E. Rodriguez: Field Exercise 5

At first I was confused by your picture - my immediate reaction was that you had somehow just put in another, lower quality version of the same painting. Then I realised the presence of the two black dogs. Of course, all this was explained in the later paragraph, but I'm always more immediately drawn to the visuals and like to evaluate my own thoughts on the work first and use the accompanying readings to complement my experience afterwards. I guess I do see where your work is coming from, but I also think it would have been better to include more changes to the work than just the blurred effect and the dogs - smaller, even subtler changes would have made it more intriguing, I think, if you weren't feeling up to creating another work from scratch. At this level, I'm not sure I can feel a very personal sense of the experience of the artwork so much as a few interesting tweaks made to it.

You had some good analysis of the painting, but I feel like the piece you produced in response is very superficial. It doesn't add any meaning to the original work. I got the same sort of peaceful, idyllic countryside vibe as before, with just an added touch of nostalgia from the blur. You wrote that the painting reminded you of being at your grandparents' place. Instead of trying to reproduce the physical house, perhaps it would have been better to try to express the feelings you had while you were at the house, or to give impressions of what you experienced there. You don't have to mimic Hopper's style or to start from scratch; there are plenty of stock photos you can manipulate. I think you had a some good ideas going in, but the execution was just a little uninspired.