September blog- art making and history

Before transferring to Columbia I was a history major, and I still find that my interest in art history is quite similar in many ways to my love for other areas of history. And what I love most about history is the sense of continuity: the idea that the world is continually changing, if not always slowly or steadily, and one can trace the changes that turned the society of the 1780s, say, into the society of the 1950s and so on. That feeling of evolution and growth comes through clearly in art history as well, and I am perhaps over-fascinated by the idea that every aspect of the visual arts was consciously invented by someone at some point in time. The Roman invention of the arch and the dome, Masaccio’s use of chiaroscuro to model forms, Welles’ editing techniques in Citizen Kane— all of these are techniques we take entirely for granted now, but they were new and brilliant once upon a time.

However, because I am in fact an art student, and learning both to draw and to design and construct costumes, I also need to take a much more practical and personal interest in art history than in, say, military or medical history. I like to think that all other visual artists are potential– teachers might be too strong a word, but influences; I try to pay attention to the choices they made in their work to see if there are examples there I might like to try following. I find the study of art history both interesting and beneficial, in short, and I take for granted that it improves my own artmaking process even in the coursework I do in a completely separate department.