Final Project

            For my final project, my idea was to make a landscape out of food, but natural food, like vegetables fruits, roots, and nuts, because they come from the landscape. I wanted to create a traditional looking landscape and use different foods to make it look as realistic as possible. I also tried to use the fact that food goes bad in some way, so as vegetables or fruits decompose, they change color, and it would be somewhat reminiscent of the changing of the seasons in the landscape. I wanted to incorporate the idea of time, which we discussed in class, into my project, by using foods with a short shelf life, foods that decompose. Before hand, I thought it would work well because many of the vegetables, fruits, etc. resemble something in nature. I thought about what I could use to create the different textures and colors that one finds in nature. Potato skin resembles bark, there are plenty of leafy greens to resemble to leaves of a tree, more potato skins for boulders, cornhusk for grass, and berries to paint flowers. I also tried to think about what to use as adhesive and decided on marshmallow fluff. I knew that it would be tricky because vegetables do go bad and so I didn’t want to start it until the day of our exam so that it would be fresh.

            I faced many challenges when trying to construct my piece. Adhesive didn’t take well to the vegetables because of their texture. I ended up using rubber cement but it still didn’t work very well. I also found that time was a big issue. I wasn’t able to give the image all of the depth that I wanted and incorporate all of the different textures. I ended up letting go of a lot of ideas. I mostly used potatoes, brown ones for the tree and green ones for the grassy hills. I used white onion for the sky but didn’t have enough to complete the sky. I used artichoke for the leaves of the tree. I had also planned to make a dirt path out of sunflower seeds, a field wildflowers in the distance made out of berries, red onion, lemon, and carrot, and a horizon line of dark forest. I had also ripped cornhusk into strips and cut it up to make grass but was unable to use it all. I still had cardboard showing when I was done, though I didn’t want it to. If I had more time, I would have tried to alter my idea a bit and work in 3D rather than try to make a 2 dimensional landscape. I would have tried to incorporate more foods to show more variety of texture that is found in nature. I would have put more leaves on the tree to make it seem more realistic. With this project, I learned that food is an extremely difficult medium to work with because there are so many limitations with keeping it fresh, its shelf life, and so on. 

Art Event Response

            This past week, I went to the Studio Art SMP Exhibition. There were six different artists displaying their work and progress up to this point. The first artist to the left was Koko Olszewski. She had a large quilt hanging on the wall that was made with the help of the community. She had professors, students and children help with it. The two outside sources that helped were The Children of Village and Yellow Door Studio. With the quilt, she created a “metaphor for community and diversity” because she had different people from the community work on it and each individual person has their own idea of what they want to make in their square. It showed each person’s idea of what home is. In the squares, people incorporated their idea of home in some way. Samantha Nickey had a series of large-scale black and white acrylic paintings of moths and showed their attraction to light. Each piece was from a different angle, or zoomed in on a different part, but they all seemed to be part of the same scene. They symbolized the “fragile, intricate parts of ourselves.” I thought it was interesting because moths are drawn to light, and they circle around light, but at a certain point, when they get too close, they die. I thought she was trying to comment on the attractions of a human that can be dangerous, yet are inherent in everyone. Jenny Metz created collages of photographs, but rather than manipulating the images by changing their shape, she manipulated them through their arrangement. She arranged them in an interesting way, almost like following a path. She showed the way that the camera and human eye see. I found myself turning my head, looking at them sideways, and trying to figure out the direction. Laura Hausheer created a series of paper cuttings. They were placed on a piece of glass or thick plastic and they stood out from the wall to create strong shadow. She was creating a children’s picture book. They made me think of the pop-up books for children, because of the 3D effect of the images. Elise Kielek created small, modeled spaces and showed where “reality and fantasy cross over.” She then took photographs of these spaces. Many were of common spaces, like the living room, bedroom, attic, and bathroom. There were also several models of the natural world, like an ice cave. They captured the “unsettling and ominous world” of dreams rather than the more lighthearted idea of them. She also allowed the viewer to fill in their own narrative and made them believe in impossible spaces. There was something real and familiar about each image yet also a dream-like quality. Some of the images were turned to the side, created an unsettling feeling and while there were ominous atmospheres, there was still some humor in them.

Blog Entry #5

Last class we had a critique of our studio response artwork. We had to create a piece of art inspired by our artist that we researched. I researched Chuck Close who was known for his large-scale portraits that were done from photographs. I did a large-scale portrait, though not as big as his pieces, of my nephew in fingerprints. I used grids to transfer what I saw in the photograph to the larger image. In the critique, I learned how I could have manipulated the composition a bit more rather than follow what was shown in the photograph. Though I did change the orientation of the image so that it was vertical rather than horizontal so that it would read more like a portrait. Some feedback that I got was that I could have left more space at the top rather than cut it off at the top of his head. Then the radiating background could have been continued on top of his head. There are still some improvements that I plan to make after being able to really step back and look at the portrait. I want to make the background more consistent in it’s fading from dark to light. I also want to create a better range of values to create more depth in the face. I don’t think that there was enough value in the face and from a distance it looks flat. Something else that I could have improved on is my own voice in my piece of art. I didn’t really stray too much from Close’s style and technique because I worked in black and white fingerprints, I did it large scale and I did a portrait of someone close to me. For the most part, everyone seemed to have their own interpretation of their researched artist’s work and I thought it was interesting to see how they developed their own ideas.

Also, from looking at other people’s work, I learned a lot about what one should consider in their piece through everyone’s different though processes. I learned how the positioning of multiple pieces is important. Different effects can be created by the orientation of images. For example, placing two images next to each other or on top of one another can create two different effects. Also, choosing which images should go next to each other can be important. Also, the choice to work in color or black and white is an important one and can change the meaning of a piece. The type of colors used can evoke different feelings. I also didn’t know how much though goes into photography and the composition of a photograph, with the direction of the image that the eye follows. Another thing that I found interesting was some people’s choice to work in 3D even though the artist did not. The though behind a piece of art can be just as important as the content of the piece of art. I’ve realized that these are some important things to take into consideration. 

Blog Post #4

In the first half of the semester we started off doing a lot of reading and then transitioned into actually drawing and having art projects. Most of the articles we read had to do with time. There were a couple from What is Time, which gave some very interesting perspectives on our perception of time and how it affects our lives. Some of the points made were pretty difficult to grasp but overall it was an interesting read because it did make me think about how our perception of time affects us. It made me look as time as something different than it just being there because our time was created. We had many small drawing exercises, some having to do with time, some having to do with the study of form, and some having to do with synaesthesia. I thought that the drawing exercises were challenging but fun. I had an especially hard time trying to draw what a song sounded like, but I liked the challenge and it was a different way to think about what one hears. Overall, I found the drawing exercises really helpful.

The topic I found most interesting was the portrayal of motion, and with that the development of film. This goes with our current project of making a flip book or an animation because we are creating the illusion of movement through still frames. I was really interested in the early films we watched by the Lumiere brothers and especially the ones by Georges Melies. The incorporation of a modern song into The Infernal Cakewalk made it more fun to watch and actually fit well with the choreography. I watched several other of his films and I found them mesmerizing. The costumes and creepy masks and the style of the films are intriguing and I love that his films had a lot of fantasy and magic in them. I also found the different effects he used to trick the audience amusing. One of his other films that I watched was A Trip to the Moon and I immediately recognized it from the music video for “Tonight, Tonight” by Smashing Pumpkins, because their video is based on the film. I was always fascinated by the music video when I was young because it was so magical and the look of it was like an early film because its supposed to look like an early film and I think thats why I am so interested in his films. 

  The three artists that I am interested in researching are Chuck Close, Alexis Rockman, and Robert Rauschenberg. In my art class last year, we looked at some of Chuck Close’s work and learned a bit about his life. Even after being paralyzed, he continues to make art and his process has changed so much over time. Like Close, we did large-scale fingerprint portraits of ourselves in the class and in a way, it felt like I had a lot more control over what I was doing. I became interested in Alexis Rockman last spring when I visited the Smithsonian Art Museum and there was an exhibition, A Fable for Tomorrow, of his work. I was immediately grabbed by the intensity of his color and the subject matter. Many of the paintings addressed environmental issues and nature. I especially loved his paintings of weather. I am interested in Robert Rauschenberg because I like the kind of hectic look to what I’ve seen of his work and I don’t really know anything about him or his work. I’ve always thought that what are called his “combines” look interesting. 

Blog Post #3

       Since the last blog post, we have had two readings. The first one was a reading/drawing activity, which showed the difference between drawing on the right and left sides of the brain. It made us transition from using the logical side of the brain to using the artistic side of the brain and made us notice the shift. It was interesting but very difficult to complete the activities. I had already done the vases and faces and drawing upside down activities, but it didn’t make it any easier to do them again. I thought that the most difficult was having to draw my hands without looking because drawing hands is hard in general but when you cannot look at the paper, it makes it even worse. I was so tempted the whole time to just look down to see if it was even resembling a hand and I found it extremely annoying trying to draw that slow. I couldn’t take up as much time as  was suggested because it was so tedious. I understood the point of the activity but it was definitely a challenge.

      What we did in class the next day followed up on the reading. We focused on drawing different forms, all in nature and we had to draw what we saw with little to no looking at the paper. Once again, I found it frustrating that I wasn’t able to look at the paper as much as I wanted to. I wanted to look after every little line I drew, to check and make sure it looked right. But this wasn’t the point of the assignment. The point was to really look at what we were drawing and to get us to pay more attention to the different lines and forms of the object. We also had to look at a stool and not draw the stool, but draw around the stool; we looked at the negative space. But when we drew this outline, then cut it out, it still looked like the stool because the space around it creates the image as well. We also had to draw the human form. This was way more challenging than having to draw a tree or a rock. With only two minutes to draw the pose at first, and then five, I hardly felt like I started drawing before it was on to a new pose. At first, I felt like my drawings weren’t looking anything like the model, but with more time, I was able to focus more and had more time to get the form right; my drawings started to look more like the human form. 

      I decided to look more into the right and left side of the brain. I read a few more articles about it and even took a quiz on The Art Institute of Vancouver website, which told me that I was 46% left brained and 54% right brained, so the right side of my brain is dominant. I am more creative and I “use feeling and intuition to gather information.” The quiz gave me percentages of my left side and right side. It told me how linear, reality-based, symbolic, logical, sequential, and verbal I am for the left side, and then how concrete, fantasy-oriented, random, intuitive, nonverbal, and holistic I am for the right side. My most dominant characteristic on my left side is linear, meaning that I take information and line it up in a logical arrangement to come to my conclusion. On the right side, my most dominant characteristic is concrete, meaning that it is easier for me to process things that can be seen or touched. It is easier for me to understand things that I can visualize. It was a really interesting quiz because it gave explanations for all of the different characteristics and my results seemed really accurate. Here’s the link to the quiz!

http://www.wherecreativitygoestoschool.com/vancouver/left_right/rb_test.htm

Blog Post #2

We played pictionary in class on thursday. It was a fun game, but at the same time, showed us how humans can communicate using only images. I was actually surprised with how hard it can be to communicate an idea with only words and have your teammates see what you want them to see. They may see the image as something different than what you actually intended it to be. This demonstrated how difficult it can be for an artist to create a piece of art with their intended message and for the viewer to fully understand the meaning of the work. 

We have also begun to watch a movie called “Memento,” which follows a man who has short term memory loss and is trying to piece together the murder of his wife and how he lost his memory. The only details he remembers are from before the accident so he has to leave photos and notes everywhere for himself. But the more important information he tattoos on himself. The scenes have been growing more and more fragmented and short, much like his memory, and the order of scenes does not follow the sequence of events in the order that they occur. Instead, new scenes will jump into the middle of an event but then they end at the beginning of a previous scene, so they always lead up to what has happened and we find out how he got where he is. There is something not right with Teddy. For one, we don’t know his real name because he is called Teddy but his license says John G. It is still unclear whether he is the actual murderer or not. So far, thats what we’ve been led to believe but its questionable. Before he’s shot, he tells Leonard to look in the basement of the abandoned building but we haven’t yet seen whats down there. There is also a subplot going on with Natalie and her character is still unclear. She was bruised up and had lost someone too so somehow she fits into the main plot. But as of yet, it is really difficult to determine how the story will end up but I feel that there will be some interesting plot twists.

This week we read a second passage from “What is Time?” I found it difficult to get through because I’m not philosophical but I did find some interesting points made. It dealt a lot with memory and how our sense of time and memory fit together. The passage touched on the relativity of time: when we are young, time goes by so slow but it speeds up as we get older. When we are young, there is all of the time in the world and we are more focused on the present rather than planning ahead for the future but that changes as we get older. I think that a reason why time goes by faster as we get older is because we are much more aware of time and the lack of it, but for children, they are more carefree. Another point made about time is that when we are unoccupied or bored, time seems to go by so much slower than when our time is filled with events. This I found to be very interesting because time cannot actually be going slower or faster, its just our perception of it. When our time is not filled with events, we are waiting for something to happen, for something to do, so we are much more aware of the time, making it seem like its going by slower. But when we are occupied with something, we are not paying attention to time and so we lose track of it and it seems faster.

Blog Entry #1

In class, we have watched two separate music videos directed by Michel Gondry. Both were very artistic and played with the aspect of time. After seeing both for the first time, I was left confused and with no real sense of what the director was trying to achieve. Even after a second time, the meaning was unclear, though it was fairly obvious how complex each video was and how much work went into organizing them. I don’t think I would have been able to understand how the second video, Sugar Water, was done without Gondry explaining that it was a palindrome. After that it was clear to see that while one frame was going forward, the other was going backward but the same thing was happening at the same time in each. To even think of that  concept to me is amazing and to pull it off is even more amazing. 

I found the reading, “The Whole Ball of Wax” by Jerry Salz, that we were assigned to be very interesting. I agreed with a lot of what the author said but found that some claims may not be true in all circumstances. For example, I think that saying that “all those dogmatists, ideologues, academics, and theorists... demonize and belittle art as a gratuitous, semi-mystical, merely beautiful, purely formal amusement” is way to broad because surely it can be true for some but there are always exceptions. But one remark that I agreed with was that art can change the world, not in the sense of stopping global warming, as he says, but by osmosis. It can gradually change the opinions of people and greatly influence a society to make a change. I think that is what Salz is trying to say, that art can help people see the change that needs to be made. Until our discussion of the reading in class, I was confused on the comparison made between art and a cat in the last paragraph of the article. However, after hearing other peoples ideas on the meaning, I feel I now understand what the author was saying. He meant that art is not always direct, there is no definite solution and it is open to all sorts of interpretations. You look at a piece  of art, gather what you believe is the meaning or take whatever you will from it, and from this you connect with the artist, even if your interpretation wasn’t their intended meaning of the piece.

After seeing the two videos by Michel Gondry in class, and seeing the list of some other music videos he has directed, I became more interested in his work, so I decided to do a bit of research on him. I found that he started in music videos for a band that he was actually in, then got noticed by bigger artists and moved on from there. I also saw that he directed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Be Kind, Rewind, two movies which I had already seen and enjoyed. So I watched some more music videos which he has directed like “The Hardest Button to Button” and “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Floor” by The White Stripes and “Everlong” by Foo Fighters and each video was unique. But the one I found most interesting was “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Floor.” Jack White was alone in a dirty house with all of these holograms of other people, of him not alone, but they weren’t really there. He was the only one really there, which fits with the song because its about loneliness.