judith conflict sketches

Marie Conflict Sketch

For this piece, I am thinking about showing an inner conflict. As artists, we all have felt that frustration one time or another of not knowing what to do. It's a conflict of ideas. To depict this, my first idea was putting the artist, just an average person, stuck at the bottom of a deep hole with blank canvases coming out of the ground. I may change this later, though. Any suggestions?

Kurt Conflict Sketches

For conflict and resoluton I've decided to do a drawing that depicts a soldier returning from war. It follows my last pen drawing, the idea is that it shows how there is constant conflict wherever he goes within his mind, as he can't forget what happened to him and how he lost his friends in combat. The picture will represent the conflict this solider deals with and how he works to resolve it, trying to reform back to a civilain lifestlye.

Conflict and Resolutioning!

Hello!?!

Let's start the post a bit heavy. Maus by Art Spiegelman is a the story of his father surviving The Holocaust. The story is told in an interesting way. The Jews are depicted as mice, Nazis are depicted as cats, and there are several other animals shown to represent other different people. This is one of the first 'Graphic Novels' taken seriously by people outside of the comic book world, and for good reason. It touches on a very serious subject and doesn't compromise any of its intelligence.

 La Pistola y El Corazon (The pistol and the heart) is a painting by artist George Yepes. I feel like the poses and gaze of the figures shows that a conflict either just begun or has just been resolved.... What do you think!?

                                             


"My Red Bike" by concept artist Bobby Chiu shows what seems to be a fitting end to a little conflict! EEK!

-Bustamante

Conflict &/or Resolution

BERLIN WALL

As we embark on a new topic, Conflict and/or Resolution, you could look to political conflicts for inspiration.  This is a photograph of the Berlin Wall which was constructed in 1961 to divide Eastern Communist Germany from Western Socialist Germany.  It was quite literally a symbol of a political conflict that divided countries, nations and even families, and was built to keep easterners in and westerners out.  Many people tried to escape the confines of Eastern Germany and lost their lives doing so.  In 1989, that all changed when the wall was finally torn down.  However, so as not to forget this terrible time, Berlin has left behind portions of the wall and artistic memorials as reminders of this conflict and its resolution.   

Portion of the wall in Potsdamer Platz, Berlin

Memorial strip that marks the path of the wall.

YINKA SHONIBARE
Yet another way to look at the topic could be cultural. 

This is a sculpture called Dysfunctional Family, by Yinka Shonibare.  Shonibare was born in England, moved to Nigeria when he was 3 and then came back to England for college and now lives and works there.  His work deals with colonisation, cultural melding, conflicts in identity when you are pulled between two cultures, and how those issues resolve together or don't.  In this piece we have aliens wrapped in what we consider to be traditional African fabric, and there are some deeper meanings going on here.  What do aliens represent?  Could we be dealing with beings form other worlds coming together and trying to function? But wait, the title tips us off to the fact that there's a dysfunction, though it does call this a family as well.  So is this a chosen family or one that is forced upon them? 

The fabric that these figures are wrapped in is also and intentional choice because, though we associate it with Africa and it's considered a cultural symbol for Africa, it did not originate in Africa.  The fabric actually came from Holland, but has been adopted and melded into another culture.  As you can hopefully see, Shonibare addresses ideas of mixed cultural identities and the conflicts and resolutions they entail.


M.C. ESCHER
Another way I think you could interpret the theme is through a structural conflict and resolution in you piece.

 This is M.C. Escher's Sky and Water from 1938.  In the middle you have an interlocking, interdependent tension that resolves into a single bird or fish on either end.  Are these elements clashing together in the middle or does it flow from top to bottom, from resolved to interlocking to resolved again? Maybe it's both. :)   It certainly is a visual puzzle.