Contemplating Liberty
If you find that this paragraph bores you to tears, just skip to the next for actual art talk. But for those who enjoy the philosophical side of things, I’m taking a class on 19th Century European Intellectual History this semester. That’s a mouthful and I have to say it slowly and think through every word when I answer someone as to what I’m taking. I’ve really enjoyed the class. We kicked things off with Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke (considered the father of modern conservatism), and moved on to Benjamin Constant, another great thinker who I hadn’t heard of before. Then we moved into studying Romanticism. I guess I didn’t really think about the fact that art might come into play this semester, and it was interesting to read about people reacting to the rationalism of the enlightenment with an equal overemphasis on the aesthetic. Anyway, all that to say, I’ve been reading about and contemplating people’s definitions of liberty. It’s a surprisingly controversial topic and the more I read about what people think it means, the more I realize that it isn’t such a simple concept to define.
I’ve been trying to sketch some lately, since I’m terrible at that discipline and artists are supposed to do it. Finding subject matter can sometimes be a challenge because I tend to want to only do projects that have some concrete reason, like someone is paying me, or I have something I really want to express, or I have a need for art in decorating. But after pondering the Romantics, particularly Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, I decided to do my own take on Liberty as it relates to the United States. The Romantics thought that art should speak for itself because it communicates on a different plane than rational thought. In that spirit, I’ll just let you interpret this one however you want.
When I finished drawing the face, I realized that she ended up looking like some kind of odd blend of George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton. So, maybe I should give Freud more credit, or just keep my commitment to not being a portrait artist.
