How to Write a Gallery Report

Your rubric is found in Canvas at www.canvas.allenisd.org

Your assignment can be found in Canvas, under Modules, labeled "Gallery Report #1"

What should a Gallery Report look like?

*You should have a beautiful reflective page in your Art Journal, along with a selfie of you at the art gallery

*You should make an annotated slide in your Process Portfolio

--there are examples of both of these things in Canvas--

Example:

On August 5th, 2016, I went to the Arkansas Museum of Art in Little Rock, AR. At the museum we got to see their permanent collection and also a new exhibit from local Arkansas artists.

I specifically enjoyed seeing artworks by Jim Ardendt, Lawrence McElroy and Paul Signac.

Paul Signac's "Marseille, le port" is an ink drawing with colored washes, painted in 1931. It was smaller, only 10x14", but the line work and soft brushwork kept bringing me back. This is only a small plein air sketch that an artist would generally then use as a thumbnail for a final oil painting, but I enjoy the way he draws your eyes to the bridge with the darker blues in the tree and uses white washes on the tinted paper to add interest the buildings. His brushstrokes and broken lines that move you through the painting are typical of the Neo-Impressionists of his day. This sketch was done later in his life. You can see in many of his paintings, including this one, that he has a fondness for asymmetry in his compositions. Signac was known for his oil paintings that almost took an a "Divisionism" or pointillistic approach to painting. This sketch looks more like something from Monet's impressionistic lillies than Seurat's dots.

Lawrence McElroy is a contemporary painter living in Arkansas. His oil painting "Portrait of Gabriel Sword" is taller than I am! It is a recent painting, completed in 2016. It is of a blind man holding out a sign for change. I loved this work because of the concept of a blind man "looking for change" but never being able to see it. The negative space is hard to appreciate in the picture, but he has created a brick wall with texture in the background. You only see the color of the bricks in the shadow behind the man. It is an elegant way to fill space without overwhelming the subject matter or distracting from the figure. The color palette used is fairly neutral, with an emphasis on earth tones. It helps emphasize the dusty, "earthy" nature of the figure. The red hat at the top of the image does help pull your eye back to the top of the work since the bottom is so visually heavy with the feet and the bag. McElroy is not just a painter but is designing a reality tv show based on an art museum and the people working there. He has a long history of supporting the arts and looking for ways to change and improve them.

Jim Arendt created an entire series of large-scale artworks out of denim. Each one was a different figure that was broken into value shapes and appliquéd together to make unthinkably detailed forms. The one I looked at the most was "Cat: Free Will Ain't Cheap", made in 2016. The finished work was as tall as I was and hung on the wall without a frame or hanger. It just lived there in space. It seemed to add something even more interesting that way. He used embroidery to exaggerate the tattoos that cover the figure's body. It is actually one of the few works by Arendt that use the color red in it. The figure is stitching the tattoos into his own skin. The red string and thread draws your attention to not only the design of the tattoos that he his stitching into his own skin, but the hanging threads seem to be like blood dripping from the tattoos. The bleeding is the cost of his choices. While he has free will to do what he wants with his tattoos, the dangling thread seems to be the price he pays for each decision. The price is high - his own blood and pain. It makes the viewer question the cost of our own choices. What are the costs and consequences of the choices I make? It is a thought-provoking artwork. This art form is a little bit collage, a little bit embroidery and a little applique. It brings these often overlooked art-making forms into a more contemporary or modern conversation.