Thinking of trees again...

I was going to stay up and do some work for our painting class, but I got a little bored, and so I thought I could post some inspirational images...





gapingvoid.com
Keri Smith

SARKEdward MonktonKinda old (it was made in 1989), and you might have to click on it to actually read it, but it's by the Guerrilla Girls


These are other images that I saved, but I don't remember who they were by:

Bored during our class break...

Yesterday, we had to discuss each other's projects for our semester projects. I really thought that most people had successful drawings and a good start on their projects, and it was really interesting to see everyone's interpretation of what they wanted to do for this project. I really enjoyed the diversity of everyone's drawings- some people are doing portraits of friends or people in the class, while other people are basing their projects on themselves or the environment that surrounds them.

On the other hand though, I sort of realized that my project is one of the biggest in the class, and I will probably be needing a lot of time to finish this. I can't really make excuses or leave things unfinished, or the house will not look as effective. Also, I have to think of other ways to keep the messages more subtle, but easy enough for people to understand it without asking what the meaning is of every detail since it would just get too confusing for everyone. Some people also liked my trees, especially the one for the "Haunted House".

We are also supposed to do a drawing for homework based on the critiques from yesterday, but I have no idea how I'm going to do this. I could just go along with my original plan for this week and draw out my first house. I will also figure out how to make the house open correctly. I'll update the images later on in the week.

"I myself am...strange and unusual"

I'm up watching Beetlejuice (it's a childhood favorite-Shhh), so I figured I post something now.

My plan so far was to work on the things that I was making outside of the doll house, and then work my way in.

This is part of the cover that some people saw me working on in class almost two weeks ago. It says, "J. Wakefield's Wacky House of Silly Societies". I also attached four different parts to the cover to represent each "house" that I will be making.
This one is really simple, but it is supposed to represent the upper class house. You can barely see it, but attached to the heart is "gold" ring and a girl pendant which represents what obligations people usually have once they marry (more material possessions and children), and the butterfly represents the opposite of that- complete freedom.

I also made some exterior parts for when the house will be put on display for the final critique. I made a simple sidewalk:
I actually made this so it would wrap almost entirely around the opened house. It is also in four different colors, including a yellow part- yes, I did have to include a yellow brick road for my fantasy side of the house.

I also made some trees. They were originally all going to be attached to make one big tree...but it did not come out as planned. They all instead got glued together and it refused to stand up on it's own. I have an idea on how to make them stand up a different way, but I'll figure that out later since they aren't really an important part of the house (it's just to add to the atmosphere of the piece).

Tree1 Side1 (doesn't look too much like a tree, but maybe some kind of weird octopus?)
Side 2: It's reflecting the flash since it has some gold paint on it. Tree 2 Side 1, looks a lot better in person. Tree 2 Side 2- Tree for the "Haunted Mansion", looks more magical than haunted


So, that's everything I'm uploading now. I have some floor plans that I drew for each of the floors for the house, but since they aren't the final product, it seems kind of a waste to show them here at the moment. Tomorrow, I'm going to finish covering the front and back covers so I could get them out of the way before I tackle the interiors of the house. If something happens, and it takes me longer than I planned to finish, the last thing I would want to do is to sew up a book cover. I'm also afraid that my sewing machine is going to chew up the whole thing, so it's best to get that out of the way when I'm less stressed.



I would also like to leave you with this:



Another film I saw tonight, called "Baraka". It is simply the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. It is a film that was made in 1992 that showed different cultures, animals, environments, religions, etc etc from around the world. Some parts are hard to watch, but the whole film is really moving. It is almost like "Planet Earth" except they obviously just don't show animals, and there is no dialogue whatsoever. Also, there are some songs that are sung by one of my favorite bands, Dead Can Dance-which I thought was ironic when they were playing one of their songs when they were showing remains in concentration camps in Auschwitz and in Cambodia. More info about the film here and here, if you like.

Haven't updated in so long...

Since the first day I had my camera, I already knew it didn't like me. It eats through batteries like Pringles, randomly turns off, takes crappy pictures... So basically, that was one of the reasons why I haven't updated this thing in awhile. I also haven't been feeling well, so going on the computer hasn't been on my "to do" list within the last week (I'm already dreading to see how many emails I have to go through later).

Anyway, while I was doing some research for another class, I came upon this one artist named Taylor McKimens. I like his drawings since he not only uses different medias, but also makes these 3 dimensional drawings for depicting everyday objects.
How could you not like that pick-up truck?


I'll be updating with some of drawings I have been doing soon.

Beginning of our projects...

My project is basically going to be a doll house book, which is going to consist of four houses. If this goes as planned, I am hoping that it will be able to stand open as a one house. This is hard to explain since I haven't started drawing the actual house yet, so I'm sure this will sound confusing to some people. In the first two houses, or on one side of the house, will be the realistic side which will show the extremes between living in an upper class family and the lower class. The other side will be more fantasy and child-like. I'm thinking of doing a tree house and then a haunted mansion.

For our homework, I knew I could not just do "one drawing" since my project will be a little different from everyone else's. I wanted to start making some of the exterior parts for the house first so I could get them out of the way. I was in a really crafty mood this weekend, so I first made this sun/moon:
It's on a hanger so it could be attached to the tree (which I will be making tonight) and could hover above the house when it is all set up. I also made a folder that would hold all of the extra parts of the house (which will also include the people and some of the furniture).I also started to dye some paper with the red food coloring again. Some people really liked how it came out, and I thought it would look cute with the doll house. So, this will eventually be the title page for the book.

For this week, I'm hoping to also layout the floor plans and also finish the book cover. I will also need to figure out how I'm going to put together the house properly so it would actually pop out and look 3-D, but that should only take a few minutes since I have some ideas. I don't know how long all of this will take since I really want to take my time and not rush through all of the parts. Yesterday, I probably spent over an hour just on the sun/moon, but I didn't rush myself and was listening to weird spiritual music in the process...

This is funny and cute...

What is art?



i like the printmaking dog....

Quotes Part Deux

(The Moon by Alphonse Mucha)

I posted some quotes almost a month ago, so I'll add some more for the time being.

“I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.”
-Van Gogh

"The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful. "
e. e. cummings

"To restrict the artist is a crime. It is to murder germinating life."
-Egon Schiele

"I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass."
-Maya Angelou

"Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise."
-Margaret Atwood

“If you hear a voice within you saying, ''You are not a painter,'' then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.”
- Van Gogh

"You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty. "
-Mohandas Gandhi

so...

I'll be updating some drawing stuff in a few days. Just trying to figure out the floor plans for my weird dollhouse.
But meanwhile-time for some weird music.

...I was 3 when this song came out...
the world must have been in a weird state in 1990....

Weekend project...

What do you do when your clothes start to fade since you where all black everyday? Dye them black! Yeah...

I also got a new bag (ok it's really used, like most of the things I own), and I also tried dyeing it black. It's still brown though. I guess I need to eventually start wearing other colors. Or not. Many people in my Dad's family wear black almost everyday, so it comes naturally.

Also been trying to think about what to do about our self-guided project. My mind is all over the place again. I was thinking at first to do small assemblage pieces for each person in the class and maybe conducting a survey to see what people's interests are, since I don't talk to some people in the class as much. At the same time though, everyone seems to be doing portraits or something relating to someone they know, so I might do something else. I also have this idea of putting together some kind of doll house so then I could integrate that innocent and weathered look that some people were talking about. It would be really hard to make and carry around a real doll house, but I could try to figure out how to put it together easily. I was also thinking of doing something else with that, but it seems like many people that I know are getting sick of all of this political stuff that is everywhere at the moment (such as with the 2008 presidential voting and primary things that is going on).

Either way, I need some time to think about it some more. Plus, my hands are kinda bluish-gray at the moment due to the black dye. Yay.

*Edit*- I just figured out how I could do a doll house. It might be something different than I usually do, but it might look...nice?

Back by popular demand...

That giant abstract circle folk floor rug hippie beaded thing that I made a few homeworks ago....It's nice having a big white kitchen wall, for these purposes at least.You can see the lemon pictures that were on the wall behind it now. This thing took much longer to make even though I wound up gluing it and not sewing it like I wanted to. My sewing machine decided to not cooperate with me that night. Also, the beading would have taken me forever if I hand sewn all of them, but I only sewed the red ones since I was scared they were going to fall off. The whole thing is still in one piece, but it's still in a little plastic bag since I have no idea where to put it.

Here is the song by a German Industrial/ Experimental band Einsturzende Neubauten which goes along with this piece. This is the real video to it, too, not just some crazy obsessive fan video. The song is called "The Garden".

Way too long entry...six more weeks of winter anyhow

I'm trying to update this thing, but it seems like it doesn't like me. The uploading pictures button isn't working right now, so I hope that providing links to the pictures will be good enough at the moment... My camera also was acting a bit wacky with the lighting, so this was the best that I could do.

I first started with this drawing. I had no idea what to do with this homework, so I just started to doodle flowers. There is some weird meaning behind it, but most people won't even look at this, so I won't go into describing it. I then went to this drawing to try to break away from the all crazy colorful stuff that I usually wind up doing. It came out somewhat cute, and if you look closely you can see little people in it, like this one. I then wanted to use this paper that I had that my mom gave me that has supposed Native American "symbols" on it. She goes to a lot of Native American festivals throughout New York that they have throughout the year, and it seems like this was from someone that came from the West (since there are symbols for cacti and teepees). The outcome was this. It looks like some kind of weird eye.

I then started to think of other ways to use the paper. I did not want to use plain white 8 1/2" x 11" paper for all of my drawings, so I started to look through my kitchen cupboards. Why I started here? I'm not really sure...but you can create weird effects with food. I also wanted to dye things with tea to give that old look, and then I moved on to red food coloring, and even some oregano. This created really brittle paper, but it still looked interesting. This was one of the drawings that I came up with. It is actually my astrological birth chart with some weird designs around it. Here is also my "Cat Island", which is dedicated to Bo Ae. Heh.

After these papers were drying, I then also tried figuring out what other materials I could use. I remembered seeing online a jewelry box that was made out of a shell and had some writing on it, and I thought it would be an interesting medium to use. So I used two different shells for two drawings, one with a hand reaching for more flowers and another with an octopus, turtle, and some dolphins. I also created these two necklaces, one was a girl and another was a boy. They kinda came out weird, and it was hard to tell what they were unless you went up to them and looked through each shape around the piece. There was also this piece of wood that I had from a wine box (I live next to a liquor store) that I wanted to use, so I drew symbols of different religions from around the world. Along the edge was a quote by Gandhi (which was hard to see while hanging on the wall) that read, "Even as a tree has a single trunk but many branches and leaves, there is one religion-human religion- by any number of faiths". In the past few years, I've been studying different religions and it really gets interesting on how so many religions are really interconnected and have so many things in common. However, since we live in an extremely prejudiced world, we have people that would rather exploit the differences than see the similarities to just increase the hatred around the world.

Going on with this idea, I want to move to my next piece, which seemed to look very personal to a few people in the world. This piece was written one night when I had insomnia. People usually think that I'm joking when I have this problem, but I'm really not. That night, I went to sleep like usual, but I just had so many things on my mind. After awhile, I get so worked up about the problems that are going on around the world or the problems that are affecting the people around me, and I really needed to vent. When this happens, I usually do not write anything down since my head works too quickly for me to jot things down in time. That night, however, I decided to get up at 3 AM and wrote on one of the pieces of paper that I put oregano on. After I was done, it did look like someone ripped it out of an old journal and maybe instead I found it in the attic of my grandmother's house.

I then wanted to do some political drawings, but it would have stuck out compared to the things that I already have done. I also really hate drawing figures (unlike other people in the class), so I wanted to figure out other ways to display this. I used quotes earlier, so I started to look for some quotes by some authors that I really appreciate. One person that I find really inspiring is bell hooks (she doesn't capitalize her name so her books have more importance- ever pick up a book and the author's name is larger than the title itself?). hooks' usually focuses on race, gender, and class in her works, and I thought her ideas would be great to use, since while going to SVA I have met some very narrow-minded and ignorant people. In this picture, it shows a flower rising above the other flowers, with a quote, "I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or someone else's ignorance". Plain and simple. The next one is on an old dictionary page that I gessoed in order for the ink or paint to not go through. On this drawing, it says, "Class is rarely talked about in the United States; nowhere is there a more intense silence about the reality of class difference than in educational settings." I drew the usual class structure except with three different colors and circles. The lower class was red, the middle class was black, and the upper class was green. On the top, I put larger circles to represent the people that "make it" in the world. It seems like that anyone who saw this would have not even understood this picture even if they read the quote. By going to two different colleges already, it also really seems like if you are poor there is no way you will graduate. You can't afford books, you can't afford supplies, you can't even afford food, yet your roommate complains about her petty problems even when her parents give her money every week. This happened to me, and I also know a lot of people that get everything from their parents whenever they want yet they still complain. They don't know how good they will have it, and yet who will make it in this world? This is a really big problem that I am having with going to school since there is no way in hell my parents could even give me a dime because they themselves work minimum wage jobs. I also tell people to be realistic with how their lives will be after college, especially as "artists", but they think it will not happen to them. You would think that a person who is literally a daughter of a starving artist (my mom is a graphic designer) would have the first hand experience of this problem, but everyone always says that I'm just an unhappy person...My mom asks me every week why I'm doing this to myself, but at least I have a little more wisdom coming out of this.

The last piece I want to describe is the collage of red papers and lace with the quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Wakefield". The quote states:
"Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever". I often wondered what would happen if I would just disappear for a bit and live in the woods with a few cats and to just live in my own little world. I thought that after being a child, and then after being a teenager I would have gotten over this phase. However, I have always felt so alienated in the world, but by getting older, it just has been getting worse. Maybe I am destined to be that crazy cat lady that becomes such a pack rat that she herself can't even move around in her house? Or maybe I should learn how to build a tree house. I saw a few pretty nifty ones online a few days ago...

My hands are starting to hurt, and this is getting pretty long, so I will just list the rest of my drawings.

Mixture of white fishnet, tea dyed paper, ink, and quote "Your soul is your highest self"
Green bunny and black tree on dictionary page
Secret garden and walking scissors with trees
Beaded feather and Buddha eyes with more eyes
Rooms before and after the growth of nature
Bookcase with velveteen rabbit, egg in backpack (from a weird dream I had), butterfly, and cat on bookcase
Turtles (from many Native American myths that the world was built on a turtle, but here are seven turtles representing the 7 continents)and two cardinals (someone said they looked like they were arguing)
Homemade soy hot chocolate and some weird land mass or iceberg...
Pumpkins on black paper and human plant (my attempt at the human figure)
Embroidery of skeleton (on left) and reaching for flowers (on right)
Castle (on the left) and witch with tree (on the right)
The Snake and the Moon (a Dead Can Dance song) and a glittery tree on a dictionary page that, of course, says "tree"

This took way longer than planned. There will be an update on my thoughts on our bigger projects in another post later...