Week Three (to September 21 2007)

Week Three at the Art Centre.

In Printmaking we continued to refine the designs for our pattern triptych. I took pictures around my kitchen and settled on the following – for an ogee pattern, a group of three: purple onion, garlic and a potato; for the hexagon pattern a red pepper, and for the scale pattern, red grapes. I like the way the shape of the subjects (there are two views of each) work with the shape of the pattern they inhabit. The tricky part is getting each composition within a pattern to be identical to the next one in the order of things. Yet to do – the hand colouring of each of the three patterns and matting them for submission. I’m using mixed media – coloured pencils, marking pens and crayons.

In Painting class, drawing – this week, a variety of objects: bottles, a pyramid, a child’s wagon, a large wooden sphere, a wooden block, a saucepan in different arrangements. Working primarily on construction and measuring to get angles and relationships of objects in the correct proportions. I improved over the couple of hours with a little coaching – the teacher is not able to give much time to each of us but he seemed satisfied that I was “getting it”.

In Art History class, we actually got a little time to look at some of the reference books in the room and to talk amongst ourselves. The teacher’s laptop was fried and he couldn’t gain access to the school laptop so plans for his power point slide shows were put on hold. We did sign out art movie DVDs and I chose Annie Leibovitz on Photography. I also decided to use I.M Pei’s Pyramide at the Louvre for my Appropriation Project. I hadn’t realized we could use Art or Architecture for this – it’s obvious but perfect as there are some wonderful images of the Pyramide online I can use. We also viewed a documentary on Frank Lloyd Wright. I was motivated to watch as I attended graduate school in the Frank Lloyd Wright designed theatre in Dallas. It wasn’t mentioned in the movie and must have been designed just before his death. I had no idea he had such a rocky career and was quite impressed with his accomplishments overall.

In Sculpting Class, my presentation on Primitivism went fairly well. I used the MOMA book on Primitivism Sculpture (Vol 1) and the Gauguin to Moore book to show lots of examples of sculptures and a few examples of the “primitive” art that inspired them. I took along an ornate cupid’s head to represent the 19^th C. and a letter opener featuring a beautifully carved African head for the 20^th C. and I worked hard to help them realize the context of the times and how these works not only were a reaction against romanticism and Rodin but were the forerunners of cubism, surrealism, vorticism, etc. Afterwards I prepared my plaster mold for the carving and continued on with maquettes for the carving project. Next week we do one maquette (the teacher liked one of my abstracts best) the same size as the plaster form we will carve.

On Friday, in drawing class I partnered up with JK, the Korea illustrator who is clearly the most skilled of us all. We did gestural drawings (10 second and 25 second) and finally a 15 minute contour drawing of each other. When our previous 20 minute drawings were laid out on the floor, I could see that mine was well drawn but lacked contrast and any dynamism. Something to strive for. We had our photos taken for the yearbook and for student ID cards on Friday too. And that was our week. Homework: 2 thirty minute contour drawings - (you don’t look at the paper and your conte crayon never leaves the paper) one a self-portrait and the other of an object or pet.