Today I finished the brunsaille part of my sketch and began the grisaille portion, creating values using shades of gray, of the vase object. I didn't really see the significance to doing the brunsaille process because we had already done the charcoal for our sketch and it's too abstract to really assist with the grisaille part. But other than that, I like how it's turning out so far, I might need to do a few touch ups and blend out some of the value shifts.
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Here is a slide show of my final sculpture, Stressed, and other views that I couldn't show in my gallery. I think I am done! After fiddling around with my sculpture for a bit, I have finally decided that I like the, as Coach phrased it, "angsty little balls" without any other embellishments because I found that they distracted from the spheres and I wasn't a huge fan of how the pieces that I worked on and were fairly proud of, sunk into the background to other, machine-made, elements. I don't think my original content fits my design and so I've shifted it a little. While it still deals with people, it focuses more on the pressure students face to do well in school and grow up to become successful individuals in society. I think that this stress really does have a lasting effect on younger minds, leading to mental health issues as they grow up and generally less appreciation for the joy in life. In my piece, which I'm thinking of calling Turbulence or something along those lines, it can either represent one individual as they grow up and yet still live with the effects and pressures that they experienced as a teen or young adult, or to represent members in society who all are under a lot of pressure to do well, either in school or in their jobs. While it is up to each viewer to interpret my piece to their liking, I think that I am going to generally convey the message that this is about one person who is living with the lasting effects of our educational system and industrial society as they grow up because I feel that it has a stronger effect to convey the extent of how much a person can be affected from these factors.
I forgot to get a pic of my painting with just the charcoal sketch but here is where I got last class. I have just started my brunaille under-painting but it's kinda faint and hard to see. I think I will probably go darker with a few of my values the next time I work on it just to give a little more contrast to the objects, but I have to be aware to not go completely overboard too.
We are going ahead and starting with oil painting and will finish up sculpture along in our free time/when paint is drying so this is what I am going to attempt to depict! We wanted to choose a relatively simple/not too fancy still life due to the limited amount of time we have to work on them so these are my objects! I think the conch shell is probably going to be the hardest just because the values all blend together and there aren't really super clear lines between when one end ends and another begins but oh well, we are just gonna have to see how it goes!
It's been a little while since I last touched my sculpture but I worked on it Friday and this is what I have so far! I've hung it on a door hinge so it will be a little easier to work on but everything else has only made the process harder. I'm really just stuck on my content and how I want to represent it on my sculpture because I think I have kinda lost sight of my final goal. My content is essentially how people are shaped and then perceived by society and how you can almost see the pivotal people or points in your life culminating to create the person you are today. I think that I am going to keep the fairy lights trailing down into the scribbles to show this relationship and hopefully, they won't turn out too much like the classic pinterest diy project. I still also have to consider the mirror bits because I don't know if I want to use them, or not, or if I do, where I would put them and ahh it's a little overwhelming. I think the mirrors would be semi-helpful with my content because they represent how you can reflect back onto your life events to see how you have change and also how you reflect society and the community you grew up in. However, I don't know if this is a great idea stylistically because I don't want my sculpture to get too busy and flashy because that's not the look I want for my piece. Ideally, I would like my sculpture to be light and delicate but at this point, I'm not entirely sure that will be possible just based on the dark colors I chose for my base and spheres. I think the best course of action for me right now is just to experiment with what I am unsure about and finalize the parts that I can finalize so that I can actually make progress.
This class, I was actually able to construct part of my sculpture! I have attached all of my scribbles with fishing line and threaded them through the pre-drilled holes and attached them with a strip of the same wire across the top to make sure they don't fall through. I was also able to drill my mounts/eye hooks in the top where I plan on using thicker fishing line to still give the appearance of floating but also make sure it is structurally sound. I'm still kind of tinkering with the idea of adding either lights or mirrors because I don't think the lights are long enough to get the effect I would want and I also made a mistake when I chose the color- I chose a more bronzy tone when I should have gone with a silver but that's besides the point. I like the idea of the mirror bits but I would really need to see them interact with what I already have for me to make a final decision. Also, the daily Google Doodle for the day was of an artist named Ruth Asawa and, as both Coach Hall and my dad pointed out, her art has some very similar parallels to my sculpture and I wish I had known about her before I did my artist spotlight but I definitely plan on researching her and her art more !!
Let me begin by saying that I really enjoyed this lunchtime lecture. I found the concept of conceptual art (haha) to be so interesting because the artist, John Freyer, wasn't really making a physical art piece, although I guess the bike and water jars technically count, but the art was created by the connections people made with other people. I really liked the idea of how his art was serving the community, locally and globally, and kind of raising awareness about addiction and recovery. The Free Hot Coffee Cart itself was also created with a lot of help from the art community at VCU so I found it fascinating that the community was helping the community, creating a little network and cycle that gradually grew as the cart and it's message grew. I thought that Freyer was a very interesting individual as I would definitely not be able to do his "All My Life for Sale" unless I had a secret double life that had everything I actually cared about. I appreciated how open he was about sharing about his addiction and sobriety journey as that really showed the root of his content and why he was doing what he was doing. I found that the advocacy and political aspect of his work was very intriguing because he was trying to more directly create change in our society by setting up the cart outside of legislative sessions to bring more attention to the message he was trying to spread. I consider myself a people-person and so it was really eye opening to see a form of art that was really all about the people involved and their interactions with the artist and the other participants. I think that this movement of art is something that I will want to look into a little more and maybe experiment with? Although this would be hard because it seems like you need to have some financial support to do a lot of what Freyer did but there are other more affordable avenues that should be explored and investigated. |
AuthorNatalie Kim is a senior at MLWGS who likes to do art, take pics, and pet puppers. Archives
May 2020
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