Saturday, Oct 11, 2008: Mannequins on Parade

Last week in my watercolor class we divided into two groups, each taking several mannequins and mannequin-parts around UNT campus.  We took pictures of them in all sorts of different locations, and I must use one of these pictures as the basis for my fifth and final painting before mid-term.

The experience of hauling the mannequins all over campus was an interesting one.  We got funny looks and people asking what we were doing.  The thing about having these mannequins was that almost any place could made weirder for having them in it.  It almost didn't matter where we put them; however, some places provided more interesting interactions of mannequin/environment than others.  Take, for instance, the crowd of people we found on the plaza next to the library.  We asked several people if they would hold the top halves of the mannequins, which they did, and several others if they would hold the mannequin legs.  Several of the pictures I took in the crowd made it look as though the mannequins were walking around on their own.

While these are interesting pictures, the one I liked best and plan to use in my painting is below.

Mannequins Don't Reflect

One of the requirements of this painting is that it be painted only with black, colors mixed with black, or pure white.  Since this picture was taken before the sun went down, I had to alter it on the computer.  I increased the contrast and fiddled with the colors to make it look as though it was taken at sunset.  This photo was my favorite because it appeals to my love of odd angles, and it looks as though the mannequin should have a reflection, but it doesn't.  The title is a play on that, and the fact that the mannequin looks as though it's contemplating something, even though mannequins obviously cannot think.

- Rachel

Saturday, Oct. 4, 2008: The Head of State

The fourth assignment in my watercolor class required that I find/fashion a figure of some sort, carry it around with me for a week, take pictures of it in 24 different locations, fiddle with three of those pictures in some photoshop-type program, and use one of them as the basis for my fourth painting.  We also had to title all 24 pictures.

It didn't take me any time at all to decide what I would use for my "figure."  A few years ago I was messing around with some of that red, air-dry clay, and I made a little head.  Not too long after I found a small hat that I'd gotten as a souvenir for participating in a production of Picnic that my high school put on.  I kept the head, with its miniature straw hat, on my desk.  When my professor introduced the requirements for this assignment, I immediately thought of it.  So that's what I carried around and took pictures of.  Below is the picture I have decided to use for my painting, and beneath it are the close contenders, all with their titles.

The Head of State is Illuminated

The Head of State seeks Enlightenment

The Head of State takes a Morning Constitutional

The Head of State gets trapped in a Jar

My figure didn't have a name until after I'd started taking pictures, but when I started looking at them all, there seemed to be an opportunity for poking some fun at politics (politics in general, not necessarily the current political situation).  After coming to that conclusion, it was more than my self-restraint could handle to avoid giving my figure a name that was also a pun.  Anyway, in the first picture the Head is sitting on/surrounded by the "art lamp" I created for my sculpture class last semester, which now resides in my living room.  In the second one it converses with a Buddha statue I got several years ago with the intent to use it in an art project.  The third picture down shows the Head leaving the small treasure chest where I had been storing it, the Buddha, and several other random objects I've made or found over the years.  The fourth picture shows in it a jar on the windowsill above the sink in my kitchen.

- Rachel

Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008: The Reality of Art

This art blog was started as a requirement in my watercolor class.  One of the stipulations was that posts "relate to work in this [watercolor] class."  At first, I interpreted that to mean I was not supposed to write about anything but watercolor on this blog, a restriction that would be severely limiting.  My art in other areas greatly affects and informs my watercolor, and is important in it's own right.  Cutting out the sculpture and the printmaking and the drawing and the oil painting would mean denying an important part of my development as an artist.

For example, it is the work in my intermediate figure drawing class last fall that is the greatest influence on my style of painting and use of materials this fall.  In that class I did all my work for the last third of the semester in ink wash and pen on yupo paper, as shown below:

This semester I'm using yupo paper and incorporating ink washes/ink line drawing into my paintings.  I'm also incorporating the much looser style of my I.F.D figures into what I'm doing now.  Most of my paintings in my watercolor class last semester were much more controlled and realistic.

Another example of how each of my classes informs what I'm doing in the others can be found in my stair series in watercolor last semester, which served as the starting point for what I've been doing in my printmaking class so far.  Sure, I often use different media to explore different ideas, but it's all interconnected, you know, since it's all my art.  I would be a poor artist if I did not take what I'm learning in each class and translate it to what I'm doing as a whole.  For instance, my interests in architecture and line drawing and texture (with knowledge taken from my watercolor, figure drawing, and oil painting classes, respectively) have all found their way into the bronze I'm making in my sculpture class; on the flip side, I fully expect the knowledge and skills I'm learning in my sculpture class to eventually come out in my painting and other areas.

Watercolor is an important part of what I do - it's my major, after all - but it is not all that I do, nor is it created in a vacuum.  I cannot pretend that it is.  This being the case, it is clear that my work in other areas "relates to work" in my watercolor class, and it is perfectly legitimate for me to mention my work in other classes/outside of classes on this blog.

- Rachel

Saturday, Sep. 20, 2008: Stratified Figure

Once again, I find myself pulling from my stock of photographs.  There were several images I thought would work well for this assignment:

Any of these would work in that in each of them the environment is more important than the figure.  However, I decided I would use this photo:

This was taken during a wandering expedition with my boyfriend.  Although you can't tell from this picture, the wooded area was a rather small stripe consisting of trees and a creek, set in the middle of a housing development.  I was down in the creek taking pictures while my boyfriend went on ahead, when I looked up and snapped this picture.  I think this picture relates to stratification in several ways; the viewer and the viewed are on different levels, or layers; there are distinct layers of the picture plane, in that there is a clear foreground, middle ground, and background; one can see all the layers of a wooded area, from the dirt all the way up to the leaves of the trees.  There is also the unseen layer of this wooded area's relation to the man-made area around it. 

Aside from the ways in which it meets the requirements of my latest project, I love this picture because of the angle it was taken from.  I like the worm's eye view and the angle of the ground.  I like that they emphasize the trees reaching towards the sky, and I like the fact that the figure is almost unnoticeable.  I also like the sun coming through the leaves.  To me, this picture celebrates the vastness of nature, while the irony is that this particular bit of nature was not, in fact, vast at all.

- Rachel

Saturday, Sep. 13, 2008: Reflected Figure

My newest assignment in watercolor is paint a reflected figure, and it has to be based off of a photograph.  My instructor advised going out and doing research i.e. taking lots of pictures of people reflected in things.  However, this was not necessary for me.  I have a habit of going out on picture-taking expeditions, and over the past two years have accumulated somewhere in the vicinity of 2,000 pictures.  While my main interests have been architecture and landscapes, I have also taken several interesting images of figures being reflected in various things.  It is one of these images that I have decided to use.

This image was taken last year at a Boy Scout camp by the name of Slippery Falls.  My brother is a Boy Scout, and he had gone to this camp for a week or two.  Now, at the end of the camp there was a day for the families of the Boy Scouts to come see where they'd been and what they'd been doing.  I had attended the year before, and remembered all the lovely, huge, mossy rocks all about the place. Having a camera at my disposal this year, I could not pass up an opportunity to go climb around on the rocks and take pictures of them.  So I went. 

That year it had rained during the camp, and there were puddles all over the place.  It was a heavenly combination: water + rocks.  I took zillions of pictures, and happened to catch this one of my brother reflected in a pool, looking like he's in some sort of suspended fall.  I like this picture because the angle is odd and it seems so off-balance.  I also like the visual texture of it (the rock vs. the pool and the grass and tree branches) and the colors.

- Rachel

Friday, Sep. 5, 2008: Eureka!

In my Watercolor class this semester, the first painting needed to be a self-portrait.  The requirements were that it had to have meaning, it had to be shocking, every part of the figure had to be altered, and the environment had to be "opposite". After a week of angst-ing about what to do, I finally came up with an idea and a sketch I liked.  The basic idea, which was to do myself sans-shirt and androgynous, had occurred to me while talking about my portrait with a friend.  This was to satisfy the requirement that the portrait be "shocking."  As women are quite often portrayed in a sexual manner in all kinds of media, I decided I would portray myself in a manner designed to take my gender out of the equation, i.e. make myself adrogynous.  I liked this, because it fit well into my feminist views and my desire to thwart those who try to define me solely in terms of my gender.

So, I had found my idea; but I couldn't decide how to execute it.  Then I was inspired by the artist that my instructor presented in class, who style was sort of cartoon-ish with a strong narrative.  In the past, I have relied on photographs to work from, partly because I felt my preferred drawing style was too cartoon-like and too narrative to work as "fine art."  It was an irrational thought, but it held me back from doing what I really wanted, up until that moment.

Below is the sketch I will be working from.  Things will change in the process, but probably not too much.  I like this because it has strong symbolism for me, the style is my own, and it incorporates my love of pattern.

Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008: A personal perspective

This is my new art blog.  Behold its glory.  Hence forth I shall be making weekly posts, which will include pictures and ruminations about my current watercolor art, my influences, and my inspirations.  

Keeping a journal about my art is not a new thing for me; however, this will be a public space where I can perhaps give a little perspective on why I make the things I make.

- Rachel