Final Portfolio Fall 2009

I began this class struggling to find my subject matter. I played with the idea of fashion and the female form. Although these subjects interest me, I found that I subconsciously wanted to get another message out. The last half of this semester accumulated in me concentrating on two larger works based on smaller drawings I had created relating to painful memories that I had been avoiding. These works are both about 4'x4' pastel or charcoal drawings on panel. The background of the art works is acrylic painted with a pallet knife. I worked to throw my emotions into the art works and so kept a looser style. When creating these works I was influenced by Egon Schiele (painting style and forms), Pablo Picasso (his bulls), and Edvard Munch (style, emotions, subject matter). I feel that this semester I have gained a great deal of knowledge about working on a larger scale. I have found a definite direction for my art work.

In Progress

For the last few weeks I have been working over Wasted Youth. I put a good four or five layers of black over it with a pallet knife. I have also started another four foot art work that will go along with Wasted Youth. This work is dealing with my brother's epilepsy. Both pieces are in progress. I would love to hear feed back.

Wasted Youth

Wasted Youth is a drawing/painting I am working on. The art work is about the second major time my brother almost died. My brother was attacked by an old friend. The guy attacked my brother with my brother's guitar. Although I was not there, my memory has fabricated the image of what that moment of violence looked like. I always see a red guitar swinging down on my brother from behind in a large arc like an axe chopping wood.
The image above is my first take on this art piece. I will be going over this with paint and starting over. I became frustrated while working on the piece as the pastels I had were just not soft enough to leave marks on top of the paint. On the other hand when I attempted to erase and then wash the pastel off, it added a pretty shade of pink to my artwork.
With this piece I was trying to portray the violence and the swing of the guitar as a weapon.

Memory Drawings

These are a few of the drawings mentioned in my previous post. These were quick drawings that deal with my memories and emotions. The top two images and bottom one have to do with my grief after my uncle's death. The middle two are memories of my brother. One is of him being attacked with his guitar. The other is a memory of being home alone when he had a seizure.

Change in Direction

After the harsh critique of my fashion drawings I stopped drawing. For about a week or so I avoided it. Then one Saturday night I picked up a piece of vine charcoal and started drawing. It was much akin to Surrealist Automatism. I started drawing without planning what I would draw and let myself go. What came out of that piece of charcoal were memories that I try hard to avoid and never to talk about. In 30 quick uncontrolled drawings I let out my emotions. I have realized that in doing my fantasy art and fashion drawings, I am attempting to escape what I actually should be drawing.
I will now be working with the concept of memories and emotion. Art is not just a communication device, but a source of healing. I am working through my own memories and grief with this artwork. I will post a few of these quick drawings in my next post.

Tim Burton in the MOMA

Tim Burton famous for movies like The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride will be showing a body of work in the Modern Art Museum in NY. His large body of work is being labeled Pop Surrealist. Apparently his artwork shows a much lighter side then his movies. It is interesting to see the cross over from movies to fine art. Check it out:

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/313

Ink Victorian Fashion

During a critique on my charcoal drawings it was suggested that I work with ink. I had a lot of fun for a week playing with the material. Unfortunately, I did not do my explorations on water color paper and so had my paper wrinkled after the fact.
This work went into critique and did not fair well. It was stated that the artwork did not matter, nor did it have a strong enough concept. Although I do not fully agree with these statements, I found that it did get me thinking. My artwork here is an enjoyment of form and shape as well as an escape into a time gone by. I have since taken a very different turn in my artwork. This will be explained in a later post.

1900 Drawings

I decided to take the fashion drawings in a new direction. I have for years loved fashion history. I love to see the connections fashion makes with the history. Like fine art, fashion often reflects the time it comes from. Most of all, I love to see the change in form and silhouette. What is the ideal beauty? What is the ideal form? I have decided to investigate this by doing a series of drawings. I will be picking out everyday fashions from each year, beginning at 1900. I will be doing them in black and white as I do not want color to distract from the forms. These images are all from 1900. I wanted to loosen my hand and begin with this style. I feel like it may be a bit dark. I would like brighter whites. The images are in the order they were created, with my first at the top.

Richard Avedon

Carmen, Coat 1957
Twiggy, Hair 1968

This man was a remarkable portrait photographer. Rather than taking the normal stiff portrait, he put life into it. I noticed his photographs would be in a show spanning his whole career at the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art all the way into November. I am sad to live so far away. Here is his web site if you want to check him out. I also have posted the website for the museum.

http://www.richardavedon.com/

http://www.sfmoma.org/

Fashion project: The Begining

Fashion. What can I say about the world of fashion. Being a tom boy, I have always seen it with an outsider's eyes. I approached my art for life drawing this semester with the idea that I was going to continue my critique of fashion from last semester, see the wood drawing/paintings from my painting class. After making this decision I began to dig through the fashion magazines I handle everyday at work, periodicals section in a library, and take a deeper examination of what I found there. I have always laughed at these magazines, as well as guiltily taking note of some of the more reasonable fashions. What is laughable? Have you ever seen the amounts of make up gooped on to the poor girls on a cover of WWD? Have you ever taken a look at some of the ridiculous fashions displayed in some of these? I have to admit, it is an interesting art form, and for all of my disgust was fascination. After a while I began to picture what these women would look like walking around in the real world in their full make up and odd fashion, not to mention abnoramlly tall thin bodies.
The above two drawings are the beginings of this exploration. The top is just an exploration into an exagerated female form, while the bottom drawing is the begining of a super model buying groceries.
After spending a couple weeks reading fashion magazines and the like, I found that although I could do this comentary, I really was not ready for it. Fashion magazines make my head hurt. My interest in fashion, has always been more toward the history of it. I will probably turn my energies toward that, although I may re examine this idea at a later date. If I can find some tall very skinny people and some outrageous outfits, I may try this in photography as it was suggested in critique and could be fun.

Michael Whelan

One of my favorite artists is Michael Whelan. Throughout my childhood I found his works on the covers of my chapter books and music. I have always been mesmerized by the way he portrays fantastical scenes and characters. He is not like any other science fiction or fantasy artist I have seen. Here is the link to his web site. Take a look. He is fantastic.

http://www.michaelwhelan.com/

Van Gogh's Ear

Van Gogh's ear is an interesting mystery. Why did he cut it off? What was he thinking? What happened to the ear? I was pondering these questions after my Modern Art class yesterday, where in we discussed the aforementioned artist. Today I found myself reading the September 2009 issue of Artnews only to open to an article, "What They See In Van Gogh's Ear." This article did not at all answer the questions I was pondering, but rather resolved the pondering in a different way. What is up with Van Gogh's ear? It appears since he chopped the thing off people around the world have been curious about it. The article talks about how Van Gogh's ear has inspired pop culture, and how more people know him for this incident than his art. Apparently three bands have taken names inspired by the ear, shops and resteraunts have called themselves "Van Gogh's Ear," and merchandise such as fake Van Gogh ears and Van Gogh heads with detachable heads are readily available online. With a love for history and psychology, yes I am interested in the mystery, but I have must agree with the article. Van Gogh gets lost in all of this hipe over his ear and possible mental or emotional disabilities. It makes me wonder what any of us current artists will leave behind. In a hundred years will people talk about our art or spend their time analyzing our possible mental states. I still remember a trip to the Salvidor Dali museum in Florida. The people I was with spent half the trip psycho analyzing his mental state. You have to be a bit odd to be an artist. Van Gogh is no acception, but maybe we can admire his art and forget about that darn ear.

Summer Art part 4

Above are my Twiggy pieces. Towards the end of the summer I became sad as I had not really spent a lot of time with water color or pastels, my favorite materials to work with. I was afraid I was rusty and wanted to just jump into a drawing with no prior planning or for thought. I have always loved fashion history. Twiggy, a young model from the 1960s, has always seemed beautiful and like an interesting subject to draw. I created the watercolor on the bottom first, on unsoaked water color paper. The top image is all pastels. I found myself virtually out of white pastel and charcoal, so I had fun with my eraser instead. That is on large drawing pad paper.

Summer Art part 3

This third installment of summer art is full of some of the images I created in my sketchbook. My favorite thing to do when drawing completely for myself is to create characters. Some of these are characters I have created before, others are random doodles, and one is a friends role playing character. When I draw for myself, I draw to escape, so why not escape into someone else. The greatest amount of the drawings in my sketch book are created by an odd process which I find myself going through. I will created categories; different types of clothing, colors, fantasy role playing classes, or different ages of fashion are some of the most common; and fill them all by the same amount by images I find on the internet or in books and magazines. I then pick something I want to take from each, another random process, and use these to put together a character. I tend to love this process as I never know what I am going to end up with and frankly I love the act of gathering images. The first image and the last couple images are examples from this process. If I could, I would love to take this process into some of my bigger art, as it always feels a bit hollow without it.

Summer Art part 2

My fiance got me interested in Warhammer and Warhammer 40k not because it was a table top army game, but because I love to paint. Despite this not being fine art I believe it needs a mention as something artistic I love to do and spent quit a lot of time on this summer. These minis come grey on sprues in a box, as they are only an inch tall or so I used really small brushes. This was done with acrylic modeling paint.

Summer Art part 1

This is the first part an overview of the art I have created this summer. I am beginning with my wood drawings/paintings. I started the summer off thinking about my memories. I began a series of palm sized pastel drawings with acrylic paint on wood. After the first few I realized that I had resolved some of these bad memories and moved on to other work. The first is actually a happy memory of my dad. In the summer I can always find him in his garden and the biggest part is always his many tomato plants which he turns into juice in the fall. This was the beginning of a series of happy memories I was going to begin as an offset to the others. It is not quite finished. The next to represent my own insecurities and stress from work. The third represents my uncle's death. I was not there, but the image of his death haunts me. The last image is what my brother looked like when we almost lost him a few years ago. He was attacked and appeared at our house the next day looking like death warmed over with dark pools for eyes.

Painting 2

This art is from my painting 2 class, which I took the spring of 2009. With my love of wood I found myself ignoring canvas for all of my paintings. In this class I began to explore my role in society as a women.

The first piece, "Women" is acrylic on medium density fiberboard. The women in the piece is an exaggerated housewife. I was thinking of all the physical features that women are often expected to have in America, so I gave her gigantic breasts, a tiny waist, and small weak feet and wrists. She is offering both herself as well as her well cooked turkey to the viewer. In the back window, feminists protest her way of life. On her fridge I have taped some passed ideals of women.

The rest of the pieces displayed are a mixture of acrylic and charcoal on wood. I wanted to bring drawing into my paintings as I had brought paint into my past drawings. These paintings are a commentary on make up, its application, and its over application. As a tomboy I avoid make up, but I see it as a necessary evil in my future as the time I will have to go for job interviews looms closer. I find make up an odd ritual where women poke and prod at their faces for hours with small torture devices and toxic chemicals, only to improve their beauty just slightly. I also find the looks people make when applying make up hilarious. I remember laughing at myself as I went through the motions to put on a simple contact. As for making the women in the paintings especially gaudy, well I work in a library and find the fashion magazines passing through my fingers onto the shelves. These poor models often have ridiculous amounts of makeup plastered on their faces.