My Best Notecard

In Humanities we have just finished all our note cards. First we got to pick a craft or study that we wanted to look into. I picked witchcraft. Then we were told to write ten note cards about the topic. The one I show was actually my last note card and I picked it because I felt I had progressed the most from the beginning. I went quit outside the box for this one and I was a little nervous about turning it in. As I soon found out there was actually a lot to say about art and witchcraft. I started developing a strategy to effectively write a good note card. First I would brain storm ideas for about half an hour. I have not been known to be a big brain stormer, so I was surprised how helpful it was. Then I would research the topic and write as much as I could on it. Then I would spend twenty minutes editing the notecard, are turn it in. I felt that this note card showed the best of this strategy, and since I was very interested in the topic it was easier to write.

Notecards

Witchcraft and How it Inspired Art

#10

Source:

“Witches in Art.” Many Interesting Facts , 30 Aug. 2013, manyinterestingfacts.wordpress.com/2013/08/30/witches-in-art/.

Quote:

“Witches inspired many artists and I will present some of their works.

“In 1953, the year the play debuted, Miller wrote, ” The Crucible  it is  taken from history. No character is in the play who did not take a similar role in Salem, 1692.”

“The Crucible is a political allegory for American mccarthyism. Arthur Miller wrote it because he wanted to make a point about society at the time and he compared it to another similar time. Mccarthyism was witch hunt for Communists.”

 

“ The Scarlet Letter is set in 17th-century Puritan Boston, Massachusetts, during the years 1642 to 1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne who conceives a daughter through an affair and struggles to create a new life of  repentance and dignity .”

“As we can see on next painting by Francisco Goya (1746-1828), witches often perform their rituals in groups called covens…This painting shows their worship of the Devil who joined them in the form of a goat.

 

 

Paraphrase:

-Many novelists and artists based their work off of witchcraft in the colonial age.

-A book called The Crucible is a play written by Arthur Miller about witches in the colonial era. Miller wrote the play in a time called the Mccarthy Era where they were they searched everywhere for communists, trying to put them in jail. Arthur thought that this was similar to the witch hunts in Salem, so he wrote about them

-A book called The Scarlet Letter was written by a man named Nathaniel Hawthorne. The book was published in 1850, but set in 1642 and about a Puritan family. Puritans were the main people that were against witches, and while the book is about a woman accused for adultery, it says a lot about witchcraft.

-In one of the pictures they show a group of women surrounding a giant goat, and worshiping the animal. Goats were supposed to be the animals of the Devil, so it made sense that the witches, who were the allies to the Devil would worship the goat.

 

 

My Ideas:

(Painting by Francisco Goya)

Most artists are inspired by one thing or another. It just so happened that the witch hunts in the 17th century inspired a lot of artists. One of the many writers that based his work off of witchcraft was Arthur Miller. He wrote the famous play, The Crucible. Miller lived in a time called the Mccarthy Era. It was a time when the entire country was on a hunt for Communists. If you were called in and interrogated for being a communist you would be poisoned from the rest of the world, and everybody would hate you. The man that ran this entire hunt was named Mccarthy. He called in a lot of Hollywood artists to be interrogated, and in doing so, ruined all their careers. Miller thought that the hunt was very similar to the Salem Witch Trials. The Mccarthy Era was like a modern day witch hunt. They were both trying to find a bad group of people that didn’t exist. The next big writer was a man named Nathaniel Hawthorne. He wrote a book called The Scarlet Letter about a Puritan family in the 1640s. Even though the book is about a woman convicted for adultery, which means having relations with a man other than your husband, the book says a lot about witchcraft. Witches were primarily convicted by Puritan people, like Samuel Parris, and almost all of the witches convicted were not Puritan. A painting was made by a man named Francisco Goya (1746-1828). The painting is a depiction of 10 witches surrounding a giant goat giving the women instructions. Goya wanted to show that The Devil would take form as a goat and give the witches instructions on what evil deed to do next. I notice that all these pieces of art were created by men. In fact, many other artists that depicted witches were also men, like De Bry. While I don’t think that any of these men had the intention to offend women, this is just more proof that men have more rights than women. Aside from Francisco Goya, the three artists I mentioned were modern men writing about an awful time. While they are supporting women, it still shows that women don’t even get to write about a time where they were being killed. While i’m sure many women attempted to write books and paint art about witchcraft, they did not become become known or famous. Our society has a long way to go before we are actually a world without sexism and implicit bias. Witchcraft was a very important event and affected many artists, it’s just that the majority of them were men.