News Roundup

First and foremost in my news of the week is that the contest I talked about entering here came to a result, and I got second place!! Besides $500, I got quite a nice line for the resume, I just don't know whether to file it under awards or exhibitions, since the tiara will be on display the weekend of September 17th as well. and according to the (probably) form email I got the judges were impressed with my work, which is a huge compliment given that the panel consists of an artist, an illustrator, a person from ARTISANworks, the owner of a gallery, and the Memorial Art Gallery's exhibitions director. So overexcited!

Less exciting is what's currently going on in my studio classes. My theme of a walk in the woods went down fairly well in jewelry though it could accidentally make a left turn into the idea of weeds. I still don't know what I am going to do for the chasing repousse project, for which my pitch bowl etc. arrived and I am working on tools for.

This is some of the results from my first attempt at true chemical dying of fabric. I'm particularly fond of the one on the right, as I was not expecting it to turn out at all. There's six other pieces brewing in the fabric studio and some of those I am even less sure about how they will look.

This is the low budget re-creation of what I am doing in  2D design, which is drawing various types of lines on paper that will then be cut out and arranged into a composition on some illustration board. It seems like it's adding an extra step to the process, but I can see the point, being that the professor wants us to be able to rearrange and play with the line elements before we glue them down. Above is one of the lines I came up with that the professor liked. Still, the class is tending towards the boring side and reminding me how middling I am at two dimensional works.

The goal for next week is to be less harried in making a blog post, since between work and classes I don't have enough time to think!

Whimsy!

To lighten my mood I've read a bunch of Moomin comic strips and dearly wished they had been part of my childhood. They are quite nicely done by Finnish-Swede illustrator Tove Jansson who had quite a long career. I'm liking her deceptively simple style in both Moomin and other works she's done and am genuinely curious about her stories, so it may mean buying the book collections in the future. And how can you not love characters named Moomintroll, Moominpappa, Mooominmamma,Snorkmaiden, Snufkin, Too-Ticky, The Groke, etc? Until Christmas, an image dump!

New Semester, New Theme

I spent all summer thinking up a new theme for this semester of jewelry resulting in A Walk in the Woods. Although it is yet another nature theme I hope that it is enough of a variation to be different. The key to this is to look at the theme as nature tamed, as in scaled down to the things in our own backyards and parks. A quick example of this is my only idea so far for this, some Coke bottle caps arranged around a Pepsi cap by means of wire and rivets in order to resemble queen ann's lace:

        

This = This, apparently.

But this has nothing to do with the actual first project of the the year which is chasing and repousse. I'm looking forward to properly learning the technique this time, and am even enjoying making the tools, but I'm not as enthused about the project itself. I have never really enjoyed making narratives in art which is probably some strange result of trying to come up with a uniquely interesting comic strip when I was a kid, the naturally being what the project is on. So far all I have is a necklace that has repoussed elements cycling through the stages of a forest fire. To get ideas I've quasi-coincidentally bought a book called Weeds at Border's liquidation sale.

See? It's True!

Thus I have plenty of time to meditate on this problem (and read a book) until my pitch bowl arrives around September 7th!

Sketchbook, Smetchbook

Ahh sketchbooks, the working horse of the art student. I meant to post this forever ago, on the occasion of my cracking in to a new sketchbook back in April and, at the same time, found my old sketchbooks dating back to high school while cleaning out the house. Plus, I wanted to show off to the echo chamber of the Internet what grew from that original assignment in ninth grade to paint the cover of my sketchbook, something I normally hated doing. Thus my two excuses for not posting this lovely material sooner are as follows:

1. An intensive four day a week, eleven week long internship at the city film festival.

2. The draft of this post was too long winded and drawn out in describing the covers and my mind set when I made each one and it was getting too boring, even for me.

Now that the internship is over and that I have been inspired by Something Awful.com's One Sentence Reviews of games in their Video Game Article section I have decided to describe each sketchbook with a haiku. Why haiku? Because three lines gives me more room to describe and keeps it short at the same time, and I haven't written any silly poetry lately. So enjoy the loose haikus and the small look into my psyche over the years, just don't count the syllables!



Dragon holding the world
Gonna smash it on the rocks (what rocks?)
Such an edgy little freshman

Sophisticated sophomore
Octopuses are a thing now I guess
Pink coral, stencil brushes are fun!

 

 

 

A small fancy sketchbook for college

Oh God do people think I'm a hipster now

Just 'cause I bought a Moleskine?



Ha ha ha top fortune cookie so true

Where has all the money gone?

Third year of school

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Laid the flowers out bad

How will I live with this!?

Tiny parrots fix everything

 

 

Recycled Art Competion

This is going to be a content light post, since it's the quickest and easiest webspace for me to upload the images I'm using to enter the Greentopia Recycled Art Competition, and email isn't being nice in letting me send them. Both small and large images and a copy of the artist's stament are here for your enjoyment!

( Click for Large)

( Click for Small)



Artist’s Statement on “Post Apocalyptic Puck”

                At the time I made “Post Apocalyptic Puck” I was interested in the theme of science fiction, particularly in making artifacts and jewelry that looked like they came from the future. Consequently this piece wound up with a detailed small story behind it. It is meant to have come from a post-apocalyptic future where mankind has lost much of its technology and has fallen back to believing in magic. In this bleak future I envisioned a surviving man who wishes to emulate the magical and mythological beings of older times, particularly mischievous fairies like Puck. Thus in order to display his imagined power, this future man has fashioned himself a magnificent crown out of the man made debris and small shiny objects left after the apocalypse.

                With such a story in place, I was able to freely design the piece using the stash of found objects I keep to use in my jewelry. Most of it comes from my odd habit of always looking at the ground for lost and forgotten little “treasures,” which are supplemented by friends and family giving me old broken jewelry and things to re-use. Being gifted a set of grapefruit spoons in this manner was the direct inspiration for this piece and I gladly took up the challenge of incorporating them into a work. Actively avoiding fabricating pieces from new metal the tiara steady grew, its shape dictated by the existing objects I had and my own sense of design, making “Post Apocalyptic Puck” a unique joy to create.

June Roundup

So despite the time sink that is an unpaid internship I have actually been working on some art, but sadly none of it is jewelry related. Still, have some drive by pictures of half finished projects like you're reading tumblr:

Firstly, I've been carving a golf ball into the shap of a swan. The rubber in side a modern golf ball is quite fun to carve, but I am terrible at detail carving and smoothing it out so I have been picking away at this off and on for weeks.

I have an old book called Album of Cats that didn't sell at a garage sale. This collage is a siamese from the book and some old SAIC college ads back from when I was in high school. I've titled it Alarm and have to glue down the cat, fill in the white strips at the bottom and test whether painting matte medium over it is a good or bad idea.

And since I'm using cat pictures for collages I also have the obligatory lolcats one that's titled Young Astro Cat Sees Forever for the First Time combining not one but two memes! This is a painting of space on canvas (that needs one more yellow spot welling up in the lower left) to which the cat on the piano keys in front of it will be glued on. To make stars I will be cutting out pictures of Pandora charms from one of their old catalog booklets.

And finally, succulents!

Year of the Arts, Apparently

So, in a move I barely knew about, the college president has decreed that the 2011/2012 school year is the "Year of the Arts" at Buffalo State. It's then good timing on my part having this being my senior year, and just declaring another art major on top of the one I already had. And, in order to involve the students at the very beginning the college commissioned an upper level class to create and propose logos. I had two friends in the class; sadly neither of their logo designs won. You can read the college news post here, and there's a flickr set here of the 12 proposals, but below is what the college chose:

Not to disparage another student's work, but this looks like a coffee stain ring. It's a style of logo I remember Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams complaining about in a book in the mid 90s. In some ways though, this one is appropriate to represent art students since most live on a potent combination of coffee and cigarettes throughout the year. What does everyone else think of it? I rather like the one by Shannon Berkel myself.

And so much for keeping up the blog over the summer. the problem is my motivation to create art ebbs significantly during this time. But I do have a few projects started and ideas kicking around in the sketchbook, so please occasionally look back at the blog for those as I post around my summer internship!