Life Bottenecking

It's kind of funny that we get the assignment to look at images of Pocahontas the day after I go to Beehive Design Collective and during the time we should be thinking about classes for next semester. Since highschool I've wanted to take an Art History class, simply because I love art but have never been particularly skilled at producing it. An art history class would provide that vital link between the beauty of a painting with the social constructs of the time, which I love observing. In my intro to theater design class we just did a project on the Gothic/late medieval period. My section was on historical, economic and social context. Seeing the connections between papal power and the vertical lines in a church, or the economic revolution reflected in the the clothes of people in paintings satisfied the side of me that loves synthesizing. In short, I'm obssessed with whether art follows life or life follows art.
The one question is answered for me though; no art history I classes are offered next semester. But, as you can see in my last post, Beehive Design Collective was an example where art is reflective of the time, this time deliberately to effectively convey a social issue.

All of this was simply rambling on how all the events are sort of coming together. It's a metaphorical bottleneck!

But I already have my overarching post for the week, so this must be reigned into the Pocahontas images we saw. What's most interesting about these images is how much the painters' perspective usually effected the piece. In Sully's Pocahontas  she maintains none of her Native American heritage, but is garbed in a western dress and put into a European portrait pose. The worst part is we have no way to tell how accurate this portrait is! And now I'm wondering what a Native American "pose" would be... How could we be more true to her character? How much of these portraits, tainted with western eyes influenced the current image of Pocahontas? Is it a bad thing that they have the artists' skew? Hopefully we can talk about this in class tomorrow.