week learnings

This week we started collages which i was very excited about. The projects i worked on were a submission for some contest coming up, and an animal collage. I'm very pleased with how my submission for the contest turned out.
For the animal collage i'm working on the background using a bunch of different kinds of papers, but they all are warm-ish colors. Collage has probably been my favorite part of the class this year.

Week 7

This week in art class we painted seascapes with watercolor. It was our last watercolor project, which i am thankful for. Its really hard to get the right shade of color when you are using watercolor palate tray things. I found it easier to get the right color when using watercolor from tubes. I like how versatile water colors are, being that they can have many different textures and layers. If i knew more technique on how to paint with watercolors, i think i would enjoy it a bit more.

Baroque Artits

Gian Lorenzo Bernini was an Italian artist. He was born in Naples on December 7, 1598. He died in Rome, the city which he principally worked in, on November 28, 1680. Bernini was mainly and sculptor and architect, but he also painted, designed metalwork, wrote plays. As a kid he worked in his father’s shop, learning the art of sculpting and painting from him. Bernini outshone the other sculptors of his time, even Alessandro Algardi, his rival. Francesco Borromini and Petro da Cortona accompanied Bernini in the emergence of Baroque architecture in Rome. 

What set Bernini aside in the period of Baroque art was his tremendous skill in carving and sculpting, especially the portrait busts. Bernini paid lots of attention to the variety of texture in his statues. When he carved cloth, you could tell if it was shiny or matte. The skin on his statues was very accurate too. Either saggy and wrinkly if he was carving an old person, or fresh and soft if he was carving a younger person. 

Bernini focused mainly on carving statues, and designing architecture. When he did paint, his portraits weren’t as good as some other painters of that time. So he just stuck to sculpting. There aren’t any real defining characteristics or motifs and Bernini is famous for in his artwork. To me, it seems like he blends in with all the other artists of his time, just maybe he was a bit more skilled in sculpting.

Bernini is a Baroque artist because he produced his great works of art during that time 

period. Also, for architecture during that time buildings were built to impress, which Bernini’s palaces and architecture surely did. 

Sculptures created during the baroque time were more advanced. The artists paid more attention to all the different angles of their statues, and lighting was taken into account when they were being created as well. Baroque sculpture included groups of figures bursting with dynamic movement and the energy of human beings. The sculptures often pictured people reaching outwards into surrounding emptiness. Bernini fits into this because he was the main sculptor of that time, and he kind of was the definition of Baroque sculptures. 

Many of Bernini’s works are still standing, like his architecture and statues. Bernini influenced the world of statues greatly, just because he was so talented.

Bernini’s art doesn’t really appeal to me because there doesn’t seem to be anything special about it that sets him apart from other artists, except that he used a lot of skill and technique in his statues he created. I do liked how he incorporated different textures into his statues though. They would be interesting to see in real life. He didn’t paint much, but i thought it was interesting that he worked in the theater a bit.  




Statuette of Saint Agnes

Piazza San Pietro

Bust of Cardinal Richelieu

Symbolic Colors

White: emptiness, purity, surrender

Black: sinister, menacing, evil, fear

Gray/Brown: dirty, earth, old age, boring

Yellow: happiness, joy, sunshine, optimism

Orange: bold, energy, fiery, enthusiasm

Red: competitiveness, strong, fury, love

Green: fertility, growing, life, good luck

Blue: tranquility, calming, water, security

Violet: royalty, wisdom, mystery, nobility

Week 1. What I learned.

Recently we have been focusing on watercolors in art class. We watched some movies about watercoloring teaching us different techniques on how to water color and what not.
Recently I've discovered that i like the contrast of the water colors when they blend together to make a soft effect, and then adding a distinguished outlined object. Its hard to explain.

Recycled Project

1. A stuffed animal owl
2. I drew out a pattern, then transferred it to the cloth and cut it out. I then used the sewing machine to sew up the edges of the owl. I embellished the owl with a pocket from an old pair of shorts, and some buttons. I  then stuffed the owl with bits of cloth, and it was complete.
3. I used an old blanket, an old pair of shorts, and buttons. I also used a sewing machine.
4. Sewing
5. I enjoyed seeing the owl come to life as i added the buttons for eyes, and the stuffing. It was difficult sewing on the pocket, and cutting out stuffing for the owl because that took a long time and I'm not very patient.
6. The overall sewing job on the owl looks pretty nice. I think i did well on that, because there are no holes in the animal, and everything is sewed on securely. I also like the design of the owl.

Principals & Elements of design in my project:
I liked the balance on my project, because the blanket i used had a plaid design, so i off centered that design, while keeping the pocket and eyes and beak symmetrical on the owl. I think that had a nice effect.
I used the pocket from the pair of old shorts as the contrast in my project, because the blanket was dark, and the shorts were khaki. The yellow beak also adds some nice contrast.

I followed through with my original plan for the project, and the owl came out very nicely.

Q2-places

100th Monkey Studio
http://www.the100thmonkeystudio.com/3352/3301.html
This studio has an open studio which is:  "An open studio is a studio or work room that is open to all, where artistic or creative work can be viewed and created collaboratively" It says they have materials there you can use for free, but i could not find what the admission cost is.
This place would be nice to go to because it sounds like you can just show up, and paint or draw or do whatever you want for free.


Seattle Art Museum
http://www.picassoinseattle.org/
The seattle art museum is doing an exhibition on Pablo Picasso which would be very interesting to go to. I don't know why anyone would not want to go to this.
We can get a group price of $14 a person

Portland Art Museum
http://portlandartmuseum.org/
from oct. 2-jan. 9 they are showing an exhibition on Lee Kelly. Lee does all kinds of art it sounds like, paintings, drawings, and sculptures.
Admission is free for 17 and under, but if we go to the exhibit we have to buy tickets but..on the fourth friday of every month, the portland art museum has a free day. So we could probably see the exhibit for free.

Art21

Bruce Nauman is kind of a confusing artist. One of his projects was building a big uneven staircase, where the meaning of it was not be be used, but to figure out what they could be used for. He also filmed mice in his very messy art studio.

Kerry James Marshall discovered that he wanted to be an artists in the first grade. He was inspired by a scrapbook of greeting cards, magazine clippings, and random photos that his teacher had created. Since then he has been creating art like greeting cards and paintings. He liked making greetings cards for his family, and in his paintings there was usually always a black figure.

Maya Lin is an artist, and an architect. In the movie they showed a project she was working on where she was redoing a park for a town. One thing in the park was an ice rink. She made this ice rink special though by putting lights underneath it to represent a starry night sky.

Louise Bourgeis is an old lady who enjoyed dealing with hands in her artwork. She made sculptures of her hands by putting them in plaster, and then transferring the plater molds into a nice black stone sculpture of her hands. I thought this was an odd type of artwork for an old lady to do.

I think that not all people view my personality or identity the same. Everyone has different perspectives or thoughts about who I am, but in the end, i'm just one single person with one identity and personality. I don't know how i would incorporate that into my next self portrait, but i would probably not just draw it, but add some other materials on it so it was kind of a collage-ish type of thing.

Marla Movie Questions

What makes something art?

I don't think that there's any right answer, or wrong answer to this question. But I think that it really depends on who's looking at the art to categorize it as art or not. Like I might be looking at a sculpture and say its not art, but some other art fanatic could look at it and say its a masterpiece. So I think that whether somethings is defined as art or not, is really in the eyes of who's looking at it.

Do you think Marla's paintings are Art? Why or why not?

I think that Marla's paintings are art, regardless of whether her dad helped her painting or not. Art critiques and professionals could pick out so many insights and ground-breaking things in Marla's paintings and say she's a genius, but i think that when Marla was painting she wasn't trying to please the world or art critiques. She was just painting because it pleased her, and made her happy. So thats why I think Marla's paintings were art.

5 Artists

1. Vincent Van Goh
      One reason why I like Vincent Van Goh's art is because all the colors and shapes in his paintings always seem to swirl and mesh together to create a one of a kind painting.

2. Andy Warhol

      He is one of my favorite artists because he paints everyday, sometimes overlooked items, and turns them into a bright and colorful unique piece of art.

3. George Seurat

     I like George Seurant's art work because his paintings look so light and fluffy and happy. He only uses tiny tiny dots to paint them, and that definitely takes a lot of skill and patience.

4. Pablo Picasso
   One reason why I like Pablo Picasso is that his artwork is unmistakably, his. There's not really any other artist like him out there because his style is so unique.

5. Leonardo da Vinci
   Leonardo da Vinci is an all around amazing artist. He's impacted the world so much with his new ideas and paintings. A reason why i like his paintings are because they look so life like, and the shading on them is unbelievable.

Right/Left Brain Videos

We watched some videos in class regarding the right side of the brain, and the left side of the brain. The first video we watched was saying how art is changing in the 21st century, and how artists need to keep up with the changing times by taking more digital drawing and painting classes.  I didn't really understand this video and what it had to do with right/left brain.

The second video we watched was saying how the world needed to exercise the right brain more in education. It said that information is usually taught by repetition, which is a left-brained way of learning. It also said that schools always pound facts and figures into your brain, which there's nothing particularly wrong with. I think that they were emphasizing that right brain, artistic classes are just as important as left brain, informative/programming classes.

The third video we watched compared the right brain, the artistic brain, with the left brain, the programmer brain. In the video they showed an example of a person crossing the street. They said that you needed your programming side of the brain to accomplish that task, more than your artistic side of brain. I learned from this video that left brain people tend to always follow the rules, and do things how they've always been trained to do them, while left brain people don't always follow the rules but they explore outside of their boundaries.

What did I learn from each drawing exercise?

Self Portrait:
  My self portrait didn't look especially like me, but there were some things in it that somewhat resembled me, like the hair and kind of the eyes. I liked this self portrait though because it has turned out better than ones that i've had to draw in the past. While drawing this picture I learned that I don't like drawing people very much.
  
Person from Memory:
   For my person from memory drawing I decided to draw one of my cousins, but in the end it didn't end up looking like her at all. Or any of my cousins, even.  Theres nothing in this picture that I like, but I learned that it was really challenging to draw a person from memory. Because every person is unique, and its hard to capture their different eye shapes, or smile, or face shape just from your memory.

My Hand:
   I think out of these four drawings my hand was probably my favorite one. Its not my best work of art, but  I was the most pleased with how it turned out to look in the end. I liked how I drew it kind of at an angle, and not looking straight down on it, like when you trace your hand. My favorite part about this picture was my thumb. It just looked nice how it was turned to the side and all. My other fingers needed some more help though.

Upside-down picture of Igor Stravinsky:
   When i was drawing this picture, I was mostly trying to focus on drawing all the shapes and lines, rather then finding an object like a hand, and just drawing mental image of what i knew was a hand. This was kind of difficult because sometimes all the shapes and lines didn't line up correctly or weren't the right proportions. In the end the drawing looked pretty ridiculous, but I learned a lot from it.