Today we continued our discussion of heroism by sharing who each of us chose as our heroes. We found that the situation is not always clear cut. For example, David painted heroic images of Napoleon,
But some of you thought that Napolean was a tyrant who was responsible for many deaths and did not deserve to be seen as a hero. What did David do to make these portraits seem more heroic?
We also discussed one contemporary example of a controversial hero: Lance Armstrong. He won the Tour de France 7 times, which is one of the toughest cycling races in the world. He also beat cancer and used his fame to raise millions of dollars for cancer research. However, it recently came to light that he used steroids and essentially cheated to win all those titles. He was stripped of those titles and banned from professional cycling. Do you think he should still be seen as a hero? Do you find his deeds heroic?
We also took some time to discuss more of the work of David. We talked about Neoclassicism, a movement that was inspired by the art of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This intrest in the ancients was brought about by the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, Roman cities that were buried under a volcano's eruption. Here are some examples of Neoclassical art, all by David.
In your hero portraits we will use such image of inspiration and try to incorporate Neoclassical ideas into our work.
We then began drawing some self portraits in our sketchbooks as practice.
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