This home project is not so much one finished project as a collection of artistic practices. I wanted to attempt charcoal portraits, but I instead turned to flora and other things. My two favorites are the buttercups and the toes and these are the two I chose to mat and hang. For "Toes", I focused on creating an interesting subject and perspective. Usually, we rarely think about our toes and undersides of our feet. Toes are peripheral and at times avoided. So I thought it would be interesting to display toes at a large scale right in the viewer's face. Contrast this effect with that of the safe, comfortable subject matter in "Buttercups".
Of these four works, I displayed "Toes" and Buttercups" but not "Maple Leaves" or "Carolina". This is because I did not feel like the latter two were finished. This brings up an interesting question on what makes a work "finished". I am a strong believer in the artistic philosophy that less is more - many of my favorite works are ones that I spent very little time on. But sometimes, pieces seem to lack a feeling of full development. For this project, I'm happy that I focused on producing many works rather than one "finished" work. It allowed me to not get too committed to one project, but rather create more freely.
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Home project is underway. For this one, I am going back to one of my favorite parts of art: charcoal figure drawing. My reason for selecting this medium is to escape the rigidity of acrylic paint and really let the process flow. Hopefully, I will have a large number of charcoal drawings to show for the next critique. So far, progress has been slow but there will be finished works to show soon.
This project followed a similar pattern as the last one. I painted the background maroon that I just realized wasn't right ... so, having wasted a good amount of studio time, I completely painted over it. I worked from a reference photograph, value matching and color mixing. I knew from the beginning I wanted the portrait to have textural brushstrokes and high-contrast, fully saturated warm hues. After I finished the portrait, I spray painted the pattern to resolve the background.
The content of this piece is simple and perhaps underdeveloped. I decided I wanted to study figure and portraiture more rigorously. The content that naturally fits within that is to draw people who are important to me. Reflecting upon this project, I am not fully satisfied. It is a good likeness but it is not striking like I would've liked. I think too many decisions of this project were arbitrary to really lack a cohesiveness and unity. At the same time, I feel like I boxed myself in with painting. It is hard to refine values or fix mistakes in acrylic while working from a photo instead of a model. For this reason, for my next project I will keep drawing portraits, but in charcoal instead of paint. Also, the palette is included because it shows the story behind the work. While working, I was struck with its beauty and decided to keep it in order to show that the painting is not just a product - it's work. By extension, this website blog also shows the story and the work behind the pieces. Kerry James Marshall is a contemporary painter who focuses on black empowerment and the effects of the civil rights movement. He has emerged as one of the greatest American contemporary painters. His work is varied, but a good deal of his portraits represent African Americans. Similarly to Kehinde Wiley, Marshall likes to challenge the centuries-old white dominated Western Art world. He is also an activist for the advancement of underprivileged African Americans. Marshall's work, as he says, "centralizes the black figure". Marshall was born in 1955 in Birmingham, but was raised in Los Angeles. There he was exposed to Black empowerment ideas even from his younger years. He earned a bachelor of fine arts in 1978 from Otis College of Art and Design in LA. As an undergraduate, he apprenticed under American artist Arnold Mesches. Marshall taught art and design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In the 1980s and 90s, his work was displayed in galleries and museums across the US and Europe. He won an honorary doctorate from Otis College in 1999. From there, he became a superstar. The City of New York commissioned Marshall to paint a mural on their High Line. Many of the most prominent art museums in the US hold Marshall's work on permanent collection, including MoMA, NGA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Met, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
Marshall has won many awards for his work. The University of Chicago gave him the Rosenberger Medal. He has also received the Wolfgang Hahn prize and been appointed to President Obama's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. I believe that Marshall's success comes from his distinctive voice and style. Many artists have made art dealing with civil rights, but none are quite like Marshall's. In social practice art, social activism combines with traditional art in unconventional ways. With its roots in the 60s, social practice art has only taken hold in the last ten to twenty years in the US. One of the most important questions about the movement as it is now is the standards with which to judge social practice projects. These projects can be active in the community for years and also be designed to be ephemeral. They often deal with important issues in ways that are difficult to hang on a wall. Community engagement is the true art form, but not something that fits in a museum. In my opinion, social practice projects should fit in museums if possible. If not, it is important that they are extensively documented. That way, the projects live on, detached from the physical space of the museum.
Another interesting concept of social practice art is determining who deserves credit for the artwork; for social practice art projects, whose name goes on the credit line? The artist comes up with the idea for the project, but often a collaborative institution tweaks it and the community executes it. The simple answer might seem that the artist gets the credit. But this gets to the question, what is the part of the project that speaks? Is it the idea for it, the initiative behind it, the physical piece, or the engagement of those who participated? In traditional art, there is an artist, a medium, a subject, and content. In social practice art, these distinctions are not so clear. Is the community the medium, the artist, the subject or the content? Judging social practice art by traditional art standards is like trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. The artist who showed the activism and initiative for the project should be on the credit line, but just that information does not capture the full complexity of this art form. The social practice movement shows how the twenty-first century art world is evolving, redefining itself, and complexifying. The values of artmaking are not the same anymore. In this art world, the message is far more important than the physical work itself. And the interesting thing to watch is how the art structures we have in place, like museums, will package and present this chimera of an art form. Our museums will probably change as a result of these new values of artmaking; and in fact, they already have. I expect to see more establishments like the Tate Modern in London and more museums geared toward large-scale performance art rather than gallery art. I also expect to see a more prominent digital art world in which allows social practice artists a greater community to work with and present to. This is the beginning of a new project. Feedback from my last project, the self-portrait, was to play with the surface more. So here I am playing with layering, shade, and textural brushstrokes. On top of this painting, I will do a portrait. My favorite part of this background is the little patches of crimson hue that show through the darker colors.
I noticed how everyone around me was perpetually exhausted. So I began to think about routine, tediousness, fatigue, and how our device culture plays into it all. This painting began with the image of a man sitting and eating cereal. With five days left until the deadline, I decided I hated my original idea and I painted over that image and completely restarted, this time focusing on the face, which I thought to be the most interesting part. After a talk with Coach, I decided to photograph myself and make it a self-portrait, which I had not originally intended. At this point, critique was three days away and I had nothing more than a dark blue canvas. So later that night, I finished the actual painting in about an hour and a half.
This is perhaps one of my favorite works so far. There's something to be said about subtleness and the application of the "less is more" philosophy into art. I had originally planned a more complicated and ultimately worse subject; but when I thought about what is actually important, I focused and created an amazing painting. I'm also really pleased that I chose to take an image of myself as opposed to appropriate from the Internet like I was originally intending. Part of the work is composing and lighting the shot and now I can say that the entire process has been entirely original. I'm also happy that the painting is recognizable as me - I do not have much experience in portraiture, especially through paint. To summarize, there were various decisions along the way, which in hindsight I'm happy I made the decision I made. This is a piece that I am genuinely proud of. In the future, I want to do more portraits in paint and charcoal. More like this to come. Ms. Freyer's lecture gave an interesting look into the world of filmmaking. She presented filmmaking as an art, another form of "visual poetry" along with the traditional visual arts. In her career, she has worked on both sides of the filmmaking spectrum, from avant-garde experimental films to news-style documentaries. Listening to this lecture, I was able to draw similarities between filmmaking and traditional arts. Art is essentially making a series of visual decisions in order to achieve a certain aesthetic result. Boiled down to this level, filmmaking is no different. Ms. Freyer talked about the effort that goes into decisions like camera angles, lighting, subject, composition, music score, cutting, and special effects. Experimental filmmaking is more recognizable as an art form, but documentary-style filmmaking also follows this same concept.
Another theme was artistic thinking. It's unlikely that very many kids in a high school art class will grow up to become professional artists. But practicing art does develop a way of thinking that emphasizes creation, ingenuity, communication, and grit. It takes skill to transform an idea into a product effectively. These artistic values give artists the upper hand in any field they choose. In Ms. Freyer's lecture, she described the process of documentary filmmaking as an artistic process. Documentary filmmaking sounds to me to be a relatively left-brain sort of process with research and interviews. But this lecture reminded me that, just like all art, the creators make specific aesthetic decisions in order to achieve a specific visual result. Ms. Freyer's lecture showed how practicing art can change and expand the way that individuals think. Janine Antoni, a Bahamian-born conceptual and sculptural artist, works with themes such as architecture, the physical body, and maternity.
The most constant theme of Antoni's work is the use of her body as an art tool. Her hair is the brush, her urine is the patina, and her breast or face is the mold. Sometimes she brings her audience in an uncomfortably intimate to her body, for example in Wean or Conduit. Or her process is uncomfortable like Lick and Lather. For the chocolate bust, she licked and gnawed away the chocolate to form the bust. The process to all four of these works is uncomfortable to a degree. But they also often bring together concepts in an interesting way. In all four of these selected works, Antoni is bringing her body into the architecture. In this way she contrasts natural and man-made, impermanent and permanent, everyday and monumental.
Antoni was born in Fremont, Bahamas and studied at Sarah Lawrence College and Rhode Island School of Design. She has been productive in artmaking for nearly thirty years. She has received many awards and is recognized internationally. The project is finished this week. I enjoyed this project more than others this year. I just started mixing and painting and getting in the groove. My favorite part of this is the babies and I also like the pink tendril plant things. I also appreciate the color scheme.
If I were to do this again, I would perhaps make the pink plants at the bottom less dominant. I would make the ombre on the green underpainting more dominant. I will definitely do more like this. I especially like how the figures turned out. |