I’ve just wrapped up my first guest lecture in a series of three lectures at Grove City College. My car isn’t starting (starting what, Sam????) and my hair is the color of a creamsicle (not a bad thing) and I’m loving this weather, my sports themed cardigan, and the opportunity I’ve been given to explore teaching (and learning) in my former college community.

In an attempt to broaden my audience, I ustreamed the lecture (and will do so for the remaining two) for all to see and comment on.

The only issue was the lack of sound. However, if you would like to watch blurry moving images of my now-silent lecture and a field of web browsing students, it’s all yours:

Sam Perry Guest Lecture #1

Because you won’t be able to gather much from the grainy silence, here’s a brief outline on the topic of Color Theory, Design, and Current Art Climates (TrOPiCaL LAUGHING LOUD OUT LOUD he he )

• Current Art Climates
• The art world is an open community for people passionate about what they do. The biggest reason for my small successes thus far in the arts is my relentless nature, lack of shame, and portfolio of work.
• The personality of someone’s work and their own personality do not have to be matching. Mine is a mixed bag: my performance art and public installations are wild and abandoning, while my visual art –although containing that same energy–is more quiet. Having these conflicting personalities in my work creates ambiguity. This could be damning. I don’t care.
• Another important aspect to current art climate is the way that art is funded. Kickstarter has become a staple in the art community for crowd sourced funding. This idea of online community should be welcomed and modeled externally as often as possible. Art is community.
•  Artist Manifestos
• James Abbott McNeill Whistler – The Ten O’Clock
• This manifesto was written years after the famed dispute between Whistler and noted art critic of the late 1800s, John Ruskin. Ruskin claimed Whistler’s piece Nocturne in Black and Gold to be a random spilling of paint onto canvas and a lawsuit resulted.
• In what I would call a reaction to the libel of Ruskin’s claims and style of art critique, Whistler speaks to the issue of meaning in art, stating, “People have acquired the habit of looking, as who should say, not at a picture, but through it, at some human fact…” The question that fills the mouths of so many an art viewer: “What does this piece mean?” is an abortion of the reason for art: line, color, form, design, tactile nature, are all paramount in terms of the “meaning” of a piece. Instead of perceiving the ways in which artist form a picture, a dance, or a song, art viewers–and in Whistler’s mind, Ruskin–don’t look at art, they just ask about it.
• Piet Mondrian – Neoplasticism in Painting
• Mondrian saw a shift from natural to abstract, defining Modern Man as an internal thing who acts externally based on internal motives. Art becomes a product of the duality of Modern Man’s internal and external natures–Mondrian’s art became what he called an “exact plastic of pure relationship” because he consciously recognized emotion and sought the universal idea of said emotion in color, line, and balance.

I will post more after the conclusion of this two-day lecture. Thanks for listening (reading).