hey gang so today in this video we're going to talk about craft okay now craft and art have always had an interesting relationship and people are always trying to disseminate either the differences between art and craft or the similarities between art and craft uh we talked about giorgio vasari he wanted to separate the three traditional fine arts do you remember what those are yeah painting sculpture and architecture he said those are fine arts and things like blacksmiths or shoe cobblers uh or things even printmakers are craft okay obviously albrecht durer who was a printmaker got upset by that and he said look printmaking is a fine art just as much as painting and sculpture is and so there's always been sort of an interesting relationship even the author of your book mark getling he has changed the title of this chapter from kraft in older versions of the book to now he calls it arts and rituals of daily life okay whatever that even means uh these days the relationship between art and craft has kind of been blurred a little bit okay some of the differences that disseminate the two have always been uh hopefully you've learned that art has concepts and ideas that artists are trying to share to an audience they create art objects like painting and sculpture and audience views these art objects that have content there's a context behind the creation of the work of art and they may have an aesthetic experience when they look at the art object they may make them happy or angry or sad and then there are concepts that the artists are trying to share within these art objects and then the audience can respond to those concepts and sort of come up with their own ideas of what the art is all about craft creates an object but quite often what's lacking are those concepts okay or the aesthetic value of a craft object usually the craft object is traditionally created for utility okay someone would make a ceramic pot to hold grain or they'll make a ceramic bowl to hold your cereal in the morning okay so there's a utilitarian aspect to the object in which is created but some people who work within crafts say well there can be an aesthetic value you can you know sculpt a bowl and you can have an aesthetic feeling it can make you feel happy or we can use formal elements of line shape mass color and value within these things so the lines have always kind of been blurred what i'd like to do is i'd like to talk about craft more of a fine art i want to focus on the materials quite often associated with crafts so know the materials that are usually associated with craft and i want to focus on artists that use these traditionally craft materials in a fine art world okay and a lot of this artwork is shown in galleries and museums just like painting sculpture and architecture so the first material i want to focus on is ceramics okay now we talked a little bit about ceramics when we talked about uh sculpture okay we talked about terra cotta terracotta means fired earth but traditionally these bowls like we talked about made by maria and julian martinez were used for a utilitarian purpose okay they would make a bowl like this and they would store grain in it you could store water in it someone may have one of these next to their front door and they put umbrellas in it or something like that but today we look at this type of sculpture and we put this in a gallery or museum and we'd look at it as fine art because of the way that the form was created being very cognizant of things like value and shape and color and a lot of these visual elements and they can tell stories right artists can use these type of ceramics to tell stories just like this artist here okay by using ceramics which is traditionally a fine art no longer is there a utility for this right you can't store anything in it it's not really an art piece that's used for daily life does anyone know who the artist is that created this piece you may have never seen this piece but we saw other pieces from this series that the artist did called his banality series where he did sculptures of objects that are and then kind of blew him up yeah this is jeff coons this comes from some sort of a fable i forget exactly how it goes but this fable is about these stacking of these uh different animals here's the piece that we looked at when we discussed uh sculpture right this one of this prized pig with these two angels and this woman in a snowmobile suit or a ski suit sort of kissing the the pig's butt there right so he's using these traditional sort of craft materials clay or ceramics his is actually porcelain ceramics and then he blows them up and then now they have concepts right we look at him we think about the ideas what is he trying to portray here with his content and with his subject matter another material quite often associated with craft is glass okay people would blow glass to make glasses that you would drink out of glasses that you would read out of um you can make bowls out of glass a lot of times people have them as sort of decorative elements that you can kind of store things in but what dale chihuly does is he's an artist that would use blown glass to create these beautiful installations and these beautiful sculptures if you go through vegas you'll see a lot of dale chihuly pieces where he's using this blown glass to make these big elaborate pieces of art that you wouldn't there's no use for them anymore right you can't store things in them and there's no utilitarian value to them anymore here's one i think this is the bellagio but this is a piece in vegas and it's it's riding the lines of sculpture more than a craft piece so these are artists like i said that are blurring the lines between craft and fine art he also does a lot of site-specific installations in parks and arboretums they'll hire him to come out and incorporate his glass through the environment and throughout the space to create these site-specific installations he's got in pretty amazing museum up in seattle i haven't been yet but i've heard it's absolutely beautiful it's underneath the space needle it's the the chihuly garden and glass museum uh in seattle uh and it has tons of his uh glass that's like i said turned into sculpture this is dale chihuly today unfortunately he cannot blow glass anymore uh he lost sight in one eye so he doesn't have depth perception that people with two working eyes do have and you need that to blow glass if you've ever seen anyone blow glass they have a wonderful glass department at fullerton cal state fullerton and usually it's multiple people in the process because you have a really really hot oven that you have the glasses attached to a long uh pole that you heat up the glass and then you blow in the pole and that kind of blows the thing up like a balloon and then you can take it out and shape it and sculpt it and add different colors to it and twirl it and keep blowing it and so it's this it's a real physical activity in the creation of the art and usually it takes a few people to do it he had someone that used to be in charge of his studio his name was actually robbie miller someone told me about it it wasn't me as a different robbie miller was running his studio and blowing his glass for a while uh there's also a stained glass okay stained glass in windows right so stained glass originally was a utility because the glass is just protecting the indoors from the outdoor elements right and people decided well as long as i'm having this glass sort of to protect from the environment outside why don't i start decorating it so they use different pieces of glass they would put together different colors they can make subject matter and people and landscapes and everything out of the different pieces of glass this is the rose windows in the notre dame cathedral do you remember a couple years ago or a few years ago now when there was that big fire in notre dame they were amazed that these windows were saved okay because they thought with that extreme heat in there that they would have melted but they were saved somehow the fire didn't affect them so the rose windows are still there another name for stained glass is also known as leaded glass because what they'll do is they'll take the different glass pieces sometimes they'll cut them to the shape that they want sometimes they break them and then use those more organic shapes and pieces and this is a lead that they would solder together and there's these channels in the lead and that's where they put the glass in this lead is very very pliable so you could shape it around the glass and then you solder it together to attach it to a new piece so you can see back in the windows here all this in between has all those different little shapes and pieces in it so stained glass also known as a leaded glass another material quite often associated with craft is fabric okay in fabric arts or in this case tapestries so this is a tapestry from the renaissance and there were tapestries all around during the renaissance in castles and cathedrals and things like that can anyone guess what the utility of hanging fabric on your wall used to be i'll give you a hint in an old castle yeah it was used as insulation okay because we talked about we're going to talk about architecture in the next video in architecture there is a skeleton skeleton and skin systems and shell systems shell systems is like a castle meaning the exterior is the same as the interior you'll have one block of stone which is the exterior and the interior skeleton and skin is a more contemporary version where you would have wall studs in your wall and then drywall on the inside that's the skin that would protect it and insulate from the elements outdoors and then usually outside you put siding or in california a lot of stucco and so that would insulate the wall but if you just had a shell system with just a stone a lot of the moisture can come into the homes and so they would put these fabrics on the wall and so they realized hey if i'm putting fabric on the wall why don't i decorate it just like posters and art that we would hang on there on the wall so they would stitch and sew and make these different uh content within the work in these different subject matters this one of this unicorn here and so artists still use a lot of different types of fabric art this is the artist faith ringgold who had been doing quilting for a large part of her life and she said well i'm going to use these quilts which is considered a craft but i'm going to paint on them and i'm going to use different types of swatches to bring them into a fine art world and she displays these in galleries and museums and we look at them the same way we would look at a painting so she's brought fabrics into a fine art world this is one of her famous ones called tar beach and if you've ever known quilting circles it's a real sort of artistic community that comes together quite often people will have these different patch is that have been in the family for years and they'll get together with other people within their community and they'll share their family patches to make a quilt that's about that neighborhood or that community or that environment this one she calls tar beach um because her and her brother used to sit on the in the summer they would sit on their rooftops in their um apartments in new york and their family would hang out and have picnics and play cards so in the summer we go to the beach beach she called it the tar beach and she said that she would lay here with her brother and imagine if she could fly if you can see if she's flying here and look at all the different apartment buildings and see all the different sort of neighborhoods and people sort of hanging out on their rooftops okay so bringing this the utility obviously of a quilt is to keep you warm at night right well this one i would not sleep put it on your bed because these are not worth a lot of money she's hanging in museums and we approach them the same way we would approach a fine art painting and a lot of artists have started to work with fabric arts in a variety of forms sigmar polk is a contemporary artist this was really big when i was an undergrad in chicago people would go to thrift stores and they would buy these different fabrics and bed sheets and they would stitch them together so this is stitched fabric and then paint on top of them so these are all different fabrics so fine art as we talked about in painting will paint on canvas right stretch canvas over stretcher bars so he's stretching these over stretcher bars but instead of using canvas he uses these different fabrics remember we talked about we talked about painting an artist would put a canvas down and before they painted on it they would have to have a protective barrier do you remember what that was called yeah that's gesso or ground okay and what that does is it prevents the paint from sucking into the fabric so it protects the paint from the fabric uh a ground gesso so this here if you're inspired by this and you want to go to a thrift store and get a bunch of fabrics and sew them together to make a painting on just realize how long your bed sheets last and they're not really archival they're not meant to last hundreds if not thousands of years like a lot of these paintings have and so you need to protect the paint from the canvas so you'd have to put a ground or a gesso now normally gesso is white and chalky like this one by sigmar polk so he put the gesso here and that's where he painted on and then this is sort of the raw fabric this one here he used clear gesso okay they do make clear gesso that you can put on and that's going to stabilize your fabric make it a little bit more archival archival means it's going to last longer right last the test of time and then you can paint on top of it or you could just use the gesso where you're going to paint okay but the goal is kind of these paintings will last a long time because we think about that as fine art as something that will last much longer than a bed sheet would last the other two materials that you're going to find in your book is wood is the material quite often associated with craft and so is metal okay so make sure you're keeping up with your readings because you're going to get a lot more information from the book than you're just going to get from my lowly old slide presentations here but i hope you're inspired and i hope you enjoyed it