Value Chris Van Alsburg

transcript

Value The next element of art!

Friday, August 28, 2009

Value is the light and dark of any object especially when talking about art.

• Chris Van Allsburg,A living artist/Illustrator who didthe drawings for Jumanji and The Polar Express.

Chris went to junior and senior high school in East Grand Rapids. He didn’t take art classes during this time. His interests and talents seemed to be more in the area of math and science. His senior year of high school a collage recruiter from University of Michigan came in and signed eligible students up for classes. He didn’t know what he wanted to do but saw a college within the school labeled the college of A and D and wanted to know what that was. The college recruiter explained that was the college of Architecture and Design, which included the art school. It had never crossed his mind that someone could go to college and make art. He hadn’t taken any art in high school but he liked to draw and it occurred to him that studying art could be a lot of fun. He told the admissions officer that art school sounded interesting and perhaps he’d give that a try.

He majored in sculpture at the University of Michigan, where he learned bronze casting, wood carving, resin molding and other techniques. He graduated in 1972 and went to graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) to continue his study of sculpture. Chris first exhibited his sculpture in New York City in 1977 at the Alan Stone Gallery. He exhibited elsewhere in New England, and though sculpture was his primary interest, he had begun drawing pictures at night in a little room in his and his wife Lisa’s apartment. He did not think of these drawings as very important, but others did. Alan Stone showed two of them to a curator from The Whitney Museum of Art, where they were exhibited in 1978. Lisa, who used picture books when teaching her 3rd grade students, encouraged Chris to consider making illustrations for a story book. A friend of Lisa’s, illustrator and author David Macaulay agreed with Lisa that the kind of pictures Chris was making could be effective book illustration. Instead of illustrating others books, he was encouraged to write and illustrate his own.

http://www.chrisvanallsburg.com/polarexpress.htmlFriday, August 28, 2009

• M.C. Esher (1898-1972) a Dutch graphic artist who is best known for his tessellations, drawings, lithographs and etchings.

Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) is one of the world's most famous graphic artists. His art is enjoyed by millions of people all over the world, as can be seen on the many web sites on the internet. He is most famous for his so-called impossible structures, such as Ascending and Descending, Relativity, his Transformation Prints, such as Metamorphosis I , Metamorphosis II and Metamorphosis III, Sky & Water I or Reptiles. But he also made some wonderful, more realistic work during the time he lived and traveled in Italy. M.C. Escher, during his lifetime, made 448 lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings and over 2000 drawings and sketches. Like some of his famous predecessors, - Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer and Holbein-, M.C. Escher was left-handed.

Apart from being a graphic artist, M.C. Escher illustrated books, designed tapestries, postage stamps and murals. He was born in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, as the fourth and youngest son of a civil engineer. After 5 years the family moved to Arnhem where Escher spent most of his youth. After failing his high school exams, Maurits ultimately was enrolled in the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem

After only one week, he informed his father that he would rather study graphic art instead of architecture, as he had shown his drawings and linoleum cuts to his graphic teacher Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, who encouraged him to continue with graphic arts.

• Leonardo DaVinci

Value Chris Van Alsburg

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