What's the Big Idea?

In the article Big Ideas and Artmaking by Sydney Walker, I felt her explanation of the way we interpret art and the artist was very easy to understand and helped to simplify the process to get us to think more about why an artist is doing what they do. She talks of both subject matter and the big idea and how they can be both similar and different. I especially liked her example comparing classical artists like Van Gogh to more modernist artists like Jennifer Bartlett. By comparing these two artists, we were able to see how they were alike and how they varied in the message they were trying to convey even though they had similar subject matter (Landscapes).

Conversely, I feel that the article could have delved deeper into the understanding of how these big ideas interrelate with one another. I felt the article explained them well superficially but not as well in how they work together.

In Interpreting Visual Culture by Terry Barrett, the author illustrates for us how we subconsciously understand our visual surroundings everyday.  I thought the author's view on the human psyche was quite accurate in developing our notions of what is good and what is bad and how imagery forces us to see one thing or another. This idea of connotation and denotation very cleverly describes the aspect of art that we don't see with our eyes but rather our mind. The imagery only provides part of the picture and interpretation the rest.

I also felt that this article spent too much focus on examples rather than explaining the topic itself. I felt that the examples could have been more integrated into explanation of topics rather than just filler. Overall though I felt the article was quite successful in explaining it's topics and opened new insight into our visual interpretation of the world around us.