Mexican Art Day of the Dead (Spanish: Día de los Muertos), is a holiday celebrated in Latin America and by Latin Americans living in the United States and Canada. The holiday focuses on gatherings of family and friends to pray for and remember friends and family members who have died. The celebration occurs on November 2 in connection with the Catholic holidays of All Saints' Day (November 1) and All Souls' Day(November 2). Traditions connected with the holiday include building private altars honoring the deceased using sugar skulls, marigolds, and the favorite foods and beverages of the departed, and visiting graves with these as gifts. Due to occurring shortly after Halloween, the Day of the Dead is sometimes thought to be a similar holiday, although the two actually have little in common. The Day of the Dead is a time of celebration, where partying is common. Scholars trace the origins of the modern holiday to indigenous observances dating back thousands of years, and to an Aztec festival dedicated to a goddess called Mictecacihuatl. In Brazil Dia de Finados is a public holiday, which many Brazilians celebrate by visiting cemeteries and churches. In Spain, there are festivals and parades, and at the end of the day, people gather at cemeteries and pray for their dead loved ones. Similar observances occur elsewhere in Europe and in the Philippines, and similarly-themed celebrations appear in many Asian and African cultures.
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GREEN ART - Environmentally friendly art. WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL ART? In a general sense, it is art that helps improve our relationship with the natural world. There is no definition set in stone. This living worldwide movement is growing and changing as you read this. Much environmental art is ephemeral (made to disappear or transform), designed for a particular place (and can't be moved) or involves collaborations between artists and others, such as scientists, educators or community groups (distributed ownership). These variables can make exhibiting this work difficult for traditional museums so we created greenmuseum.org: an online museum for global the environmental art movement. Art is everywhere. Is art in the eye of the beholder or is it in the bank of the advertisers? Driving down the road I realized that art is everywhere. The advertising agencies have made our world into a drive by gallery. Now, I agree that seeing a McDonalds arch every where I go is pushing it, but look beyond that. Someone had to design the logos. So many of the vintage advertisements are considered art and are hanging in our homes. Maybe...just maybe in 50 years, what we look at today as being ugly advertisements will be hanging over our fireplaces or at least decorating our barns. Doodling isn’t the distraction it’s commonly thought to be, researchers say–in fact, it aids concentration, and memory. A new study suggests that doodling takes up just enough attention to keep the brain from wandering further afield, explains lead researcher Jackie Andrade. “If someone is doing a boring task, like listening to a dull telephone conversation, they may start to daydream. Daydreaming distracts them from the task, resulting in poor performance. A simple task, like doodling, may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task” [BBC News], Andrade says. In the small study, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, Andrade asked 40 volunteers to listen to a monotonous two-and-a-half minute telephone message and jot down the names of people who had been invited to a party. Half of the participants were asked to shade in shapes on a piece of paper while they listened to relieve the boredom. The shading task was chosen instead of more creative doodling because it was less likely to make people feel self-conscious [The Guardian]. In a surprise memory test afterward, the doodling group was able to remember an average of 7.5 pieces of information from the message, while the control group could only remember 5.8 on average. Says Andrade says: “It’s not so much that doodling is good for your concentration, but that daydreaming is bad. If you are thinking about where you are going to go on holiday, that is probably going to be more cognitively demanding than a doodle” [The Guardian]. I am doing a 5th grade art lesson on “face jugs”. In my research I discovered that my rural Georgia County has some face jug history. It is a little known fact that I discovered in the book Brothers In Clay: The Story of Georgia Folk Pottery By John A. Burrison.
“In a remote section on the Pike/Upson County line, is found a variety of clay peculiarly adapted for use in making pottery , and here that industry has been practiced for nearly one hundred years in the village called Jugtown.” This was where a number of potters gathered to make pottery. They chose the area because of the good quality red Georgia clay that they could obtain near the Flint river. The potters often made jugs that had faces on them. These were known as “face jugs”. They were used for several reasons. The main one was to store their illegal alcohol. If they used glass the contents could be seen. They told the children to stay away from the jugs or the “devil” would get them. (The devil was a popular face on the jugs). They also put funny faces on the jugs to store medicine. The thought was that children would take their medicine easier if it came from the funny face jug. I made a piece of art once (it is actually in my artwork section, under printmaking called “sister tattoo”) and I really liked it but didn’t know what it was that was so attractive to me. I know that everything that I included in the artwork was symbolic to me. A friend of mine enlightened me to the art of mandalas. I was so nieve to think that it was a religious art. Well, several religions including christian to my surprise, do use the mandala in their teachings. But it is more an art of wholeness and unity. After learning this I did research and realized that without knowing it, I had already created a mandala. My sister tattoo was a mandala. I now am so intrigued with the circular and symbolic symboled art. The girl-scouts have a very cool website that allows the user to make their own mandala.http://www.girlsgotech.org/mandala.asp It is so much fun. Also there is a “mandala project” that would make a great lesson for school aged kids. You have to look at it. http://www.mandalaproject.org/Mandalas/index_new.html The mandala that is shown above is one that I got from this site. Isn’t it amazing? I love internet sites that offer cool stuff for free. Especially if you don’t have to do anything. The kids at the middle school and I have been talking about graffiti art. I found this really cool website that you can enter your text into and it creates it in graffiti form. Then you can print it out and have fun. It allows you to even decorate it on the site. Nice, huh? Check it out at...
http://www.graffiticreator.net/ I have been exposed to a new art form!!! It is known as a tessellation. It is a patterned design that is repeated over and over then colored. I love it. Don’t ever say you can’t learn from kids. The Pike County Middle School kids taught me this one. I think I have a new doodling subject. You can find some directions for this at: http://www.tessellations.org/diy-basic1.htm “Slow Exposures celebrates its seventh year as one of the premier juried photography exhibitions in the South. Held every year during the last two weeks in September, Slow Exposures features fine art photography by established and emerging artist that captures the diversity, contradictions, and complexity of the rural south as it exists today.”
This is a show that I am very proud to say I help out with. It is definitely worth a visit. |
AuthorI am just a curious artist. I like to experiment with new materials and see what I can do with them. This is simply a record of my self exploration in art. |