighborhood, where I spent a lot of my time as a child, there are many of these houses and seeing a painting that is focusing on a common black way of life is touching to me.

In the picture there are many rows of these shotgun houses. The houses are behind a set of train tracks. These train tracks are symbolizing the common term “on the other side of the tracks.” This means on the other side of town that nobody wants to hear of, or have shown. They are like a cultural barrier, and back in the old days black and white people did not mix together. The front row of the houses has a different woman standing on each of the porches. The women remind me of the common term it takes a village to raise a child, and the way the houses are close also reiterate the fact that the communities in the south are close nit. Each of the women on the porches are holding a different type of house in their hands, maybe to symbolize how their house is all they have.

I do not necessarily have a favorite picture, nor do I really look at different pieces of art, but I do know that this piece of art moves me inside, because of the name and the view that it gives of the southern black community. This picture reminds me of how much I love the country and down south ways. I know everything in the south is nothing to be proud of, but I would rather live in the south with its rich history than live up north where people do not speak to each other, and there is not a sense of unity. The strength of the black women and Big Momma in the family I think is really shown in this picture.

The colors in the picture tell another story about the painting and what it is representing. There are dark and light shades through out the painting; it makes the picture interesting to look at. The coloring of the picture does not suggest that it is a sad or gloomy but rather, it gives the sense that the people in the picture have troubles in their lives, but still have good times. The rows of houses in the background are representing the rest of the neighborhood and how close they families are literally and figuratively.

All of these things about the painting that I have talked about have come from the stories that my grandmother and parents used to tell me about their neighborhoods when they were young. I think John Biggers was raised in an all black neighborhood and is probably portraying what he experienced growing up as a child.

Observing Your Bad Habits

Over my spring break I kept track of my sleeping habits. I was supposed to do a self-experiment and have punishments and rewards for things that I did helped me reach my goal, but I do not have the will power to punish myself. Nor do I have the luxury of rewards. There was nothing that I could punish myself with, and I do not have a luxury that I miss and only have on special occasions that I can give myself for a reward. The best I could do was just to collect data on myself.

I did realize that I did worry more about what time I woke up, got out of bed, went to bed, and went to sleep during the week. I did put more effort into staying on a schedule similar to school, while still getting rest. My typical day over the break would be to get up in the morning and get out of bed within an hour of waking up. I recorded what went on throughout my day, and then documented what time I went to bed, why I went to bed, and what time I went to sleep, and what kept me woke before I went to sleep.

Even though I did not change much with an experiment with rewards and consequences, I did change other bad habits that I have. I became aware of my bad habit of slouching, and I put my best effort into making sure that I ate meal when I woke up in the morning. I know the idea of sleeping less was not going to be so hard when I went home on spring break because now when I go home; it is usually just me and my mother in the house. Due to the fact that I am no longer the only person in the house I have to get out of the bed when I wake up.
On the Monday of my spring break I did get to oversleep, but I did have to eventually get out of the bed, get a shower, and go out of the house. I did not stick to any of the rules of my experiment such as getting out of the bed at or around 12:00 noon, eating breakfast, and going to bed at or around 2:00 in the morning, but I was the first day of my long awaited spring break. I did not lie in the bed all day though. At around 4:00 in the afternoon I got dressed because I had to go with my parents to a meeting at my high school about my brother’s school schedule next year. After the meeting though I went back to my room to be lazy, and catch up on my sleep that I deserved from being in school. I went to sleep just a little after 3:00 in the morning.

Tuesday I was woken up by a stranger calling my phone, and my mother knocking at my door asking me if I wanted to go shopping with her and my aunt. So I did get up, and get dressed before 12 noon. In fact I was up, dressed, and ready to go by 10:00 that morning. I did not eat breakfast before I left the house, but I did go in the bakery down the street when we stopped there and get some food to eat. Of course I was not healthy, normal breakfast food, but it was food. When I got back home I was tired and had a headache so I did go to sleep for maybe one and a half to two hours. I woke up though to go to my brother’s band concert at school. I was still tired when I got back home from the concert so I ended up going to sleep earl around 1:00, which is good because I never go to sleep before at the last 2:00 when at school.

Wednesday was a busy day. My mother made dentist appointments for me and my brother, so I had to get up early. I got up and took my mother to the grocery store. I was out of the house by 11:00, but I did not eat breakfast. After the dentist I went back home and did not do anything else substantial all night. I stayed up for a long time though on the internet talking to old friends, and making new friends with people who were like me… Bored and up too late at night. I did not go to sleep until sometime after 5:00.

Thursday was the day I got my hair done. My appointment was 2:00 that afternoon, and I knew I had errands to run for myself before I went to the beauty salon. I set my alarm on my phone to wake my up at 12:00 so I could get up do what I had to do and still make my hair appointment on time. My mother made me eat breakfast before I left the house so for the first time all break I sat at the table and ate breakfast. After I left the hair salon I went to my high school to watch some of my brother’s baseball game. When I got home I left with some of my friends to go to one of their houses for the night. Even though there were all college students and other people there at the house our age, we were all asleep by 2:00.

Friday morning I had an alarm set for 10:00 so I could go back home. My mom was a little jealous of my friends, because I came home and still went somewhere with them. She said that we saw enough of each other in school. When I got home I ate breakfast and got a shower. My mother and I planed a girl’s day out with shopping and a movie. Later that night I was scheduled to baby-sit my little cousin overnight, while her mom threw her older brother a birthday party. I entertained her until around 11:00. We both watched the UNC Men’s basketball team. I went to sleep after the game around 12:00 that morning.

I woke up at 7:56 on Saturday morning because my little cousin was staring at me. We both eventually went back to sleep, and slept until a little after 12:00. I ate breakfast, took a shower, and went on a walk in the front yard with her. Later that night after we took her back to her mom, I went to my brothers swim banquet, and then to the movies with two more of my friends to watch The Hills Have Eyes. I did not go to sleep before 2:00 Saturday because I was having visions of fear from the movie.

The goal of this experiment was to change or maintain my school sleeping habits over spring break. Over any break out of school I usually spent the whole day in the bed. I wanted to get out of this habit and take myself out of the habit of being a homebody, because now that I am in college I should have a life when I am home as well as when I am in school. Besides being as lazy as possible on Monday, I got up before my designated time every other day of the week, and I did have things that I had to do outside of the house. Most of the days I was home I also stayed on my same sleep schedule for bed that I have set for myself for school, except on Thursday, when I went to the movies to see a scary movie with my friends. I stayed awake that night out of fear. I know I would have been up and on the phone or on the internet all hours of the night over my spring break and in the bed when I did not have anywhere to go, had I not been trying to change myself for this experiment. Like I stated earlier, I did not give myself punishments or rewards for doing things that abided to my experiment, but I observed my behavior, and my being conscious on my actions led to me maintaining good posture, making good food choices, and now that I am back in school from break I have maintained good study habits. These good habits all come from me planning out my day and thinking to myself about the positive and negative effects they will have on my life. So I have concluded that not all experiments have to have consequences and rewards, some experiments whose goals are to change ones self can just be observations. Because the more you pay attention to, and care about your own actions the more of better person you can become.

The Unconscious brain

The brain is a very mysterious thing. It causes people to love, hate, and discover many interesting things. The brain can also go into its own world. When I say a brain can go into its own world I mean it can slip into a coma or worse a vegetative state. When brains go into a coma it is in a deep unconscious state. Comas are usually caused by illnesses or traumatic brain injuries to the head and brain. Comas usually last up to six weeks, and when the person wakes up from it they usually regain normal bodily function. We know that people in a coma are sleeping, but unlike everyone else when they go to sleep people in a coma can not be woken up. People in a coma also can not respond to any form of stimulation.

Doctors use the Glasgow Coma Scale to determine how severe a case of coma a person has. This scale reads the persons neurological brain function, and assesses the level of consciousness a person is at. If a person scores a 15 on the scale then they are almost normal and probably have minimal brain damage. There is another scale that is used called the Rancho Los Amigos Scale. This scale is used within the first weeks or months of the brain injury and assesses the coma patient’s progress toward recovery.

But since the brain is in a state that is similar to sleep does it unconsciously respond to stimulations? There should be a study in which doctors use MRI to scan the brain to look at the different levels of response a brain has while in a coma. There should be some activity in the brain while in a coma, even if the person is unable to respond to outside stimulus. As long as a person is alive the brain should still have activity occurring within it. MRI’s can be taken of a person who is in a coma to show how much or how little brain activity they have, and if there is some part of the brain that responds to stimulus while unconscious.

It is imperative for patients to be absolutely still when having an MRI. Since people who are in a coma are not prone to movement it would not be hard to study their brains. There should be scans for coma patients whose families are willing to let them participate in the study. The patients should be in the MRI machines and have different types of stimuli administered to them. Since the brains of patients in a coma are not fully asleep, but just merely in a deep state of unconsciousness. The different types of stimuli that could be administered to the patients in a coma could be the voices of a family member of significant person in their life. The sound of something that could cause fear in a person, such as a scream, or sudden loud noise could be a stimulus. Another stimulus could be causing pain to a sensitive area of the body. The pain of course would not be intolerable, but jus enough to cause a reaction to the nerves of a normal person. Like the pricking of a finger or pinching of a foot. All of these stimuli to a person should cause the brain to respond in some kind of way.

There have also been studies done on the brain activity of people sleeping. Many people show brain activity in the rapid eye movement stages of sleep, also known as REM sleep. I believe that if there can be brain activity in the deepest parts of sleep then, there can also be brain activity in some and maybe even the smallest parts of the brain during a coma.
In the experiment that I am thinking of the MRI scans of the brain should be able to reveal to doctors what goes on exactly in the brain of a patient in a coma and how well it is functioning at different levels of consciousness. Maybe if there is a way to treat comas from within the brain then there could be a prevention of coma patients going into a vegetative state. A coma is diagnosed as an irreversible sleep, but with the way things are being discovered and inventions being made there might one day be a medicine or treatment to make coma patients recover faster.

I do not know why I have such an interest in the brain in a coma, but I think the brain is the most interesting thing in the human body. The brain is the most powerful and mind boggling thing. It is capable of giving people the ideas of inventing machines like MRI’s that can look inside of another human beings and view their brain. Humans are the most intelligent beings on the planet so their brains in my opinion are always functioning, until death of course. Since a patient in a coma is not dead there is always going to be some brain activity. Maybe we have not had the right person to invent the right machine to specifically see what happens when the brain is at maybe one of its weakest points.

MRI AND BRAIN SCANNING TECHNOLOGY

There have been many changes over the centuries in the way doctors diagnosis and treat their patients. Every year, the technology that is available to doctors that helps them better treat their patients and their illnesses. ADHD is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a common learning disability that affects many children. Prosodic processing in humans is speech recognition and understanding of what is being said. Doctors are now using MRI’s to look at how the brain responds to different things people experience in life, and the developing brains of children. Prosodic processing and ADHD are two things that many children experience in their developmental years.

MRI’s or magnetic resonance imaging provides pictures of the brain and other organs inside the body without taking X-rays. These machines have been able to give doctors images of what parts of the brain are working when certain behaviors are being expressed. In most of the studies the doctors used BOLD fMRI’s, which is blood oxygenation level dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging. Some doctors would argue the findings of the study, because of what a MRI picks up on a scan, and how effective they are with the limitations they do have. MRI’s are very sensitive to even the slightest movement during scanning.

Doctors mostly used the BOLD fMRI’s to look at the brains of children with ADHD. They tried to find children that could represent every child that could possibly have the disorder, and they even followed some patients from their childhood into adulthood to study the lasting effects of ADHD and their brains. The total size cerebral volume of ADHD patients is approximately 5 percent smaller than age and gender matched control subjects (Giedd para 5).The corpus callosum is a broad, thick band running from side to side of the brain, and consists of millions and millions of nerve fibers. In many of the ADHD patients studied the corpus callosum was generally found to be smaller. The frontal region of the brain was also found to be slightly asymmetrical, with the right frontal region smaller in boys scanned with ADHD. Most of the images taken of different patients with ADHD found that they did have slightly smaller areas of their brain that were used for different tasks. MRI, as of right now, is not used to diagnose a child as having ADHD or not. Some children may have a history of ADHD symptoms, and not show the usual symptoms on a brain scan. Other children may, in a brain scan have activity that is constant with an ADHD brain and not show symptoms of the disease (Giedd para 21).

The second article is a lab report of a study done on children that is usually tested in adults for speech recognition, also called prosodic processing. Doctors have concluded that children can use prosodic processing from infancy to assist them in decoding words and sentences. There was a study conducted of 284 children from the ages of 5 to 18, where they had their brains scanned to reveal multiple regions of their brain, and note changes in these regions as different task were given to them. Such as decoding a target sentence what was repeated at a low frequency pitch. Prosodic processing can either be cued emotionally, linguistically or via sentence structure. The imaging done revealed that different parts of the brain were responsible for sentence recognition in different age groups. There were similar areas of the brain that responded to the sentence recognition task, but in different age groups of children. Frontal regions of the brain in most of the subjects did not show much activity.

Both of these articles give details on research of two things that affect children, and the way a child learns. Since the use of MRI is not harmful to children because of its lack of ionizing radiation and capacity to provide exquisite anatomical detail, it is a great help to doctors who study their brains. Doctors have been able to see how the brain functions in patients with ADHD, and can start to make an improvement in the way they look for and treat this disease. Doctors still have to study the brain in children a little longer to find out exactly how their brains work and are able to use prosodic processing with learning.

Giedd, Jay N., Johnathan Blumenthal, Elizabeth Molly, and F. Xavier Castellanos. "Brain Imaging of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 931 (2001). 12 Feb 2006 .

Plante, Elena, Scott K. Holland, and Vince J. Schmithorst. "Prosodic Processing By Children: An fMRI Study." Children's ospital Research foundation, The Unviersity of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH USA (2005). 12 Feb 2006 .

New Ways to Fuel Cars

Do you ever think about what would happen if the earth ever ran out of petroleum oil for gasoline? That is something that I think about. “Can ethanol replace oil?” is a blog I found when I was surfing the internet one day. There is talk that this new product can and maybe will one day replace oil used in everyday vehicles. Maybe I was not the only person who was thinking about the end of earth’s oil, because scientist and car manufacturers have thought of an alterative to using petroleum gasoline.

In stead of using gasoline to fuel cars, scientists are trying to use ethanol. The use of ethanol is not but so much better than using gasoline, but it can be produced from corn or sugar cane. There is so much of a need for new ways to fuel cars that researchers and scientist have turned to the environment for new alternatives. Car manufacturers are making cars that are called “flex-fuel” vehicles. These vehicles can run on 85 percent ethanol gas which is called E85. The development of a new way to fuel cars is a big discovery because the earth’s supply of fossil fuels will one day be depleted if they are continually used for fueling cars, and other machines that humans use for everyday life.

The United States is the world’s largest consumer of oil. We consume three hundred times more than China who is second in oil consumption in the world. I know it is a privilege to live in the United States, but we are sucking the world dry of its natural resources. When making a mental picture in my head of what the United States is compared to the rest of the world, I imagine the U.S. as this big bully, who threatens other countries and who takes what it wants without caring if the other countries in the world need anything. I know it is a silly thing to say, but when looking at a statistic like the oil consumption in the United States, we are bullies. Now that there is a concern for how much natural resources are being used we want to step in the picture of historical events and come up with remedies to problems that we had a major hand in causing.

General Motors is now launching a campaign that says “Live Green Go Yellow”. This is its campaign to promote their new line of cars that run on E85 ethanol. These cars are supposed to lower greenhouse gas emissions, reduce dependence on petroleum, reduce smog, and improve vehicle performance. GM is making all of their 2006 model cars E85 fuel efficient, but they have later model cars that are capable of using the new fuel. Even though GM is the leading automaker that is promoting the use of E85 ethanol, there are other automakers that are trying to manufacture flexible fuel vehicles such as, Chrysler, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, and Nissan.

There are different types of ethanol. There is E10, E20, and E30, but for now in the early days of research and trials automakers want to stick with the use of E85 for their vehicles. As of right now there are still not many E85 ethanol gas stations. There are only about 600 stations in the United States that offer E85 ethanol, but the number is steadily going up. The price of E85 varies, but when gas prices went up in September 2005, E85 ethanol was 60 cents cheaper. That is a lot of money when you are talking about gas. So now when you are thinking about buying a new car, there are more things to thing about other than the price, and look of a car. The type of fuel used is now a big issue when choosing a new car to drive, because we all want the best for our selves and the environment.

Hello,
My name is Charlene. Im a freshman also and I am thinking about majoring in Exercise Sports Science, then going to Physical Therapy school for Pediatric Physical Therapy. Then I would like to back to school for a BS in Radiologic Science, and go into the field of Medical Imaging