In class today we watched a movie on the Vietnam Memorial. The memorial was created by a Yale student. The design was simple yet complex. The simplicity of the design was the fact that it was a long black wall of the names of the men who had sacrificed their lives for our country. The complexity in the design was the fact that the wall used the collaboration of colors, chronological order and two walls coming together to express something more than just a wall with names on it. This memorial has a lasting impact on many because of it's simplicity.
At first glance I thought the Vietnam memorial was lame because it wasn't anything flashy. But after hearing the architect's reasoning and ideas and concepts around the memorial I grew to be astounded by it. The fact that the architect came up with something simple yet so powerful is astonishing to me. To come up with something powerful is hard enough but to create a work of art that leaves a chilling impact is amazing. The feelings and emotions she was able to express in this work of art without making it huge and flashy is a skill that not many of us have.
This memorial really struck me today because it gave me ideas of how to go about creating my own sculpture for the 21st century human. I am going to try to emulate the same concepts she put into her memorial, simplicity is design. This is a phrase that my mothers art teacher would recite to her, and today I finally understood it. I now know that most of the time something simple can speak more words than something that is not.
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