I added a metallic wash over areas of this to make it appear to be glowing in areas. I added my douglas fur trees as another layer, and I plan on adding more tonight, this was from last work before I went to Virginia to see my aunt. I will be posting about my experience with a gem mine and how I am going to incorporate it into my next ball point pen drawing.
Jennifer Brannigan
Graduate Studio Work
Spring 2017
As I’ve started to work on my practice through my fall semester some things have changed since the summer. For example, during the summer I geared my work towards the environment and our impact on nature. Specifically endangered birds and their diminishing numbers due to human progression and the pollution of water. As I have started to work this fall and spring I have looked to myself to make my work more personal to my experience as an educator, artist, and woman. I’ve always created settings that I thought were parallel to our own, with natural blues, greens, and browns, and layered images of pine trees and other natural and man-made occurrences. However, I have now looked at the land I now own as a main source of inspiration. Working hard for something that you and your partner have strived for often takes up a lot of mind space. As I am working, I think about where I am in my life and what’s important, in my opinion, to share.
Currently I am still very much interested in nature and our impact on it. I recently watched the documentary minimalism and how we really don’t need all of the things that we buy or consume. It started to make me question my artwork in relation to how I live my life. Am I creating worlds or fantasies that reflect what I want from my own personal life? I’m still trying to figure this out. I am excited to start working on my own piece of land and living holistically. My partner and I have decided, before anything else that we will start a garden to sustain ourselves that best way that we can. As I’ve started to work more on the property, I have thought about what influenced me to get to where I am today. What is important to me? Why is it important? I have been always been interested in my environment and I have now started to believe that all of the trees, mostly douglas furs, in my work have been influenced by my child hood. My childhood home had 32 pine trees that lined our front yard, I would wake up to them every morning, and I have always been attracted to how they look. It reminds me of some sort of enchanted forest and I’m proud that it’s mine. When I was a child I was always fascinated by the fantastical, and things that didn’t exist. I still am today. My work is a combination of what I see on my property, and creating layers upon layers to make each work feel dream like or other worldly.
I have been looking at artists that create site-specific work in an abstract way. I continue to look at Julie Mehretu, from the summer and I have recently found contemporary artist Heather Day, along with Katie Pumphrey and Yellena James. All of which have similar ideas or color components that make them visually and conceptually pleasing to me. I’ve been finding that creating on a daily basis, even on commission has put me in the same mindset of these ladies. Meaning, I am working on what is around me in a visual response that might be farther away from reality than I would have initially done. For the spring I have been investigating more artist, and the one that has impacted my work the most has been Emil Ferris and her groundbreaking graphic novel “My Favorite Things Are Monsters”. She uses all ballpoint pen to create really beautiful and layered drawings of art that you cannot look away from. I have started to also use ball point pen as it layers better under the washes of ink than charcoal or graphite would. It also creates really intricate drawings that don’t smudge or move.
As I move forward, I need to create art work either on site, or where ever I am in order to find out what I need to pursue, As I have mentioned earlier I recently watched the Minimalist Documentary and it impacted me in a way that I didn’t expect. I am curious about my own American dream and living in a way that reduces my carbon footprint, along with questions about why we live the way that we do. I will have to further my research in order to get a good grasp on all that I am thinking about currently.
Right now I am exploring what I have mentioned above, I unfortunately have not been able to make a larger piece of work about this, as much as I have dreamt about these ideas. It is something that will probably manifest itself naturally in my work. Working through paint, inks, and watercolor I am planning on moving my work in a more personal direction. I have looked at artist’s such as Heather Day to further my idea of documenting my life through a visual and abstract way. I am planning on using the land that I own, along with my life as an art educator to further this with extensions the real world with parallel components through out.
Through out the spring semester I have been working on layered ink washed art works that I work on simultaneously. My first paintings were small and I took a lot of pictures and chose areas that I thought would make cohesive compositions. I looked at the colors of the photo and exaggerated them with the ink washes. I even used metallics to add layers of dimension and a hazy or dream life quality to them. I uses the numbers that were meaningful to the property i.e geological coordinates, acreage, lot number etc. I found that is gave some of the works an industrial feel. This often happens when humans get involved in things, and I’m not sure if I will use them again as I move forward.
The second set of paintings were a little larger, and I found that I was making them too muddy by adding too much information to them. However, I did gather a lot of ideas to put into future art works. For one, I found that close up images or abstracted India ink trees work well visually, and it is something that is so predominate on the property that it need to be kept. No matter the time of day, some of the trees are always in the dark. The property was is an old Christmas tree farm, and a lot of the trees are close together. This also leads to really amazing little paths that look like little alley ways to new worlds. I also found that I need to either add the unorganized splatter, or the India ink, but not both together. Compositionally it looks too dark and over whelming.
The last painting that I’ve done I went larger and in a different direction. I started to use ball point pen to make the drawings that I was doing darker, more layered. It also helped that it didn’t smudge or disappear when I layered the ink over it. For the future, I am going to use more detailed drawings that almost come across as abstract, within my paintings. This brings the viewer into the work in a way that the washes didn’t. It slows down the eye and unlike the washes that would come across flat at times. As I move forward with my work, I’m going to make larger works that incorporate ideas from the property, detailed ball point pen drawings, and abstractions that are in references to what I experience in my life. I am going to use larger pieces of paper and abstract the drawing even more.
Today was the day of my field trip. The kids were really excited and they got to see some really awesome things. I have been so consumed by the hreb stuff and it was nice to see it pay off, and be approved the day before we went. I had the students photograph and email the pictures to me. I’m going to start graphing and noting what they photograph, and tomorrow, we are going to start to draw from these images. We were even given pieces of palette to draw on. The Green Palette wants them back to make a communal art piece with them. So far things, are going well. I’m busy, but I’m excited to start logging data and get to the finish line. Here are some images that the kids took. They liked both business’s, but I think they got different things from both. 
This week, I added a few layers of washes to my pine cone, This upcoming week im going to layer more organic, and some india ink trees on top, or branches. I’m not sure if I like the harsh breaks in color. 
Jennifer Brannigan
3/30/17
Data Visualization
For this first data visualization, I decided to map visually my students understanding to the key concepts of two-point perspective and its key components. As a wrap up activity, I asked students to chart where they thought they might be in each category. The first category was vanishing points and the midway, i.e finding the center to where everything begins to pull back into space and to one of the vanishing points, the second was placing objects in a two dimensional space, and the third was the horizon line. For these three categories, students received three post-it notes. They were asked to initial the back, so that it would stay anonymous. Once they did this, they were asked to one post-it note under each category. They had three options for this also. The first- I understand this 100 percent, the second- I understand some of this, 75 percent, and the third- I really don’t understand this at all, less than 50 percent. Students charted themselves on their own personal bias, and they were asked to be honest so that I could better help them.
Once students mapped their post-it notes, I took them down section by section and listed their names so that I could see where everyone was feeling confident, or not understanding what we had been doing. This was for my own personal data collection and use, and it helped me better understand the key concepts that I had to re-teach for the next couple days.
For the actual visualization, I started with one cerulean blue wash. Blue being clarity, and my presence in the classroom. I originally put two colored washes, but didn’t plan of planning things out as far as background color in connection to what I actually graphed and collected in terms of data.On top of these ink washes, I started to make a different rectangular marks for each one of the sections. After I completed these marks, I went back and created dots around these marks. Each dot represents the number or class that each student is on. For example, one ring= freshman, four=senior.
With this visualization, I was able to see that my sophomores, except for one student all understood the three concepts at 100 percent. Which tells me that they way that I teach, or the way that they understand what I am teaching are almost perfectly aligned. My freshman were mostly in the 100 percent to 75 percent range. I had only two students under “ placing objects in a two dimensional space” say that they didn’t understand this concept at all. One student has a 504 plan, and the other has an IEP.
Although I’ve been really overwhelmed with HREB stuff and getting all of my paper work done for my field trip I still really enjoyed doing this first layer. It was really time consuming, but totally worth it. I was checking out all of the different pine cones on our property and thought that making a large cropped version of one would be a little different than the landscapes that I had been doing. This is done entirely with ball point pens. One and a half of them to be exact.
Mentions the colors in their art work as a positive 1111111
Mentions their content as a positive 11111111111
Mentions drawing as a positive11111
Mentions the washes or painting as a negative 1111111111
Mentions everything as a negative 1
Mentions drawing as a positive11
Mentions fixing certain components 11111111111
The tallying above is from a written assignment that I asked my students to work on this week. This is right after we started to get into our Julie Mehretu inspired art works. Students were asked to pick a place, and abstract that place with layered drawings, light washed of acrylic paint and finally adding details back in. I asked student to write about five sentences for the following prompts 1) Write about all the positives that you have been seeing in this work, what have you enjoyed or liked about your work this far. 2) Write about all of the negatives that you have been experiencing within this work. Once I had all of the students work that were in class that day, I started to read through them. I took notes of the commonalities that I was seeing and after I made the categories that are above. I found that students listed about fixing things also, which was not asked from them.
For my corresponding visualization, I tried to make it more concrete than last time. I decided to use objects that looked like air molecules. I thought about how we are all breathing and moving constantly and that the only thing that is similar to all of the students places that they picked, was air. We all need to breath. I made the molecules larger if there were more tally’s that were in connection to that idea. I then, colored all of the positive molecules bright colors, and all of the negative colors dark. This way I could, and the viewer could, make connections to what was the most popular theme for both and whether or not it was a negative or positive response. All of the red circles are freshman responses and all of the blue circles are sophomore response. Unfortunately my senior has been out for about a week and hasn’t been back. On the paper I also placed all the positive responses on the bottom and all the negative on the top. I tried not to leave anything up to chance so it congruent to the data I collected.
This project is also in connection with my literature topics that I have been exploring this entire time. I am looking at visual culture impacts on students and their responses to these ideas. Although it is not present in this data set, it is present in the artwork that students are completing in class. Community and place is a large portion of everything that I have been doing and is present in the research that I have been collections and the literature review in which I have gathered all my information to help aid this project.
I fell in love with her illustrations after a co-worker showed me her new and first graphic novel “My Favorite Thing is Monsters”. She uses all ballpoint pen and her work is dynamic, rich with contrast and color. One of my favorite things about this is that all of the pages are scanned from a spiral notebook where she drew all of them out. As if she was documenting all of this in real town as she was in Chicago. As I have been working on slowing down my work and adding more layers I decided to try ball point and I’m really enjoying it. 
So I’ve started to explore the possibilities of using ball-point pen in my work. I was inspired by Emil Ferris, who is also my second mentor artist. A little out of the ordinary, in fine art, but I love how the pen layers with the inks. 
This guy is amazing, he talked a lot about AI and it’s impact on the future development of the world. Definitely worth watching!
