Purpose:

To become familiar with the way artists are responding to the issues in today’s world (as well as the past);

To understand characteristics of storytelling, both historically and contemporary;

To learn about contemporary artists, as well as Peter Bruegel and their work.

These artists creatively add techniques to their art to convey different meanings and messages. Crosby uses a specific art style but adds her own Nigerian culture to it. She talks about how the portrait fabrics are custom made for traditions like weddings and burials, and she has the idea of invention to show how she creates new styles of art with her culture layered into it to tell a story about her life. Marshall uses the technique of showing black people being the focal point of the art, because of how back in the day the white person in the painting would always be the center of attention. He paints very dark skin to show beauty, power, and proudness for being black and being the main point of the painting. He says that he does this to show there can be lots of beauty even in these extremely dark skin tones. He doesn’t want there to be any confusion within the painting if the person in the main point of the painting is fully black, he wants that to be the main idea. Nisenbaum uses the technique of very bright and contrasting colors to show life and kindness within the people she paints. She paints at a slow pace to really make sure their personality shines through the painting.

May 2015 "Wedding Portrait" by Nijdeka Akunyili Crosby

Peter Bruegel uses the technique of making his paintings very busy looking and sometimes very realistic. He gives the people in the paintings lots of movement and each person and part of the painting tells its own story, unlike the contemporary artists who made one main idea and story in their paintings. With Peter Bruegel’s paintings it's harder to tell the real meaning behind them, with so much going on in the painting, but with the contemporary artists it's easy to find what their objective was with creating the painting based off of their techniques. He doesn’t use very bright or contrasting colors, and the faces aren’t the main points of the art, but rather the scenery like in the winter scenes he painted. He uses the techniques of busy art and unrealistic fantasy animals and other things to show his own paintings emotion and meaning. When he uses underdrawings to create the background characters of the painting, he then creates a main point of the painting overlapping the other things as the foreground. In the winter painting, it is very popular because of his perspective on winter, painting it to be very beautiful and realistic.

"Hunters In The Snow" Pieter Bruegel