Ebony Derrick
Futurism Final Essay
Futurism art was first created in the early 20th century in Italy. It’s a type of art that incorporated social movements such as speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects like cars, airplanes, and cities. The first Futurism piece was created by poet, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in the early 1900s. Marinetti crashed his car into a ditch after swerving to prevent hitting a cyclist. The experience of the bicycle vs the car inspired him to write a manifesto of Futurism. Though Futurism is meant to incorporate social movements, it also allows one to overcome nostalgia and traditional pieces. From the examples of Futurism that I’ve seen, Futurism seems as if it captures the movement of the same situation that occurred but from different point of views. The art pieces look as if you ask different people about the same situation and receive different responses, but at the same time the information falls hand in hand.
The first image I close was The City Rises by Umberto Boccioni. Boccioni was an Italian Futurist and was important during the time he was alive because he expanded his knowledge on the movement’s theories and visually improved through his artwork. From working on the movement’s theories, he began to produce Futurist sculptures. This image was eye catching to me because of the low-key colors at the neck of the man that’s in the photo and a mixture of both lowkey and high-key colors around the entire image while keeping the facial structure of the man and building a city within it. The piece also caught my attention because of the stream running through the man’s structure and ending as if it’s a small waterfall around his neck area. The face structure also looks as if it’s coming out of the piece which I find very fascinating.
The second image I chose was Sea Dancer by Gino Severini, created in 1913. The website I had found the piece didn’t give much information about the piece. This specific piece that he created was my favorite piece of the three that I chose because of the color differentiation all over the piece. In certain areas where the blue and pink and the blue and lavender colors are shows that in certain situations specific shades of colors can work well together more than we thought. The more I looked at the image the more I notice that some areas look as if it’s a crowd of people standing or if it’s a Futurism Pointillism painting. Some of the colors look similar but not the same shades, it could be the same colors but because they’re surrounded by different colors that’s giving it the Bezold Effect.
The final image I chose was this image, I didn’t find the name of the piece or of the title. But while I was looking at Futuristic pieces, I didn’t like the image at first because it looked like hands sticking out of random parts of triangular shapes. While looking at it longer, I realized that there were heads in the top half of the piece and the bottom half sort of look like feet, but I might be wrong about it. The shapes, hues, and highlights of the piece makes it very interesting to look at for a long period of time and notice something new about it.
The information I learned about Futurism is that Futurists were extremely knowledgeable and constantly practicing every form of art which also included ceramics, sculpting, graphic and interior design, theatre, film, or any other form of art that allows the mind to think freely and creatively. The creators of Futurism would have a lot of successful pieces since they got ideas from writing and many manifestos that were released to the public. Futurism is a type of art that people would study for long periods of time and continue to find something new about it. I learned a lot from doing research on Futurism and look forward to attempting to do a piece based on it one day in the future.
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