I’ve noticed that over time, the projects I come up with for my art classes become progressively more...odd. Artsy, maybe. “Unconventional?” Who knows. Something lofty and creative-sounding, I suppose. I think this trend started around spring of junior year, when Bill Flynn and Bob Siegelman forcefully dragged me out of my comfort zone. Lizi Brown deserves most of the credit for making me more comfortable and fluid in my painting, but Bill pushed my somewhat reluctant self into the world of abstraction. He strongly believes that to do realism effectively, you need to explore and appreciate the abstract world. I was skeptical, but considering my work in his class went from a representational drawing of a corkscrew to a 4’ by 10’ charcoal abstraction of a fight between me and my dad (which was both technically and intellectually far more interesting), I’d say he was pretty successful. In the first day of Bob’s figure drawing class, I told the class most of my work had been figurative, and I was ready to branch out, to add more of myself to the work. From that day on, Bob made it his goal to break me of my attachment to anatomical figure drawing. Whenever he’d come to my easel and find me working on a drawing which was “too realistic,” he’d make me start over. Periodically, he or his TA would come over and offer me a new medium, which I was to integrate into whatever drawings I was working on at the time. Sharpies, collages, and paints all inserted themselves into my work. That semester turned my personal aesthetic on its head, ridding me of no small amount of perfectionist tendencies, and teaching me to enjoy creating more abstract works. Those changes have bled into other artistic pursuits, encouraged further experimentation, such as adventures into small metals and performance art. My work is more adventurous, more exciting, and more personal. This semester, these trends have appeared early.
My first four assignments show how much I’ve migrated away from literal interpretations, and how I’ve allowed myself to have more fun with interpreting loosely worded prompts.
Object a Week I: Book of Mormon
If you haven’t looked up the origin of the Book of Mormo, I would recommend it. No offense to the faithful, but that story is as full of holes as Swiss cheese, and distinctly less tasty. I decided to recreate the legend in a sort of playful way. I invented a “Notice” on which I detailed the book’s origin story in a symbolic language I made up by playing with Microsoft Word’s symbol database (another thing worth exploring). Underneath the notice, I placed my copy of the Book of Mormon. The book had been painted gold, wrapped in craft paper secured with masking tape, and placed in a box (also painted gold) with a similarly wrapped, gold-painted block of wood designed to look like a stack of engraving plates. I then wrapped the box itself in the same craft paper, and carefully aligned it with the notice on the wall. I think my favorite part was how the final product looked so mundane, despite all the work I’d done.
Painting Space I: Specificity
Thus far, prompts for this class have been satisfyingly open-ended. “Specificity” allowed me to make use of the wonderfully gory photos I took of childbirth and surgery in India. The surgeries, patients, and locales were undeniably specific, but up close, surgeries tend to come across as nondescript color and shape, losing a lot of the visceral experience of viewing them up close. I decided to experiment a little, see if I could hold onto the vivid colors and gut reaction they inspired, but by letting go of a lot of the specific details in the original photos. I imagined the finished product as a triptych, which may have been a little overambitious. The first two pieces are basically done, but the last and largest still needs quite a bit of work. I included one of my reference photos, but the other two are a little too...bloody to be posted here. I am happy to share with any curious emailers, though!
Object a Week II: Rulers
Okay, I admit, I was a little light on ideas for this prompt. A ruler is so...distinctive, in shape, function, and materials. I was pretty stuck, so thank goodness for Nikki, my very inspired classmate, who enlisted my help for a collaborative project. Her basic idea was to create a human silhouette, and fill it with all the ways humans have found to measure the world based on their own bodies (e.g. a “cubit” is the length of the forearm from elbow to tip of the middle finger). Between the two of us, the imagery changed significantly. I added black threading to the white silhouette, which Nikki interpreted as creating a “human ruler,” inspiring me to vote for realistically meandering, rather than straight, lines. She wanted to hang the piece in a window, and proposed crafting a metal frame in which to hang it, and I loved the idea of using the black threading to attach it to the frame. We jointly agreed to remove the text measurements altogether, feeling that they’d be a little too concrete. And voila, we arrived at a piece far away from the initial idea, and even further from any literal interpretation of a ruler.
Painting Space II: Sublimation
The prompt for this project was wildly confusing, if entertaining. We watched several videos of contemporary artist Mike Kelley talking about his work with stuffed animals. He saw it as an exploration of the intersection between consumer and commercial culture and highly specific objects. Critics saw it as a soul-bearing expose on child abuse. Kelley decided to run with it: “yes, I have been abused, so I shall now explore the reacquisition of my repressed memories on the subject!” What an awesome take on a goofy interpretation. I couldn’t quite tell what we were supposed to do with this, until my teacher started asking us for examples of “bad art.” Some suggestions were the photos that come in store-bought frames, photobooths which allow doodling on the pictures (something I experienced in Japan), and homemade ads for local carpet warehouses and car dealerships. For me, one of the first things that came to mind was scrapbooks. Our generation grew up with colorful papers and themed stickers, scrapbook kits encouraging us to track and save our fascinating and rich experiences. I decided to use that kitsch, but in combination with a less savory topic: serial killers. I haven’t decided whether to go for flowery and saturated with color, or classic, reserved, black-on-black, but either way, the idea is to find the most normal and mundane pictures of serial killers I can find, refer to them only by their first names (to cut down on recognisability), and structure it so that it seems like all I’m doing is cataloguing the day-to-day lives of my friends and family, when in reality, they’re anything but.
At this point, it should be obvious how far I’ve come from representative drawings of live models. I love that I can now apply my technical and experiential knowledge to more off-beat and quirky projects. Though I can’t say I recommend that everyone take to studying and cataloguing serial killers, I would encourage everyone to view the world with a little more skepticism: ponder, interpret, and reevaluate what you encounter and experience, and allow yourself to be curious. There’s so much fun to be had by appreciating the delightful weirdness of the world at large.