Pittsburg Visit

Last Monday my Dad and I went to visit Colleges up in Pittsburgh. Yes it was 30 something degrees, but it also was beautiful with the leaves in vibrant reds and yellows. We got a few pictures (unfortunately when my dad takes photos they come out a little blurry), and the park we visited was absolutely gorgeous, overlooking the river.

 

To kill some time(and be someplace warm) we headed into the Carnegie Museum of Art which doubled as the Museum of Natural History. While exploring the Art galleries, my Dad and I started with Modern Art, and I started thinking of how people view/define art. I narrowed it down to two definitions. People value art as a means of expression, or as a mastery of a technical craft. Depending on what value determines what you consider as "true art".  People might consider it pointless to write political slogans on a chair and call it art, while others think it's unnecessary to capture an image people see often onto a canvas. I realized art doesn't exactly have a definition, it all depends on the person, making it that much more complex. Just a thought.
A few things from the museum.

Always a favorite: Monet!!!

Things from the Gem/Stone exhibit that caught my eye
 
 

Art from the Backyard

So last month when I was out sick and construction kicked our class into the library the other students went on an exploitative art project. Looking at their blogs I felt slightly deprived of that project and decided to make it up on my own today. Inspired by the work of Andy Goldsworthy, it takes natural objects from nature and arranges them into a visually attractive sculpture. Here are a few of his pieces:
 
  

Working with my hands after the backyard scavenger hunt(which really reminded me of days when I was younger and would go outside to make flower bouquets) I was gathered up a variety of materials.

Here our the sculptures I made! My favorite is the first one, where I braided the cattail stems.

Another favorite!

 

Since I am now in the midst of my time-consuming module project, it was really nice to do a project that had beautiful results that only took an hour and a half (most of that time was fiddling with the camera).

College Art

On another note, this week I was really excited and nervous to send in my portfolio work to colleges. It feels so nice to get MIT's app completed! I'm a little nervous because I'm sharing some of work for the first time. I've been designing dresses for sometime now on my own, and haven't really showed them to anybody before. Gosh I feel a weird sense of terror, excitement, and anxiousness about it. Since I'm already sharing it with a bunch of people I don't know, I thought I would share my piece here as well. (Also "Don't Stop Believing" is playing as I type it so I'm feeling a little more confident).Hopefully you(and the admissions reps) like it!

Multiples and Modules Project/Artist Inspiration

This project is interesting first because I didn't know there was such a difference between multiples and modules. Multiples usually emphasize color/surface treatment and often say a statement with the way their components are arranged. Modules have many more pieces (our project needs at least 100 components) and is purely focused on maintaing a visually rhythmic arrangement. It's exciting to get into some more technical terminology!

While on Pinterest( I have re-surfaced my account for this class) I came across this fantastic picture:

This was exactly perfect in all ways artistic for what I was looking for inspiration! The artist is Fenella Elms, and on visiting her website there were many other pieces I loved:

 

 

Fenella Elms says her constant travels and frequent change of residences as a child helped contribute to an amount of adaptability and a sense of curiosity. She undertook psychoanalytical training, and  her past career in mental health influences her work: a subconscious approach with clay. Noticing the similar mindfulness of the enabling what it hidden to emerge and the formation of new patterns, Elms says she felt she couldn't make something with just one part. Fenella Elms was first introduced to clay by a Lucy Rie exhibit in 1981. Working at workshops and classes she eventually got a wheel in 2004 and began the teaching that college offered her. She has been featured in multiple magazines, had designs in 2007 which lead to become factory made samples in China, and last year was featured in a review of the best from London Design Week.
Feel free to visit her website, and thanks for sharing your work with us Fenella Elms!

Something Inspirational

So today has been a pretty awful day, and I wanted to share something inspirational I found earlier this week. Matthew Bartiks has become my new hero, and probably my favorite sculpturist right now. I loved how he took simple, everyday objects and turned them into something awe-inspiring. Thanks for making my week better Matthew Bartiks!
 


 
 


In case you couldn't tell that was all made of forks!!!!!Mind-blowingly awesome!

Breadth Piece #2

For the home project, I ended up deciding to use both paper and metal wire for my medium. It was really an intriguing process, because I hadn't worked with either of the materials before. Wire by far was the most difficult because it involved a different sort of thinking than clay. You cannot attach separate pieces of wire, so every single fold and bend must be accounted for. I figured out a long piece of wire can go short very quickly. After messing around with the wire for a little bit to get a feel for it. I started on the first part of my abstract sculpture: the roots.

The rest of my sculpture all involved paper. I choose to use pastel colored card stock, to give a more whimsical and childlike feel to the piece. The first part of the paper structure was an Indian head. It took a little while to draw it out on the card stock the same way I liked it in my sketchbook. I attached the two pieces of paper and made into a pocket, where I planned to put the wire inside later. I curled the "headdress" of the head, but later went back to add more dimensions. The eye hole I cut out as a house to further continue the concept of home.

The next step was to create the clouds, and idea I was inspired from one of the examples. This was were I got an opportunity to experiment with the dimensionality of paper. I was having a little bit of trouble keeping the paper 3-D as opposed to 2-D. I tried using folds and slits with an exacto to combine the layers of paper, but I found folding and hot glue to be a better tool. Again like the head, each cloud was formed like a pocket, so that it could easily slip onto the wire support that would come out of the head. Using the hot-glue gun technique, I next made the most important part of my sculpture, the skyscrapers. This was the hardest and most time consuming part because I could not cut the opening of the windows easily without exposing the underlying skyscraper. Again I created a double side pocket to allow for the other buildings and wire to give stable support.

The final putting together of all the individual parts proved to be a little challenging. It was really difficult to put the wire through the eye hole and get the sculpture to stand on its own. I had to do a lot of careful bending and re-arranging of the wire so that no parts of the sculpture sagged. All in all it turned out to be almost exactly how I had planned it out, and I'm content with the results. Also it was a nice change to not do any glazing or finishing of the piece. When it was done it was done.

Reflection

It took a little bit to adjust to the new material, but I didn't really feel that behind, and stayed on target to what I was expecting. The windows were a lot harder than I was expecting them to be. It was a challenging piece to think ahead on, because I had to adjust some of the arrangements of the piece so that it could be self-supporting. I really like how this piece turned out, but am ok without working with the time-consuming paper medium for a while.