Non-Western Communication Patterns
Non-Western Communication Patterns
As a father, I avoid using the ex-cathedra justification “because I said so.” However, kids are obstinately, fiercely eristic: They assault with mercy and expect complete constancy from their argument partners. My daughter Joanna, then 3, once enquired as to whether or not we would have been taking a swim with her young sister. I answered, “No, newborns can’t swim.” However, Daddy, Baby Beluga “swim so wild and swims so free,” she sternly warned me. She had seen me in a contradiction after I had allowed her to see the film that included this counterprogramming. I took the note because I am a good enough dad. My kids like making fun of me; they tease me about my gray hair and lower back discomfort, and I tell them that they will never acquire a dog. The reason is a tremendous leveler in the intellectual endeavor and the democratic household. Being a dad is like a never-ending recruit training that teaches you to put in the effort and eliminate your inherent hypocrisy and laziness. Nevertheless, one of your children is constantly there, a whistle gripped in their teeth, ready to announce any minute slip-up.
The good intellectual habit of giving due procedure must be developed, which requires demonstrating your effort. Thus, the dad hypothesis is a second-look theory. It has a cynical attitude but mild skepticism because it is also intriguing. Dads have a more fundamentally conflicting commitment—to our children and their welfare—and cannot afford to be overly devoted to any one perspective. Dads also benefit from some distance from the fundamental premise that we must preserve a separation from a subject of investigation since that commitment has been earned with tremendous labor and expense. Therefore, the second Dad Theory moment is to acknowledge the situatedness—the imperfect humanness—of reasoning.
The virtuous intellectual habit of giving due procedure must be developed, which requires demonstrating your effort. Thus, the dad hypothesis is a second-look theory. It has a cynical attitude but mild skepticism because it is also intriguing. Dads have a more fundamentally conflicting commitment—to our children and their welfare—and cannot afford to be overly devoted to any one perspective. Dads also benefit from some distance from the fundamental premise that we must preserve a separation from a subject of investigation since that commitment has been earned with tremendous labor and expense. Therefore, the second Dad Theory moment is to acknowledge the situatedness—the imperfect humanness—of reasoning.
Dad Theory is a sensibility created from the experience of assuming the dad’s position, focusing on situatedness and humility, a melding of the heart and head, values of intellectual justice, and soft touch. When we gain knowledge, we tend to act like stereotypical dads; we begin to think of ourselves as fully grown and independent. However, the distinctive insights of Dad Theory are derived from the experience of growing up alongside your children and the democratic recognition that there is still growth potential. Dad Theory goes past those forces to the future they make possible, beginning with our hearts if fathers became dads in reaction to the pressures of the times.
“Young Woman with a Fan (detail), early 1750s, Pietro Antonio Rotari. Pastel on blue-green paper, mounted on canvas. Getty Museum”
“Eighteenth-Century Pastels”
“August 30, 2022–February 26, 2023, GETTY CENTER”
This exhibit traces the development of pastels throughout Europe in the eighteenth decade, when the mobility, speed, and stunning aesthetic impact of the medium led to an unheard-of boom in appeal. Due to this, pastels became a viral medium for portraiture. Pastelists were frequently quite mobile in order to find contracts and traveled throughout Europe. Rosalba Carriera and Adélade Labelle-Guiard are two featured painters who were among the first female artists to utilize the possibilities of pastels fully.
The natural chalks of various hues that have long been seen in the drawing are different from pastels. It is created by combining powdered colors with a binder, forming the resulting material into sticks, and allowing the bars to dry. These pigment sticks or crayons are highly crumbly, and the colored powder they contain very lightly attaches to paper that has frequently been roughened beforehand to provide a substrate for the substance to adhere to. Thus, pastel artwork is brittle because movement might cause the pigment to loosen.
Although pastel painting as we know it now comes from the seventeenth century, the earliest pieces of artwork to employ pastel were created in Renaissance Italy. Pastel was rarely used throughout the Renaissance to emphasize or color paintings typically created with natural chalk (Box, 2021). The usage of pastel increased over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; it was no longer only used for final touches, and French artists like Robert Nanteuil utilized it increasingly extensively and across more significant areas. As pastels grew artistically closer to paintings during the eighteenth century, color, rather than line, started to take center stage. The classification of pastel has long been contested: André Félibien characterized pastel as a style of sketching that exhibited the same effects as an oil painting but was unable to be classified as painting in 1690, while Roger de Piles defined it as a drawing in 1684. However, one is missing the vibrancy of compositions in oil (Box, 2021). Nevertheless, the seventeenth century was a defining moment for pastel, as Joseph Vivien was admitted as a “painting in pastel” to the French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1701 and was the first artist to do so.
Even with the life-size pastel portraits of Vivien’s mammoth scale, pastel was still considered a medium for preliminary work. Benedetto Luti created the first polished pastels in Italy using the medium to paint study figures and portraiture. Although Luti gained much of his popularity as an oil and fresco painter and trader, his brilliantly colored pieces were greatly loved by and gifted to his clientele. Rosalba Carriera (1673–1757) (Box, 2021), a Venetian portraitist who communicated with Luti but was primarily self-taught, became the first painter to be appropriately recognized and characterized by her pastels. She started her career creating tiny portraits, which were then seen as a suitable subject for ladies. Her pastels are renowned for dazzling palettes, glossy velvet tones, and miniaturist precision. She never used oil on canvas in her later portraits; she always used pastels (Box, 2021). Lords and palaces from all over Europe, notably Grand Tourists from Germany, France, and England who were in Venice, ordered and amassed them. Larger than Luti’s pastels, Carriera’s were created for hanging exhibition next to and competing with traditional oil portraiture.
Pastels have traditionally been recognized for their hues’ vibrant but subdued brightness. Even though we now understand how fragile they are, pastels were once considered more lasting than oils because of their vivid colors’ resistance to minimal damage (oils often faded or yellowed with age). Pastel, like oils, gave the artist access to a deeper interaction between material and substrate. Blue paper was frequently used for pastel painting because it was the thickest paper readily accessible in the eighteenth century. Due to the chromatic benefits it provided when the pastel colors caught up on and reacted with the blue backdrop. Maurice Quentin de La Tour (1704–1788) (Box, 2021), arguably the most celebrated pastelist of the eighteenth century, produced vibrant pastel sketches for completed portraits nearly exclusively. These studies provide essential insight into how this tonal sophistication was built out. Pastel painters utilize thousands of crayons because each tone demands a separate stick and contrast oils, which can be blended on a palette from nine or ten actual colors.
References
Siegler, S., Besson, S., & Gardner, D. Painting Pairs: Art Historical and Technical Study 2020-2021. https://courtauld.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Siegler_Besson-Final_Report.pdf
Box, L. V. (2021). Enlightened “Museums of Images” or Decorative Displays? Elizabeth Seymour Percy and the Eighteenth-Century Print Room. Eighteenth-Century Life, 45(3), 135–157. https://read.dukeupress.edu/eighteenth-century-life/article-abstract/45/3/135/174273
Whitlam-Cooper, Francesca. “The Eighteenth-Century Pastel Portrait.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/papo/hd_papo.htm (September 2010)