November 16, 2010

Peer Editing && Viewing Myself

Peer editing taught me that the writing process is not a easy process. It takes a lot of time and energy out of an individual. It’s constant criticism on yourself and holding back on what you have to say. Often times people feel that the readers will react a certain way based on how they phrased something in their paper. Feeling this way leaves your paper not as strong as you imagined it would be. Not saying that you should insult someone, but just get your opinion out in an mannerly way. Editing in general is a hard job, you never want to seem mean or rude, but you do want to have some type of backbone. Its a thin line between giving advice and actually telling someone what to do. You want to be conscience of how you phrase your words because the writer can take it the wrong way. To me it seems like some emotion is tied into editing, having sympathy on the other writer’s work.

Peer editing the 101 essays was a good experience for me, I have edited other people papers in the past but each time is always different. The one essay that I read was a good start for an 101 student on their first draft, she had a lot of supporting details and good points. I felt she was a better writing than I was, that made me look at myself and question “What can I do to make my research paper better?”. The essay contained great organization, something that I need to work on more. One thing that I loved was here conclusion, she compared having a healthy relationship to a house, if you don’t have a strong foundation it will crumble. I agree with this one hundred percent, everything needs a strong foundation in order to stand. Not only can this be applied to a healthy relationship, but this can go for anything in general. For example, my research paper needs a strong foundation. If I map out exactly what I want to include in the paper and organize it well enough then it can make my paper even more stronger in the end.

This whole editing experience has made me look at myself as a writer. I know I am not as strong of a writer that I would like to be and by criticising my own work I can acknowledge my flaws. I have noticed that I often struggle with opening and closing a paper. I never know where to start and how to close in on my ideas. Another flaw is expanding my ideas, I want to include more information but without sounding like I’m repeating myself. I don’t want my reader’s attention to drift off after a while. I have a lot of revising to put into my paper. In the end I hope to have a well thought out research paper with little to no flaws. :-)

November 2, 2010

Revised Intro

Have you ever walked into an art gallery or Art Museum and wasn’t quite sure what you were looking at?. Yes, I too have been puzzled by the things I seen. I started looking at other people faces and asking myself, “Do they honestly understand what this is? What is means?”. Sometimes I felt embarrassed that I was not able to appreciate good art. I guess my interest wasn’t as strong as others. Over the years my interest toward art began to change, no I wasn’t Picasso, but I knew how to draw more than some stick figures. In high school I was given an art class and those fifty-three minutes was the best of my life. It was a time to escape from the ordinary pen and paper with lines to a blank sheet that I could control the outcome. I was able to choose from a pencil, colored pencils, markers, a paintbrush and even chalk. After high school, art wasn’t really a part of my life, I still loved the idea that I could create whatever I had in my mind and it would be art, but I just didn’t have the time nor did I try to put the time in. Then I came to LaGuardia Community College, here I was offered a chance to take an art class. I didn’t second guess the option when it was time to register, I was overly excited.
Throughout the class, the Professor showed us many different forms of art that were created by various great artists around the world. She often explained what we were going to be learning and she planned trips to Museums where the students can get the physically experience of viewing art up close. One day, the Professor took us on a class trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this is where I first laid eyes on a very interesting piece entitled “Canyon”. As I viewed the piece my interest continued to grow. It was a basic painting on a canvas, just as any other painting, but at the bottom was as stuffed bald eagle attached. I have never seen anything like this, as I read the short piece of info about the painting, that the Museums put next to the artworks, I read that this masterpiece was created in 1959, by a man named Robert Rauschenberg. I have never heard of him, but I was immediately drawn to his sense of style.  

Robert Rauschenberg  died at the age of 82, but he leaves behind a timeline of events and the legacy of being a pioneer to new ideas and ways of creating art. Robert Rauschenberg is known as the greatest artist of printmaking and for introducing the world an transformation from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. He inspired other artist to have freedom of possibility by finding beauty in everyday, he took ordinary everyday objects and added them into his work. This form of creation later paved the way to Pop Art and Conceptual Art. Robert Rauschenberg was most famous for his Combines, combined found objects and paintings. Although many people viewed them as trash, he declared that this was and still is a form of art. Robert Rauschenberg was not the only artist considered the greatest of printmaking and silk-screening, among him were Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, but Robert was the best out of them all.