On Wednesday I worked on the sketch, taking it from a loose sketch to a more refined one that I can trace with ink later. I have to think extensively about how I will go about cutting this one - it's more complex than the last in terms of its layers.
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Today we went on a field trip to the VMFA in my English class. While looking around the museum for art that reminded us of the literature we had read, I noticed pieces that were artistically appealing to me. We passed by a wedding being set up and WOW it was so beautiful!!!!! There were pink rosy lights all along the floors lighting up the walls and ceiling from below. I tried to take photos but my phone camera isn't very good with capturing colors so none of the photos look very pretty.
Also, the light in the galleries is not ideal for phone cameras. The first thing I saw that caught my eye was a Faberge Calendar that was small and decorative. I just thought it was pretty. The white band at the bottom had "August" written in French on it, but due to the lighting I only got a bad picture. Another Faberge that I liked was the gold and glass Frame. Though it's 3D I thought of how interesting it would look if I were able to replicate it on a 2D surface - surely it would look boring simply as lines, but if I used gold ink or otherwise added the variations that the gold provides, I think it could look cool. In the room of Chinese art, I saw these small flower sculptures that just looked pretty. Lately I’ve been doodling long grass-like leaves such as the ones on these flowers, so seeing them reminded me of that. There was a room dedicated to Steinlen’s cats, and I saw three pages of short little stories. These caught my eye because they had no frames around each shot of the story. Usually I see it the other way around – there may be frames but no sequential story within them (like I talked about in my awareness post of ikedda) but here there was a sequential story all within the same space, with no separation by frames. I found that interesting. I saw one simple piece of a bird perched on a leafy branch that also reminded me of my doodles. At the very end I had only limited time (as in, about one minute) to go in the Art Deco and Art Nouveau area, so I only saw two pieces that caught my eye but I documented them nonetheless. I really think this is an area for me to look into for inspiration for my work (like Mucha.) It seems Georges de Feure is a good artist for me to explore. Honestly my favorite part was the beautiful lighting and architecture around the wedding area. I will see if I can get some photos from Grace that better show how pretty it was. Maybe I’ll use pink in my next piece. I just loved how beautiful it looked in there wow!!!! Wow. This artist creates just absolutely beautiful watercolor work. I remember the night I found him on instagram I watched his 2017 watercolor sketchbook flip-through video several times over because I was just in awe. He is an artist from Melbourne, Australia who does both watercolor and digital art. I am a big fan of the watercolor pieces.
He inspired me to play around with watercolor one night (I posted the results on my art instagram @owlinne) and I really hope to draw inspiration from his compositions. Much like the other artist I looked at this quarter, he uses the technique of breaking the character out from shapes. One particularly unique aspect of his art is his use of negative space *within* a character. In a few of the drawings I included in this post, he used a whole blank shape for the shirt/body of the character instead of drawing in the folds and divides. I had actually played around with this idea before finding him, so maybe I can refine it further with inspiration from his work. He makes me really want to learn how to use watercolor, so maybe I will continue to play around with it, but I know it is difficult to master so I'm hesitant to try (I am afraid that I'll get too discouraged too quickly.) Overall, I hope to draw inspiration from his compositions and use of geometry, as well as maybe trying out a new medium for me. (for the images, I decided to just keep them as screenshots rather than crop them and rewrite the captions, since they already have captions and often the date on them.)
This is yet another artist I found on instagram. Since I tend to draw most of my inspiration from browsing instagram artists, I like exploring and trying to find more. From the fact that their bio says "I live in nowhere," this artist seems to be very private so I don't really have any information about who they are, all I have is their art. They do have various Japanese words in their bio and have Japanese and English captions on their posts, so I can assume they are Japanese or live in Japan. All of their art is done in a journal, a nice minimalistic page layout with three boxes for weather and seven boxes for the weekday at the top left, and a blank for "Memo number" and the date on the right. I find it interesting that they work on this paper rather than in a sketchbook, due to the lines across the page, but in some of their pieces you actually don't notice the lines at first due to the color or detail of the illustration. However, they participated in the beginning of Inktober on unlined paper and I really like some of the entries (included in slideshow.) One of the things I noticed about their art is that they use that nonsequential storytelling that I used a few times last year. I have thought about doing it again this year but haven't had a good idea for it yet. Another thing they do that I really like is breaking geometric borders - I've been doing a lot of that this year, by putting boxes and circles behind my characters and having them break out of them somehow. I hope to get more inspiration for that from this artist. Finally, a lot of their work has that quiet, gentle, floating feeling that I used to strive for with my work. I just really like their work overall for its simplicity in feeling and effectiveness of techniques I try to employ. On the first Monday (not pictured) I drew thumbnail images in my sketchbook and on my phone to figure out a plan and composition. From that Monday, I worked on this project from November 27 until December 12.
This quarter, the topic of artists’ reactions to war was covered similarly by two different articles. Both give examples of exhibitions for art that show the true pain behind war. One focuses on time in the sense that humans at any time feel similar pain from war (by displaying art from a span of over 200 years that hold similar themes), and the other focuses on it in the sense that pain sticks with the sufferer for much longer than the event itself (by displaying art of the pains of WWI 100 years later.)
I found that the Modern Warfare article took a much less nihilistic view of portrayal of war. In their description of the contrasting portraits of leaders and soldiers, the author included Moorhouse saying that they were all “in it together, trying to make the best of an impossible situation.” It seems to focus more on artists’ impact in the sense of making war personal again rather than making war horrific again. One interesting point I noted in both articles was curators’ comments on photojournalism as war art. In the Horrors article, the curator says that if the photo causes the viewer to feel something deeply and fully, then it is art, regardless of how it was first published. The Modern Warfare article curator, however, says that photojournalism has less intent. The photographs included in that exhibition are part of an artistic project about representing the suffering of a place, whereas photojournalism simply documents an event there. I think this is an interesting topic to discuss in the seminar – does it matter how much intent was put behind the photos for them to be effective “war art”? I found the concluding paragraph of the Horrors article to be a bit confusing. After spending the article talking about the progression of depiction of war throughout history as a very general trend, it concludes by claiming that each generation of artists must reinvent the depiction. Then says “today’s artists are not alone” because past artists have shown them how to portray war through art. I don’t know, I just felt like it didn’t really fit with the rest of the article accurately. But I guess that’s more of a criticism of the article than a discussion of its contents. |
AuthorKristin Hines - Student artist at Maggie L. Walker Governor's School Archives
June 2018
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