If you went to the DAM(which most of us did), you may have seen an artwork titled "Summer" by Giuseppe Arcimboido. I have to admit, when I looked at that painting I was a little repulsed. It looks weird. It just does not seem very aesthetically calming to me. It's odd. So after the initially "this is weird" thought, where do we go from there. Well, I will attempt to sound mature and talk about what I learned. In a biography on Guiseppe I found this "A majority of scholars hold to the view, however, that given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre (see, for example, the grotesque heads of Leonardo da Vinci, a fellow Milanese), Arcimboldo, far from being mentally imbalanced, catered to the taste of his times." I can hang with that. I mean, it's not something I would like to hang on my walls, but to think of it in that way makes it seem less "threatening" to me(not that one should be threatened by art). In our book, the author talks about an observer not simply walking away from a painting because they don't like the way it looks (or something like that). I am guilty of this...I can judge an artwork and not try to understand the artist or context of the work. Sometimes, trying to understand may not help and sometimes we may not want to understand or can understand. Yet, if we do try, maybe a little step at a time, we won't become so intimidated by art. Well, not all of it. Honestly, I still don't like his art of fruit people, and it still freaks me out a little bit. I can handle it when I think about it in a certain way. Maybe it's better to just let it go, turn away, and say "talented artist...not my cup of tea".
*note: quote taken found off of http://www.giuseppe-arcimboldo.org/biography.html
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