Author: Jaime

The expressionist movement is one of the more modern movements, starting in the late 19th century through early 20th century. Expressionism is an art form in which the artist attempts to portray not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him. The artist accomplishes this through distortion, exaggeration, primitiveness, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements.

Unlike Impressionism, its goals were not to reproduce the impression suggested by the surrounding world, but to strongly impose the artist’s own sensibility to the world’s representation. The expressionist artist substitutes to the visual object reality his own image of this object, which he feels as an accurate representation of its real meaning. The search of harmony and forms is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity, both from the aesthetic point of view and according to idea and human critics.

Expressionism started mostly in Germany, in 1910. As an international movement, expressionism has also been thought of as inheriting from certain medieval artforms and, more directly, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and the fauvism movement.

The most well known German expressionists are Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Lionel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein; the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, the Czech Alfred Kubin and the Norvegian Edvard Munch are also related to this movement. During his stay in Germany, the Russian Kandinsky was also an expressionism addict.

Scream by Edvard Munch

Credit: Pioch, Nicolas. “Expressionism.” BMW Foundtion, 2002. Web. <http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/tl/20th/expressionism.html>.

The Brooklyn Bridge is fairly new to me. I have walked across many times in the past year, a fun but occasionally grueling task

This past summer I worked a paid internship at a media company based in Brooklyn so I became familiar with travel and the surroundings. Also, my mother works in Brooklyn now so I’ve driven over the bridge as well.

The Brooklyn Bridge is a very popular tourist spot. If I would have taken this photo midday or early afternoon there would have been a flock of tourists, but in the early morning it was desolate, sans some runners and biking commuters.

I think that in Hassam’s painting the people weren’t tourists as much as everyday pedestrians traveling, for free, across the bridge. Although winter time, 1892 was not the ost prosperous time. Hassam’s painting captures what is now a firm historical piece of New York (with no toll!) while incorporating the flurry poverty of the time.

0. Art is soul, energy, the animus, the breath, thought, spirit, mind, reason, heart, feeling, conscience, ego, one’s being, put into life. Art is that feeling you get when you’re about to talk to that person you like, when you see your leader on television and feel that inspiration, when you read about 13 year old kids saving lives and feel proud, when you find out your relationship will no longer work out and you feel that emptiness, when you feel amazingly great about the day and wish to convey your great feeling, when you’re excruciatingly bored and want to undo it. Art is the abstract side of conventional human beings.

1. My favorite art forms are film and photography. Film is one of the most profound art forms in the sense that it can encompass imagery, sound, and writing into one medium. Photography does not have the benefit of sound or a script, but still images can also be deep and reflective because the viewer is left to his own devices to understand what the photographer wishes to portray.

2. My favorite historical period is the 50’s. I like the 50’s because the clothes were awesome and I love Lucy was showing on TV.

3. My academic strength is writing, more specifically short essays or creative, concise pieces. I also write for fun, mostly poetry, so writing is pretty natural for me. Non-academically, my strength is photography and imagery. I’m an amateur photographer and I’m also a film connoisseur.

4. I do feel comfortable with new technologies. I learn new things fairly quickly and can adapt like Jason Bourne in Istanbul. If I were amazingly good with Apple computers, I just might call myself a genius.

5. My writing skills are pretty professional. I’ve written for magazines and school papers and one of my hobbies is poetry. I wrote album reviews for a magazine and my mom is also the Publisher/CEO of a Spanish-language newspaper, so I’ve grown up with harsh critics and editors. I don’t enjoy writing for school, but I do what I must.