Independent Project

Symbolic Portrait

Symbolic portrait of John Coltrane

Process Reflection #1

This week has been productive for me. I wrapped up all of my projects, and started my independent project: shapes. Basically, I draw a shape and form a work of art around numerous amounts of the same shape. I got a couple pieces done, then tried to do something but ended up screwing around with a party hat, listened to music, came back, and made something unrelated. I have no process. I have no plan moving forward. I will make art.

The Unexpected Match

Glass Half Full Project

In this project, we were supposed to choose one general theme and reflect its good and bad attributes. I chose winter, because my feelings towards winter are very ambivalent. I love skiing, wrestling, snow fights and watching basketball, but I hate dirty snow and the gloominess that seems to take over Massachusetts. For the positive attribute, I portrayed a skier going off of a jump. I love skiing and the picture looks fun. In contrast, as the negative attribute, I have a pair of lonely footprints adjacent to a cold, icy road. I struggled making the road look gloomy rather than peaceful, since it was supposed to be a negative. Ms. Roberts helped me a lot by telling me to contrast one side of the road more by making it lighter. I think that by using white charcoal, I accomplished what I wanted in my picture.

Sculpture Reflection

The idea of this project is not to have an idea and find materials that work, but to get inspiration from the objects you are given. John and I had a big box of technology and random objects, and we were told to look for objects that looked like something, objects provocative of ideas. There was a piece of a scanner in the box that one of us said looked like a gun. I took this scanner, and hot glued a phone battery case to the bottom, a piece of a hanger to the middle, and something that looked like a trigger in between. It came out looking exactly like a gun.

Extended Pour Painting

For my extended pour painting, I took the element of drip-painting from my original pour painting. I used this concept to create a log, with brown paint. I went over the drips with further diluted paint, so as to preserve the lines made by the dripping. It was a fun project, but the log alone seemed plain. Over that log, I stuck on non-dry clay to make a hatchet, and covered the head with aluminum foil. The end-product was mostly good, expect for the yellowish oil that seeped through the paper directly around the non-dry clay.

Found Photos Collage

Title: God Bless America

This was an interesting project. I came back to art class/school from having a bad but brief case of mononucleosis, only to be told that I should make an image with photos that I found looking through magazines. I was immediately drawn to a section in a magazine about a multiple-statewide flea market. The photos taken were colorful collections of toys, clothes, and guns. I liked several of the photos, so I cut them out. The image of all of the mint-condition toy cars was particularly colorful, so a picture was taken on a digital camera and printed out. Once that was out, I layered the original image in the corner of the larger print-out, and another bright collection of toys in the other corner. In contrast, I cut out an assortment of rifles out from another collection, and had them strewn across the bottom. In the center, a cutout of the back of two babies sitting down, with an action speech bubble from one baby, saying "YES!" I'd say that this image represents children in America, growing up in a land of luxury, toys, and violence.