The very first art technique I learned in my first drawing class in my freshman year in high school was one point perspective. The technique of one point perspective didn’t just pop up magically in the textbooks like our planet Earth didn’t just pop up like the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella who can easily pop up any form such as a carriage. It takes years and every bits of forms to come together to create our world today. Surely, someone had to be genius enough to build this one point perspective method , but this method didn’t show up right away. During the cave men times, the first people to walk on our planet. First, the cave men created two dimensional paintings that looked like drawings done by toddlers. Then, several thousands and thousands of years later, people, in particularily the Ancient Egyptians, began to understand the proportions a little better. To draw humans, they used a method called Canon of Proportions. Their bodies looked twisted, but there were no three dimensional rendering. While drawings were in the process of coming together to today’s modern drawing, sculptures and architectures were also forming like chunks of gas, dust, and matter forming our solar system. The very first sculpture that we learn in Survey of Western Art History I is Women from Willendorf from around 40,000-10,000 BCE. She has a very pudgy body form, but that’s a symbolism of feterility, and again, people were just beginning to understand how to create scupltures like when our planet Earth first formed, it was just a hot molting gas planet and figuring out how to give us life. Then, again, during the ancient Egyptian time while the Canon of Proportions was created, the understanding of mathematics was a beginning as the Egyptians created massive pyramids which surely required a great understanding of engineering. Then the Ancient Greeks and the Romans came along and gave us a gift of who we are today. As the politicians walk up the steps to the entrance of our nation’s capital building and our president enter his home, the White House, they see the Ancient Greek and Roman architecture style. Basically, the Greeks and Romans created a standerized classic style of archictecture and sculptures. They created many nude pieces and throughout their creation process, they were beginning to understand our body forms, the muscles, the proportions, and facial expressions. Then passing by the Byzatine and the Middle Ages era, the eras that nearly destroyed our world like a giant asteroid passing by and just barely about to hit our planet, but thanks to the Renassiance era that saved our life. Just as the Renaissance was beginning to step in, Duccio, a famous Italian pre-Renaissance painter, made a first step to form our modern world – creating illusion of space. He formed the technique, chiaroscuro – three dimensional rendering in pictures. People were beginning to see three dimensional forms of people’s faces, clothes and architecture. Then, only decades later, Jan Van Eyck took a step ahead and created real and photograph looking images, but there was still a lot of tweaking as the proportions from the body to the archicture were not correct and the forms were not quite twisted. In other words, they were either in frontal view or profile view. Finally, where did the method of one point perspective that I first learned in drawing come from? After more and more understanding of how three-dimensional works, Brunelleschi’s, a well known Italian architect, brain light bulb came on and was the first to understand the correct way to view a one-point perspective. Since then, many artists followed his theory to create much more realistic and natural looking drawings, paintings, and also gained the ability to create interior designs. Then, at last, Leonardo da Vinci, another Italian artist, creates paintings with the three quarter body view which is known as pyramid view. That is what the famous painting, Mona Lisa, is known for. It is the first portrait to depict a person in a pyramid view. Not only that, he studied human anatomy in a great depth and created many great drawings that are being used in medical books today. As we can see, Europe, in particular Italy, is the Big Bang of the arts. They created our western world of today. In two and a half weeks, I will be taking another expedition. Last summer, the trip was about understanding the French language and its culture. This time, it’s about art history and understanding better the “big bang” process of our world. In order to take a depth in this study, I will be taking off to Italy for three weeks starting June 4th. Then, after the trip, I will be reuniting with my best French friends in Bayonne for two weeks.

Then, I head off to Israel where I will finally understand my Jewish heritage.