Pieces and Reflections:
(Process and Portfolio)
Preliminary information:
I've just joined this Semester, so I only have 4 pieces, rather than the normative 8.
My main theme is related to comedy.
Suhaib ate my glue, Allah won't rest until he's punished.
So the common theme between all my pieces is comedy... and not he regular definition of comedy. It's not really supposed to make anybody laugh, it's just supposed to be a piece of art orchestrated by ironic elements. I got inspired by Gustave Dore, an artist who usually paints or does carved out illustrations, and he made the artwork for Dante's Inferno almost 3 centuries ago. In Canto XXIII, Dore carved an image of Dante and Vergile investigating the people trapped in the ice, and what fascinated me was a use of negative space that faded above Dante and Vergile in the image, slowly turning into the blackness. It helped me realize that the setting of the painting was in a cave, and the gradient used with the bright grey turning to black has such a moving element to it; it convinced me to try and emulate it somehow. I ascertained that the best way to do my influence justice was through photography, rather than copying everything Dore did verbatim. I took a photograph of me playing an instrument in the dark, and I had the bright lights wrapped around myself so the gradient of the image would center towards the middle, and slowly turn into negative space. My mom does photography, but unfortunately I'm not my mother, so photography was new for me to explore.
This is a pastel drawing I did while listening to Captain Beefheart... personally I think the context is in-and-of-itself the meaning, but I should probably elaborate. The whole point of this pastel piece is for me to try something new, but I had to have an idea or two for how to formulate a meaning behind doing this. So throughout my process of trying to use pastel, I listened to Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. It's complicated, and goofy?
It's complicated and goofy music, and it helped me make a very idiosyncratic piece of artwork. The mountains are mirrorred the sunset, with a weird lava-like river inbetween both parts of the image. This by far was the most time-consuming of my artwork, and I have no regrets trying something new. Of course, I would reconsider my choice in soundtrack.
I wanted to experiment with pop-up art, because I found out that engineers use pop-up models to create visual representations of what something looks like, and this inspired me to try it out on my own. I don't really want to be an engineer when I grow up (sounds like a lame job), but I like trying to integrate other disciplines into what I do artistically. This will help me focus on trying to have lots of texture, with an intentional LACK of unity in my work; honestly, there's no other way I'd have it.
I wanted to have some influence of comedy in this work, and I did... but it wasn't what I had expected. I wanted my friends Dylan, Caitlin, and David to help construct my popup art in a "funky" way, which wasn't really humorous or ironic at all, so instead they made some coodie catchers with SLIGHTLY inappropriate fortunes in them as their SHARED EFFORT? This actually worked out better in my opinion, because it was actually really cool and humorous. Though, if it was something I'd do again, I would probably mandate tyrannical control over them.
While this wasn't the piece that I spent the most time on, I was certainly the most effort. Unfortunately, I couldn't stop myself from being influenced by Gustave Dore again (yes it is a scapegoat to use the same influence more than once), but I wasn't influenced by the same artwork, and certaintly not for the same reason. At the end of Dante's Inferno, Dore painted the scene of Dante and his lifelong love gazing into the celestial rose; it is one of the most beautiful painting's I've ever seen, EVEN looking at it through a picture on the internet. Unlike most of his paintings, where it's dark and has gradation in one place, the gradation is spread out. The texture is also very mecurial, which is something I wanted to try and emulate. If you made a graph with all the points of where on the painting the most dark spots are, and where on the painting the most linear lines are, the graph would look VERY odd. There's actually a physical principle called Chaos, where every linear cause has a random effect, and it makes a trend where the graph looks butterfly'ish (unfortunately some movies and mainstream stuff made "the butterfly effect" seem important, but it really doesn't mean much of anything).
I went home and got the top of a box from my storage room, a construction pencil, and some oranges. I sketched out what I was going to draw, and then drew it with the construction pencil on the top of the box, so that the weird semi-pores seeping into the box would obfuscate straight lines. I was trying to illustrate a completely chaotic scene (not listening to Captain Beefheart, but whatever), and having the same mecurial gradiant and texture Dore was able to accomplish in his work. After getting the illustration done, I went back in with 1300 scotch weld glue and put on some orange peels onto the piece to add a 3 dimensional element, and I'm not sure why, but I don't really regret the decision...
If I could do anything over, it's probably the orange peels.