Art Centre: September 15-19, 2008

Central Technical School Art Centre:

Year Two: Week Three

September 15-19, 2008

Monday: Ceramics Class

bowls

The class is now busy making bowls. Our teacher was away and the ceramics technician was kind enough to hang around and give us all sorts of good advice as we experimented with coil and slab methods, sometimes working on the outside of a bowl mold and sometimes inside of a mold. I completed one crude coil bowl and began another. Later on Monday, I purchased two plastic bowls from the dollar store to have as molds for my next creations – we have to make at least six bowls in total for this assignment.

Wednesday: Printmaking Class
We had a demonstration of a new way of doing polyester lithography. It is a much less demanding medium than using lithographic stones. We were shown examples that seemed to work well if one was careful with cleaning the Plexiglas

I began transferring my designs for the block prints onto the blocks. I’m doing three different fountains that have water coming from the mouth. One is a medusa like head – a wall fountain I saw in an art museum in Jacksonville Florida, one is a winged cupid head – not sure where I took that one and the third is a stone lion with brightly painted Spanish style tiles in the background – that one was in a courtyard of an old mission in Tucson, Arizona.

I did a study of fountains when I was developing a resource site called, The Fountain (http://www.astralsite.com/holistic/fountain.html) and noted my explorations in a web page – “Notes and sketches from an exploration into the nature of fountains and the planning of gardens as regards life and contemplative thought” found at: http://astralsite.com/holistic/fountain_read.html also created a gallery of fountain images http://astralsite.com/holistic/gallery.html

Sculpting Class

Built a human skull and completed the building of David’s lips.

Decided on these two heads for the fusion head project

Elizabeth Frink fused with the Ancient Egyptian Amenhotep III

Photography Class

The Pinhole assignment continued this week. My self-portrait from last week was acceptable and after two tries, I got one of empty containers on the school retaining wall to have a photo showing foreground and background. I was shown how to print from the negative of my portrait on the enlarger.

The Alfred Steiglitz – The Eloquent Eye – American Masters series video is superb and I am watching it again as it details not only the first gallery showings of important American photographers but also chronicles the beginning of the modern art movement in America just after the turn of the century starting with Picasso.

Computer Class

I understand that the class continued working with the basics of Photoshop and also had a look at Image Ready. I was occupied with having surgery and missed class. I have started taking a few pictures as I work on the excellent assignment coming up in that class. We are to “Photoshop” the image of one of our teachers to illustrate what they teach. There’s a big display on the wall of a series done of teachers at one of the local colleges to give us inspiration for the project.

The Week Ahead

I’ll be taking a week off to recover from surgery and have at home what I need in order to work on the printmaking projects, the maquette for the fusion head, and I’m shooting the roll of colour film in my 35mm camera to free it up for black and white film for when I return to school and future assignments. I’m also looking at the digital photos I have taken so far for the Photoshop assignment. So probably there will be no entry until I return to school since this blog is intended as a way of recording my progress in art school.