Friday, November 18, 2011

New sculpture

   So it has been a little bit since I've posted pictures of what I'm working, so I thought I'd do that now.   This is a picture of a fellow student wearing a piece I made.  The piece, though small represents one of my new concepts.  (New as in this year.)  It is part animal in shape, and part armor.  This ambiguous-ness between technology and nature is a common theme for me.
   The next piece can be looked at as ribs or spines, or even an insect.  Each steel rod was hammered to shape and then welded to the steel base. There is this progressive curve created through the shape of the ribs.  Its about 6 feet in length and about 2 feet tall.  This is my first welding project here at school and has given me a fair amount of practice.  I engineered the piece to have the welds out of view in case they were sloppy, as well as to remove the construction of the piece from the context of the work.  This piece is still being worked on, though the last few things are finishing touches.

   This thing hanging on my wall is a piece made of tape and wooden dowel rods.  Again exploring line as a way to create movement and progression within a piece, but adding ideas of cellular or plant-like growth to it.  I also wanted to make something outside of metal, and this is very transportable and does not require the same stamina and energy to work on as the steel work.  I am planning to fill the entire studio wall with this, and have been spyed at coffee shops and riding shotgun to Los Angeles while working on this in my lap.  I am making about a yard at a time.  This represents about 5 yards.  The spacing between the dowel rods varies but the "height" remains constant.  I'd like to take the finished version of this and do some guerrilla photographs at a corporate building lobby, maybe a bridge or piece of architecture. 
   So that's what is going on in my studio.  I am nearing the end of my first semester at Claremont and am planning on utilizing winter break as a time for major production in the studio, along with reading a lot.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Grant Funded!

Good News Everyone!  My research/reading group proposal was approved and is now grant supported.  In case you missed that post, its called Methods Of Innovation: The Process of Gaining Inspiration From the Other Side (a few entries back).  Please contact me if you are interested in attending.  Even if you are not a CGU student, I am interested in getting representation from different fields to provide balance to the group (writers, actors, dancers, musicians, historians, philosophers, physicists, anyone in biological/medical/chemical sciences, architecture, engineering, mathematics, and anyone with proficiency in any other subject.  I am also seeking special guest speakers, suggestions on books, articles, film clips, etc. that might inspire people.  I can send you the full syllabus to review.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Art All Stars

I got to meet one of the biggest names in contemporary painting this past weekend.  CHUCK CLOSE!!!  I went with some friends to an opening for him at Blum & Poe, the first in a while in the LA area. I got to tell him a story about being yelled at by security guards at the National Gallery in DC, when trying to inspect one of his paintings.  The painting was Fannie, and its a portrait of an old woman made entirely of thumbprints.  I was 14 or so, and was leaning in to see this wrinkle in her clothes.  He told me that happens to him a lot.  I went with a few school friends and respective spouses who shot a picture of us with him.  We were all gushing, because we are art students and have all studied painting.  That's me on the left, with Chuck in the middle, Kristen, and Stephanie on the far right.  The painting behind him is one of his self portraits.  For those of you who don't know his work, Close has a rare condition called face blindness, where he can't recognize faces.  He started painting portraits of people using a grid system to blow their faces up to larger-than-life size as a way to help him remember the faces.  He's famous for the size of the paintings, as well as this 1970's aesthetic of the portraits.  In another room of the gallery there were some paint on paper pieces done with colored dots.  He layered the colored dots with smaller one of contrasting colors to really help push the effect: a newspaper-print looking painting.