Triple Project Update!

Hi all! I have three projects I want to update you on. FIRST PROJECT: Were you wondering what ever happened to Project Fox Bed? Well, I'm still working on it! Here is the progress on the headboard:

I am excited about how far it has come, but I clearly need to finish up those dandelions. I also am going to do the back of the headboard even though it will be up against the wall. I'll know it is there even if I don't see it!

SECOND PROJECT: Marker portrait practice is ongoing:

 

Look! Some of them are even not in profile and they have their eyes open! PROGRESS!

And finally, THE THIRD PROJECT. I am introducing a new project for 2014-- Every year I get a wall calendar and aside from helping me organize my busy life, I think the images set the tone for my year in a way. It is important to me to have a calendar that I like, that makes me smile, or inspires me. Then I save my calendars from past years-- I have calendars dating back to my high school days. I have had Penguins, Japanese Woodblock Prints, Black and White Photographs of Paris, Gundam Wing, Van Gogh, Ferrets Dressed in Silly Ferret Costumes, Bread and Puppet, Inuit Art, and Goats in Trees (who knew-- goats love to climb trees!) 

Anywho, this year I waited until about January 6th to start looking for a calendar and by then they were %50 off at least, but they were also the worst ones that no one else wanted. I could not find the calendar of my dreams to define 2014! I found a $2 calendar at Walgreens that has pictures of beautiful and generic landscape photography and I was like, "ok, fine, this one is not the worst" but then I decided that these landscapes would be perfect surfaces for collages or drawings. Each month I'm going to alter the photo in some way and create a new, interesting art piece! Here is January-- I turned the negative space of this glacier into a disgruntled hippo monster and its grand baby:

I'll keep you posted on the upcoming months!

Drawing the Expressive Figure (Nudity! Heads up!)

I spent this past week doing an intensive art class as part of the Illustration Certificate at the SMFA. The class was "Drawing the Expressive Figure" and it was basically eight hours of art-making every day-- 9 AM to 6 PM. It was fantastic! It got me so jazzed about creating figurative work (since I have been doing so many landscapes lately). Focussing so closely on the nude models and doing observational work also made me really loopy and zoned-out at the end of each day, which has never happened to me before, so that was cool!

We experimented with different mediums including ink, chalk pastel, permanent marker, paint, and oil pastel on a variety of different surfaces. I am just going to go ahead and post all my best stuff (If you didn't want to look at nude figures, this is your last chance to turn back):

DAY 1: We did contour drawings with permanent marker and added chalk pastel over top!

This one is huge! It is 22" x 30"

DAY 2: Ink! I loved working with ink-- I had never attempted realistic figure drawing with it and it was great to work with. We talked a lot about the power of suggestion. With ink, you can suggest a whole face with just a few marks. Also, the model's hair lent itself well to being represented in ink.

We tried some silhouettes as well:

DAY 3: More ink! Yeah! I felt really good about almost everything I did that day. I was able to get pretty detailed renderings of faces.

We then created our own textured paper by putting down thin washes of acrylic paint and then placing the figures on top:

DAY 4: We tried out oil pastels on yupo, which is a plastic paper. I don't know how they make it, but it creates an interesting surface to work into. The materials really want to slide around on the yupo.

The model brought some really great wigs and when she put this long, pink wig on, it seemed like she was really building a character and a story, which I totally love! I asked what her super power would be if she could have any power and she chose time travel and the ability to solve unsolvable math problems. I imagine those two powers would be related, she could somehow use her knowledge of math to find her way through the time/space continuum. Thus The Naked Time Traveler was born! 

This pose looked to me like she had just lost a battle of some kind and was down for the count, so is this the end for the Naked Time Traveler?!

DAY 5: Another morning of figure drawing from the model, then finishing touches and group critique.

The above figure and the head below are from the same painting and I am super proud of both of them, but unfortunately the head is super small in comparison to the body, which I am really embarrassed about. Alas!

One project that I didn't quite get the chance to finish up integrating pattern into the figure, or the figure into a pattern, so I created a pattern and then translated some of my sketches from the week on top of that pattern. Here is what I came up with:

My next steps are going to be definitely continuing to work with ink and also practicing drawing hands and feet. I didn't realize until my teacher pointed it out how much work I have left to do in terms of my hands and feet drawing skills. 

It was productive, fun, and eye opening week. I was totally immersed in drawing and my classmates were fantastic and talented! I actually wish the class had been longer. There is so much more we could have done!!

Collage, the Excitement! The Danger!

So, I am really into collage. I think it is a pretty cool medium when done right and I have spent a lot of time making collages in my day. During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at college, I failed to get a summer job, so I spent months sitting on my bedroom floor making endless collages. It became almost like an addiction: I couldn't NOT collage if I had the time. I was happiest when I was surrounded by scissors and tiny paper clippings. I also noticed that over the course of the summer, the way I made collages changed. I started expanding my ideas and taking the images in new directions. I started using the images I found in new ways. It was awesome. 

These are collages from that first set I did that summer:

After that, I started getting into the idea of mixed media, that is combining found images with painted elements. My work started shifting in that direction on paper, canvas, wood panel, and found objects (usually found at the Salvation Army). The following are the next incarnations of collage in my life:

The most recent collage style I have been experimenting with is using figure drawings as source material for collage. I carry out a ridiculously elaborate process involving tracing paper, a system of sorting colors and textures I find, and incredibly tedious cutting of tiny puzzle-piece like shapes. The result is worth it:

My drawing and painting professor in college thought this one looked like paint by number porn. Thoughts?

Anywho, I think collage is one of the most exciting things you can do when you do it right! The danger of collage happens when you start using it as a way to avoid drawing or painting. When you start to rely on the found images to create your work for you, that is when it stops being a valuable medium. I know this because I went through some time when I fell into that artistic rut. Some of the best advice I got that helped me through that was to think about why I was attracted to the images I was choosing and figure out how I could express those artistic interests with my own hand and my own voice. The second piece of advice that helped me was simply to trust myself as a painter.

Oh collage, you fickle mistress.

Senior Show 2010 (Its old news, but I’m still going to talk about it)

Thanks for checking out my blog! For my first post, I want to write about my senior capstone experience at Earlham College. It is true that my senior show went up almost a year ago, but I am starting with this for few of reasons. First, my two senior projects (yes, I did two of them) represent some of my most cohesive bodies of work so far and I think they help establish who I am as an artist and where I would like to go (artistically speaking). Second, I’m really proud of them. Third, one of the pieces from the show is the inspiration for the title of this blog, so I thought it would be appropriate to begin with that.

Basically, every senior art major at Earlham created a self-designed project over the course of our final two semesters cumulating in a large group show. We did weekly peer-critiques and a couple of times each semester we would have an incredibly nerve-wracking faculty studio visit in which all of the art professors would critique every student’s progress. The faculty studio visits were long and arduous but generally very useful. The whole senior capstone experience was one of the best and hardest things I have done as an artist as well as a real strength of Earlham’s Art Department.

In any case, fast forward to the actual show! After experimenting with a lot of different ideas, changing my focus, hitting roadblocks, and perhaps confusing my teachers, I finally settled on two projects. I did both of these projects in oil paint on wood panel.  The first was what I like to think of as magical realist paintings. I really admire Magical Realism as a literary genre and wanted to try translating that type of imagery into paintings. To do this I painted scenes from my college campus and brought birds into those spaces in a variety of ways. In some paintings, I made the birds enormous and in others I made them house pets or even stand-ins for students. I wanted them to be playful and imaginative, like daydreams. Also, I just love birds and I wanted to paint them a lot.

One of these paintings entitled, “Woodpecker Caught in the Rafters” (the inspiration for the title of this blog) is based on one night when I went up to the painting studio and there actually was a woodpecker that had flown in the open window and couldn’t get back out again. Even though I painted the woodpecker unrealistically huge, the actual woodpecker seemed just as stuck in the actual painting studio. It was that painting that really propelled me forward… It is interesting that this woodpecker getting stuck in the studio got me unstuck from an artist block.

My second project began as more of a side-project. I have learned that I need to work on more than one thing at a time so that I don’t get bored or go crazy. Knowing this, I made it a ritual every Wednesday to choose a different spot on campus and paint a small nightscape (a landscape at night, for anyone not familiar with nightscapes).

These nightscapes took between two and four hours to complete and I actually got faster at them week by week. When the weather was bad, I found windows with good views to paint. One Wednesday I painted a scene from a first floor window in the house of a few friends and fellow art majors. When I was finished, one of these lovely ladies asked to see the painting more closely. As I was handing it to her, one of us dropped it and we had sort of a hot-potato moment to try and catch it. Miraculously all of the wet paint was ok and un-smeared.

When I painted outside, I found myself judging anyone who walked by and didn’t stop to see what I was working on. “ART HATER!!” I would label them in my mind. But many people did at least look over my shoulder as they walked by. Some even stopped to chat. Whenever other art majors would walk by, their reaction was usually this: “What are you doing out here? …OH! ITS WEDNESDAY!”

In any case, I got a lot of positive feedback for the nightscapes and ultimately the fine arts faculty recommended that I include them in my senior show. Aaaand here they are!

There you have it! That is the evolution of both of my senior projects and the starting point for my artistic endeavors post-college. Oh and one last bit: I designed the poster advertizing the senior show. It has little cartoon versions of all of the senior art majors doing things that related to their projects. I’m the one with the bird on my head. Obviously.

And finally, I promise not to make future posts this long.