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!

Stumbling Down Memory Lane

As of late I have been helping to clear out the house in preparation for some improvements, which leads to finding all sorts of old crap like my old Tamagotchi with, oddly, it's instuction manual too. Turns out you could actually pause those things. But, I also found a whole trove of my old jewelry stuff from high school and since I haven't posted recently, you guys get an extra long post with more images then my internet can handle!

The class began with practicing bending wire, the first two follow patterns the teacher had laid out and the third one was me messing around.

This was the actual project to build off the wire practice. I remember choosing the treble clef pattern just because I needed a larger curving and swooping element to be visually larger and contrast with the chain. I put in the jade bead just because I found it in the classroom and liked it, and I also remember coiling wire on round pliers and flattening them to make my chain links.

We then learned how to saw and thus I made this cuff bracelet, everyone thought I was nuts back then; I was only dissapointed that I had to scale it down from interlocking octagons to interlocking squares. Thankfully I'm much more accurate with a saw blade now.

In between projects I discovered classic Doctor Who (before it was called classic) and plowed through most of the Fourth Doctor episodes. Here's the tardis key from that era and I assure you I made it completely accurate front and back with three layers of sweat soldered sheet metal.

Now here's where things get confused, since I've forgotten which order the projects were outside of them being done in the last half of my senior year. The center ring I do know I made ealier that school year, and have always wanted to remake it in sterling silver.

Aaah! its a flock of old dudes attacking. I blame anime (in some obtuse way) for making my old man winter here. The left one was some sort of texture sample; don't bother looking at it larger there's hardly any on it. The right image is more old men heads this time thickly cast in pewter via a plaster mold.

On the bright side I cast this letter opener handle in pewter as a present for my Mom, and it turned out suprisingly ergonomic as a bonus.

These are little frog charms if you ask me and they are tribal women if you ask my old jewelry teacher. But I still cast them using the cuttlefish method, resulting in the funky layered texture.

My first encounter with acid etching ended in a double sided pendant partially eaten away. Never futz with the stength of the acid while your piece is still in it.

Enameling was rougher, my sample piece attests to it. Like most of my other enamel attempts it got overbaked in the kiln but my actual project worked out fine.



Hence, a parroty bird thing and a Buddha I never finished and never could quite figure out what to do with.

The title is Cat Book. Why? Because a bird has landed on an open book about cats and it snapped shut, catching the bird.

I know for sure this is the last jewelry project of high school because it was the bubble wand project! This actually worked fairly well when I tested it on the last day of class and always a fun way to end a class.



I hope you enjoyed this trapse through my high school jewelry class and all the bizzare things I was apparently thinking about back then; going from music to Doctor Who to old men to frogs, parrots, and cats. Digging up this stuff was fairly informative for me: it confirmed my suspicions that I have gotten worse at soldering and better at sawing since then. It also rubbed it in how I was able to crank out more pieces a year than I currently can. Ah well live and learn I suppose? Toodles!