Blog Number 5

Our guest speaker this week was my favorite lecturer we've had so far. His name was Ron Graff. He's a painter, a great public speaker, and a badass. When he was younger he stole a motorcycle and got to choose between going into the military service or going to jail, he chose the service. During his time in the Navy, he had a studio the entire time. When he got out of the Navy he went to school with the thought of following in his fathers footsteps and become an engineer, that thought went away quickly once he was in school.. He said one day he walked passed an art class and "the fumes sucked me (him) in", and I believe that was the end of his attemptive career at being an engineer.
He went to an art institute and one of his first paintings was the one of the naked lady lying on a sofa. "I started this painting with the nipple, and it extended it out from there," he said which I thought was pretty funny. I believe Ron is a realist, he began painting what he saw, looking at things and copying them down with paint on a canvas. He painted a lot of landscapes outdoors and was able to get permission in Iowa to go on top of roofs and paint cityscapes. I thought the story were he was painting the city with the river going through the middle of it and the object "bobbing" around in the water was pretty eerie..
Ron is somewhat of a perfectionist, and I believe he may have a small case of ADD. He said that every morning he would force himself to remain in his studio from 8 to 11 and strictly paint. He wouldn't even get up to go to the bathroom. He got tired of painting things he saw and wanted to get away from the realist look of his work that he had for so long. He would add a quarter inch of a different color of paint to the canvas, and have to peel away at it and add new colors on top of it, I thought that idea in itself was pretty amazing.
Ron is extremely different from the two artists that we read about this week. Coco Fusco is an artist who doesn't give a damn about what people think about her work. She's an extremely independent artist who does what she wants and displays her work in an unusual way. I like Fusco more then the other artist we read about, Arthur Danto. Danto doesn't think art can solve problems and I thought that he was a little bland and depressing. He was almost the complete opposite of Fusco who is full of energy and her own thoughts and ideas.


This picture somewhat reminding me of Ron's first painting he did of the naked lady (not exactly though..) Its of a naked lady who has been painted on to make her appear as if she's wearing clothes.

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