Quiz Make Up

I watched the Balance video from the Art21 website and really enjoyed Rackstraw Downes art work because he made a very honest effort to depict his paintings as close to the reality he saw as possible.  Rackstraw seemed to be attracted to certain locations for different reasons which he doesn’t always explicitly say, but after he chooses a location the original reason why he chose it fades away and depicting the site he chose as accurately as possible becomes his main motivation.  I liked most of his paintings, but the only one which I didn’t like was the painting he made of the power plant.  Most people might think that he chose the power plant location for political or social reasons which may be true to an extent, but he really just liked the unique location for his painting.  I just think that the power plant location has some many other ramifications as a painting and he is missing the major political and social undertones.  However, he is an extremely talented artist because looking at his paintings almost transports you to that location at that specific moment or moments.  While some might say that one can do the same thing that he is doing with a high resolution digital camera and taking a photograph they could be missing something that the photograph can’t capture.  Ultimately, in art the medium or what the message is conveyed through makes a difference and paintings of the real world have a very unique texture and personality.