my second home

Advice to future AP students:
you are lucky to be where you are

look at a lot of art, on the internet and in galleries, expose yourself to everything

you will only get as much out of this class as what you put into it

make a lot a lot a lot a lot of work!

Favorite piece:

Fish tits. I had a lot of fun with this and I learned how much effort should go into a piece to make it really successful.

I learned about myself as an artist that I still need a lot of practice and that there is no secret to making good work. Inspiration comes and goes but hard work and patience are what save you in the end. I learned that it's okay to scrap something and start over, because not everything you make is going to be a masterpiece.

Most rewarding activity this year:

Working with Jesse Reno. For a workshop that replaced our retreat, I think this was great. We all learned a completely new way of painting and this influenced everyone's work for the rest of the year. I'm always amazed at how much you can learn from another artist, especially a very experienced one.

I think we should all have submitted self-portraits to the Utrecht contest, because you can also learn a lot from doing a self portrait, in my opinion. The 30 mini-me's was a good project, but making one really nice refined piece is also a good chance for growth.

Annnnnd...a retreat would have been nice...! But that's old news.

In 10 years...I see myself living outside of the United States. Still doing art, but maybe something else as a focus. I still won't be eating meat.

I've learned more in this class than I have in any of my other classes in the entire year because I discovered more of what I want to do, which is infinitely important to shaping my future. I've felt more supported and successful in the art room than anywhere else, at home or elsewhere at school, and I feel lucky like an adopted puppy to have found my place in it.

the final s t r e t c h

I'm physically and mentally EXHAUSTED! I just finished the first draft of my research paper; it's 15 pages long and essentially everything I did last year over the course of three months or so, in a day. Exponential improvement.
Anyway, now that that's out of the way (hopefully, if I get a grade on it) then I can work on ART ART ART all weekend! I'm excited because I really like my portfolio this year. It's a lot stronger and more cohesive than last year. I'm also just really excited for our showcase and the end of the year and merit awards and graduation and everything I guess. summer. ho hum. so much work and so little time.
I really hope that I don't get all caught up in how much work I have to get done before the end of the year - AP tests, calc finals, endless APH work, scholarship applications, etc. - and forget to really enjoy the last month or so I have here. I mean, this is it! This is the end of high school! I don't know if I feel like it's a big deal or not yet. I think it just comes down to whether or not I'm happy with where I am now and who I am and where I'm going.

a cool artist i found. he has really great sketchbook images, I recommend them for next year's sketchbook assignment...which I won't be here for. :/

http://hannap.com/vermell/

concentration!

Maybe not this one

but definitely these two

inspiring works and one word whys

sewn

busy

moth

jars

love

impressioniste

Instead of my concentration, I am currently working on a project for my french class. We were supposed to pick an impressionist or post impressionist artist and reproduce a painting of theirs with oil pastels. I'm not much one for copying works, and though I would've liked to work with oil pastels, I decided to just do a painting in an artist's style.
I chose Berthe Morisot because all the other artists I recognized were taken, and I figured, why not learn about a new artist... Her work is really beautiful! I actually really like this impressionist painter stuff even if it seems all traditional and boring. They really were good at what they did.the cradle. I think her most famous one.
This is one of my favorites of hers.

from what I can gather, what makes the impressionist style the impressionist style is that they have very loose, painterly brush strokes, but they aren't careless. There is a lot of light in their paintings and very little black, so everything seems very angelic and serene. I think there is a lot to be learned about their use of color: they were brave with them and chose vibrant over what they actually saw, or maybe they did see them.
I'm painting Melis and a fish, and I'm making progress nicely, but it is not in any shape to be photographed right now.

concentration critique!

My concentration is exploring the beauty of fish that we eat, regardless of whether or not you find them delicious or if you think they smell altogether too 'fishy'. Whether or not they are alive or dead, fish have a really natural and elegant movement to their shapes, and I'm trying to explore that idea in a painting.

This one is pretty awful I hate it a lot I did it for my french class after reading the Stranger by Camus, and it illustrated the theme I picked pretty well, but ...ugh. It's too concrete and doesn't even look that cool. lame. when i put it up with all my other pieces that i have so far, it's just kind of blah and doesn't flow as well with the others. I don't think it's really a problem with the 'elements' or 'principles' of art, it's just conceptually lame and doesn't fit.


This one I like a lot more. The colors and the whole feel is very different, so I might paint over the previous one that would show more of a "bridge" between the first few and this one. I'm planning on taking this abstract thing further and maybe pushing it more. I want the fish to feel more loose and flowy than they have been. I think the movement idea is going to become more prominent in the next paintings I do, and I think that the rhythm of the fish and their shapes contribute to that.

sigh sigh sigh cough cough cough

Being sick is so awful, yet it's so easy to complain about! For the first time ever, I missed a day of school because of being sick on Tuesday. It felt great, partly because I was actually productive, and because well, I wasn't at school.

So I recently I don't really know what I want to be drawing or painting or making...I've been half-heartedly looking at art but nothing really strikes me. Whenever I think I'll just draw what I see when i close my eyes, I just see slightly dirty things that don't translate really well onto paper. hahaha
These are a few gems that I've stumbled across..

http://plslala.com/#


http://www.thorazos.net/index.html

http://robagorni.blogspot.com/

So as of late, I think what I'm trying to be more moved by is the aesthetic quality of something, like the way it was rendered on the page, than the actual concept. I'm a bit done with really conceptual things right now, and I think I want to focus on developing my style and exploring ways of doing things in all kinds of media. I don't REALLY know what that means, but we'll see...

two

the week of being grounded produced...

and two other paintings that i haven't photographed yet.

I tried to do a painting a day and i made it until about Friday...I've realized that you can't stay in all day and paint because you need to get inspired. being grounded sucks!! i need painting ideas...

visual fodder

FISH!!!!!!!!!

I wish I had that on my walls. too bad my mom would kill me!


more fish!

Travis and I were talking today, and we held a consensus that the social quality of our art class has been severely diminished by the absence of a retreat at the beginning of the school year. Goodness, we were looking at the work above the windows today, and I'll admit to experiencing some memory slips of the names of some classmates or even of their presence in class.
Are all political activists cynics?
images from kinseyvisual.com

streeeeet

this is art from an artist in brazil known as Os Gemeos. Will says that he's seen some of this guy's larger stuff when he lived in brazil. I'm so jealous.
I love stuff like this because even though it's totally unlike my style at all, i really admire the freedom in it. I mean tagging is cool and all, but real art like this it's amazing. If I ever get around to doing stuff like this, my goal is to make something that will make people think "oh, it's kind of a shame to have to paint over this..." or "hmm that's vandalism..but kind of awesome..." I think will and i are going to start with wheat pasting!
I think street art reminds me of andy goldsworthy a little bit, that artist guy who did stuff like
this, in that his art was so transient and he had to accept from the beginning that it was going to be destroyed one way or another. I think that's real freedom in art!
A lot of artists tend to care a lot about keeping track of all their work and even more so they care about who gets to see it, like they're embarrassed, but if you've done a huge painting on a public wall, you can't really do any of those two things, and instead you just get to care about making something you find funny or cool. That's freedom.

winterbreak

I hate painting.
I decided to say screw concentration pieces.
how about another fish painting?

yeah!

happy new years

merry christmas!

Man, I really hate painting. I wish I could just draw all day and use watercolors and markers and pens. Paint is just so messy and old



this is a christmas card i made for my friend Emi! I cut it all out by hand with an exacto knife! It's by far the coolest christmas card I've ever made. I put it in one of my college portfolios

more inspirationy stuff

david choe is such a babe

inspiration

I started my first piece for my concentration, and i dont' think I'm goign to change it anymore because I want to stick with something and commit to it. And before I start any piece i have to look around for inspiration, and this is what I have for now


as well as some stuff i can't seem to link. hmm.

austraaalia

Greg

I want to get a sex change to Australian.

17:55Karen

XD

17:55Greg

I think that's how it works, anyways

17:55Karen

i think it's called

citizenship

17:56Greg

Hm

As long as that comes with the accent and charming antics, I'm game.

i love looking through other people's sketchbooks.

SQUID!

I have lots and lots and lots of things to do because I've hit one of those busy patches of the school year, but today after school, I decided to take pictures of the various types of seafood in our house right now.
I got sidetracked, big time.
I don't know if you've ever seen a jumbo squid in real life before and held on in your hands, but they are fucking AWESOME!

i spent 5 hours drawing it. I'm really happy with it. and I hope i will be tomorrow too. this kills like 3 birds with one stone because it can go in my portfolio for college, portfolio for scholastic, and risd application.

i'd say it was a productive way to spend my time then.

artistic heroes!

"rogue activities"
Deanna Staffo - http://www.deannastaffo.com/index.htm
i cannot tell you how much i love her style. She makes me want to go to MICA just because she teaches there. I love how she can draw people very accurately but still have a distinct playfulness to how she renders them. Her lines have so much character.
title?
Paris is burning

Lizzy Stewart - http://www.abouttoday.co.uk/
I haven't been looking at her work for a really long time like staffo, but I like what I see so far. Her drawings are kind of childish but they have a confidence in them that makes their lopsidedness very intentional and effective. The simplicity of her work is also very confident and it works well. I wish I could achieve that kind of effect because I feel like I need to overwork a lot of my stuff.

"Hansel and Gretel"
Chuneunsil - http://www.chuneunsil.com/
I love her work. I literally am in love with it. Everything is so delicate and her use of negative space is just AMAZING in every single piece. I love it love it love it. I really want to know how she does her stuff, but unfortunately her site does not tell much and I'm pretty sure she lives in Korea, which is awesome. I would guess that it's watercolor, but you can never be really sure. There must be some digital elements to it. It doesn't matter to me though; I love it anyway.

"Pandarama"
Heiko Windisch - http://thestateofthings.de/portfolio/
I've been following this guy's work for the longest time, probably about two years. His style is so distinctive and while it is narrow, it never gets old. It used to really break my heart how imaginative his stuff is. It's also ridiculously cute.

so that's four...can I just use like one of the other five people I've already posted on?? I haven't had as much time to look at art as I usually do, but these are some pretty consistent ones that I've always followed.
EDIT: I have to post another one
title?
title?
Gemma Correll - http://www.gemmacorrell.com/
She is pretty standard as far as illustrators go because her work is very illustrator-y and graphic design-y, but I like it for her style. I don't really know what else to say except that I love her cats and her people, and if I were in charge of a magazine I'd hire her to do illustrations all the time.

FIN

I really enjoy this. I wish I could design noodle bowl packaging.
I (kind of) finished a painting. I just have to bring it in to school for deliberation. I'm rather pleased with it though, so I think anything that needs to be changed should be minor...
Lindsay and I went to PNCA today to learn about how to document art work for submission to competitions and online or whatnot. It's a lot more complicated than you might think. From his example, it might take anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour to have a good photo of a piece of art. It involves a gray card, metering, a histogram, self-timer, the choice between black white and possibly gray backdrops, photoshop, levels, skewing and stretching. It's craziness. be glad mrs. mcbride does most of it for us!

and i finished The Whistling Season. I have no idea what I am going to paint for it...

rage

First I'd like to say that I really like that we're required to update our blogs every week because it gives me something interesting to look at now. Before, everyone's posts stayed all static and boring.

Now i'm going to bitch about my mom. A minute ago or so I was just trying to type out a letter to Gayatri in French, and my mom comes in first saying how feminine and pretty SAIC's viewbook is. I'm already kind of annoyed because I hate it when she tries to affirm her undeveloped aesthetic senses by talking about how colors match or how she swears she could do graphic design just because she likes to call things pretty. Then she demands to know how many pieces I have done, so I tell her 8 because that's how many I've done since the beginning of the year that would go into my portfolio.
This number clearly incites some complaints. She pulls out a pen and writes down the number eight, while admonishing me for not being more productive. Still talking with that irritating sense of infinite wisdom on everything related to art school, she writes down the numbers 15 and 20 with a dash between them and underlines 15 twice while emphasizing that this is the minimum number of works required by art schools for portfolios. She again admonishes me for not being more productive.
You have no idea how fucking pissed I am that she thinks she can berate me for something like this. Since the beginning of the year I've been working as hard as I can, with as much creative productivity as possible while still balancing other school work. When we were visiting schools on the east coast she insisted that I needed to focus on studying and standardized tests before I could work on art, so I conceded, telling her that I would study for the ACT and subject tests and whatever else she thought was important.
Now that I've gotten all those tests done and have everything I need to start and complete applications, she cannot reprimand me for not having completed more art pieces.
I think I started screaming at her to get out and shut up and then I pushed her over and stormed upstairs. I don't think I even had time to not get mad.

This artist is so cool!!! She uses primarily palette knife so everything looks all choppy and layered. Love it. I need to do a self portrait for the Utrecht thing! I mean, if i don't crank out a new one by dec 4, i can use fish tits, but i really want to do a painting.

http://www.francoise-nielly.com