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.