Sunday, October 19, 2008

Art Centre: October 13-17, 2008

Central Technical School
Art Centre:Year Two: Week Seven
October 13-17, 2008

Monday: Ceramics Class

I finished my fourth and final bowl using a plastic bowl and cheesecloth as the mold. Three of the bowls have been painted with various colours of slip. As soon as they are dry I’ll take the to the kiln room to be fired.
We were given an exciting new project for ceramics – an artists book featuring a letter of the alphabet. The class brainstormed words for each letter drawn to work with. I have the letter W.


Tuesday Evening: Collage and Assemblage

Our third assignment: photo collages. I brought along a a few magazines, an old Yahoo magazine, an Entertainment Special and two Premiere magazines. I developed two collages over the two and a half hours I was in class. The first and largest featured a male diver in a swan dive with a host of various characters witnessing his feat – I call it “Showing Off”. The second had great masses of various types of hair with a centre face in a frozen and fanged scream: “Bad Hair Day”.
Wednesday: Printmaking Class (and Advanced Printmaking Class)

Continued on with my lino blocks for the three fountains series. They have been test printed and require much more cutting and refining. I continued with this through both classes this week.
Block printing is an ancient art – here is a link to woodblock printing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodblock_printing
and a YouTube video on the art:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNgAS3Wm4E8

Thursday: Sculpting Class

We were introduced to the sculptors – Midardo Rosso and Isamu Noguchi.
http://www.medardorosso.org/
http://www.noguchi.org/
We continue building the head of a classmate. Our skulls were ranked and mine was close to being the least effective.

Thursday: Photography Class

The challenge this week was to first do a test strip to determine the time required for the optimum results for our images. First we cut the negatives into short strips (five photos in a strip) and placed them in a clear plastic sheet with sleeves. This sheet was used with a strip of photo paper in the testing under the enlarger light. The next stage was to develop the contact sheet – my time was determined to be about 30 seconds of exposure however, I was not successful with developing my contact sheet – I’ll have another go at this next week.
We were given our next assignments which includes going to the World Press Photo Exhibition at BCE place. This is the website: http://www.worldpressphoto.org/?bandwidth=high – and we are going to see the winners of the 2008 competition to answer questions.

Friday: Computer Class

In class we did an activity that helped us review what we have learned to date. I began work on my “W” book for ceramics and got a great idea for it from my computer instructor. I located an image of a wizard with a palette and paint brush and had been working to make it a female figure. The suggestion came that I use an iconic artist for the face and I developed an image of the painter Georgia O’Keeffe then moved on to develop one for photographer Annie Leibowitz. I plan to add a few more powerful women figures in the collection of female “wizards”.

Georgia O’Keeffe links - http://astralsite.com/georgia/



Annie Leibowitz links - http://astralsite.com/annie/

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