response to Walker's and Barrett's articles

     In Walker's article, the author mentions about the importance of the big idea of the artworks and the differences between the big idea and the subjects. The big idea is about the conceptual ground for artmaking, but the subject matter serves as the context for examining the big idea. I think it is important for artmaking people to form a big idea before they begin to perform their arts. The big idea is like a signal which could let us keep going in the right direction.
      I think even though we need to focus on the big idea, we still think about the technique skill and material,etc. We should not let the big idea go beyond these skills. We should consider the big idea first because we need get some general ideas which could inspire us to do some artmaking. However, if we wan to make our work more attractive or formal, we should improve our work by using these skills. Even though the context is important, we need to consider the ways we use to express the context.
   
         In Barrett's article, I agree the idea that denotation and connotation are different. We cannot just make a judgement by looking at the appearance. As Marilyn Kern-Foxworth mentioned, "You can see me and you can see that I am black, but you don't really know who I am. " Denotation is what you could see and we don't need to consider. However, connotation is the meanings of those you see. As a viewer, we should interpret the purpose artists want to transfer.
         Even though I agree that people with different ages and education could develop the skills to recognize the denotation and connotation in art work by learning. However, I think it is more important to let them think by themselves than teaching them. Different people could form different ideas to the same art work based on their experience and we should not force them to form the same  basic opinion when viewing the work. It could reduce the chance to improve. Besides, only the person who has similar experience could have the same feeling and understand the artists' purpose better. We cannot develop this kind of feeling and understandings by teaching.