Approach 2

Painters often take a unique view of reality and frequently look for ways to redefine their experience of the visual world.  One way of doing this is by de-contextualizing objects found in reality so that the viewer is confronted with a reality removed from the unusual (and expected) references of size, color, scale, location, etc.  One artist who was very successful at doing this was one of the most important and famous painters of the 20th century, Georgia O’Keffe.  Essentially, she enlarged corners of reality in such a way as to give objects in reality new identities and new aesthetics.  Her close-ups of plants and flowers are famous for this technique.  Your assignment in this approach is to select some aspect of physical reality and change its context or relation to the world around it.  In doing so, you should actually change the identity or way in which people think of this or these objects.  A look at Rene Magritte or Dali can help you see how surrealists also used the idea of de-contextualizing objects in their work.