Kristie Nguyen Professor Kathy Arnold Art 10 American Art 7 April 2013 SJMA & Eric Fischl For

my museum visit and essay, I went to the San Jose Museum of Art. I chose to analyze two of Eric Fischls contemporary realism paintings from his Scenes from Late Paradise series: The Stupidity and The Parade. The San Jose Museum of Art was established in 1969 and is located in Downtown San Jose, California. It is a museum that mainly displays contemporary and modern artworks. The permanent collection, around 1,400 artworks, focuses on the Silicon Valley and other regions in the Pacific Coast of the United States. The building itself is attractive on this inside and the outside with beautiful brick architecture, glossy wooden floors, modern colorful walls with murals, delicate hanging glass sculptures, and many other decorations. The atmosphere is professional and quiet on all three levels of the museum. The art displays are welllit and spacious with many feet in between separate artworks, making viewing a pleasant experience. Fischl is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker. He was born in New York City, New York in 1948. Fischl is married to April Gornik, an American landscapist. In an interview with the San Jose Museum of Art available for viewing in the Dive Deep exhibition, Fischl describes how his art uses traditional techniques, but is set apart by a modern twist in how he develops his composition for paintings. Fischl uses digital photographs that he personally takes and manipulates the images on his computer using Photoshop to make collages that allow him to experiment with cutting and pasting props and figures, compositional components, and

narratives. During the interview Fischl reveals how he was trained to be an abstract artist, but after realizing he did not work well with the style chose to incorporate this modern approach to create representational art specializing in narrative. The majority of Fischls artworks focus on everyday life with scenes of people in stores, streets, homes, outdoors, and other settings.

Scenes of Late Paradise: Stupidity was produced in 2007 in New York, USA. The medium of the painting is oil on linen and measures 84 108 inches. This artwork is part of a series of uncommissioned works with realistic and stylized images of people at the beach as the focus. The subject matter in this painting is an ordinary man walking across the shoreline entirely oblivious to the approaching storm. The scene is slightly comical with the nonchalant expression on the mans face and calm stride despite the nearing dangerous situation. I believe the artists message in this painting may be how some people are drawn into caring about their own realities and are often quite ignorant of their surroundings if they do not seem important, and these rigidly

self-constructed paradigms may be detrimental. The narrative portrayed in the image is of a man so focused on walking across the shore to a destination that he does not think for a moment to observe his environment. The cloudy sky adds a gloomy atmosphere and hints at the possibility of repercussions to his carelessness, such as being rained on or stuck without a shelter. The painting is very colorful, with predominantly cool colors. There are earthy colors in the blue/green/white ocean, beige sand, reddish brown mountains, and grey sky as well as intense, bold colors on the mans striped bathing suit and on the foam bodyboard. There are more light values (in the ocean and sand) than dark values in the painting. There are mostly organic shapes, but the bathing suit and bodyboard are geometric shapes. The water and mountains have a lot of visual texture. This is a linear perspective. The forms are three dimensional. Much of the contour is created using differing colors and implied line. There is strong sense of movement in the lines of the waves in the ocean.

Scenes of late Paradise: The Parade was produced in 2006 in New York. The medium is oil on linen, and the paintings dimensions are 76 x 108 inches. The subject matter of the

painting is a group of individuals who appear to be friends casually strolling down a coast with their three white dogs. The message the author may be trying to get across is how walks along the beach are relaxing and fun with company you enjoy, regardless of age or backgrounds. The people all appear happy and content with their relaxed strides, smiles, and calm expressions. There is a balance of both warm and cool colors and dark and light values. There are only geometric shapes aside from the geometric patterns on bathing suits worn by the figures in the painting. There is not a lot of texture in the background, but in the foreground the hair of the people and fur of the dogs are full of texture. This is a linear perspective with varying scaling to create distance. The forms are three dimensional. The horizon acts as a directional line, and the figures have strong gesture lines to show movement. In conclusion, for my midterm, I visited the San Jose Museum of Art and had a great time viewing a lot of contemporary and modern artworks of varying mediums. The artworks that I paid the most attention to were Eric Fischls contemporary realism paintings from his Scenes from Late Paradise series: The Stupidity and The Parade. These paintings were enormous displays and the Dive Deep exhibition showed viewers step by step how Fischl creates the paintings, with walls of images of conceptual sketches, his digital composites of beach photography collages, and a video explanation/interview with Fischl. Fischls paintings take ordinary scenes and through his stylistic choices and compositional changes create really interesting narratives.

Works Cited "San Jose Museum of Art | See what you think." San Jose Museum of Art . N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Apr. 2013. <http://www.sjmusart.org>.