This past week and a half I made many Halloween costumes, both for myself and for friends. Though it was a lot of stuff going on at once, I found it making the actual costumes was a great escape from the craziness. I also re-discovered my talent at hot glue (I am officially a Hot Glue Master after this past week haha). Here are the costumes I ended up creating!

Starbucks

My friends PB&J Costumes (it was supposed to be a group effort but they gave up last minute)

I also was in charge of coordinating the Halloween costumes at work for our annual school Halloween celebration, as well as help out with decorations. Of course, as an art teacher I had to do something artsy and decided to make us all crayons.

I think that the costume designing this past week and a half was actually a really nice way of stepping away from my current series. I find that the more I do one continuous thing, the less inspired I get and I can find myself frustrated with what I am doing. I can get bored very easily so I always try to keep busy with different things. These all served as a good, and different, way of creating something and continuing art-making, but in a different way than I have typically considered in the past.  I had to some creative thinking and had a great time doing it, and was extremely happy with everyone’s reactions to all of the costumes.  Now that I spent some time away from anxiety painting series, I have some more ideas about how to move forward and try out some different things with it. I look forward to see how I will move forward!

It was interesting to read of the process involved in actually creating a comic as Sousanis described it. I was particularly interested in how he gained inspiration from a conversation he once had with his father.  Hearing about his experience and using a past conversation as a base on his art-making shows how ideas can develop and manifest into a visual form over time. What may seem inconsequential actually has all the possibilities of being an influential piece of inspiration in our own art-making- we just need to stay aware of such things and events.

These readings lead me to think more about comics as a resource in learning. I feel that often times they are overlooked as not something that can be academic and teach much. But the use of imagery is an extremely interesting approach and can at times help convey an idea better than words can. One of my favorite examples of utilizing comics as an educational resource is “Maus”by Art Spiegelman. It is a comic that depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor during WWII. The imagery of the comic is key to telling the story andhaving a comic format itself helps engage readers who otherwise may not be interested in reading such a story.

Comics use imagery as a visual language that anyone is able to read and decipher.  The very making of comics is all about the visuals.  As Sousanis describes it, there is an “attention to the size, shape, and location of the panels on the page – where they are and what they’re next to – really a consideration of the entire composition as a whole experience”. This could not be more true. For many years, I worked at an art camp in which cartooning was a given subject for the campers. In that, the students learned about designing their own comics and how to set up a panel that convey information successfully.  They learned how the visuals of a comic alone can tell a story and the overall power of imagery.  It also taught them, similar to Sousanis’ process, how to sketch out their ideas beforehand and let them develop as they are working.

I also found the timing of this reading to be interesting  as just this past week, I was reading Carpenter and Tavin’s graphic depiction of the reconceptualization of art education (2010. “Drawing (past, present, and future) together: a (graphic) look at the reconceptualization of art education”. Studies in Art Education, Vol. 51, No. 4., pp. 327-352).  While it was a topic that I was familiar with, the inclusion of imagery and visuals made it all the more interesting and engaging.  The power of imagery is really extraordinary and there are time that with the current push for academic writing in schools, I forget just important and influential images can be.

I completed my paintings for this week and really like how they turned out. It was a great experience to reflect on my feelings and how I can depict them. It also leads to some interesting questions of how the viewer can interpret the image. For example, when looking at the red painting from Wednesday, one of my friends asked if I was angry while a family member said that I was energetic/passionate.

One thing I really like is how I had the black ebb out on the grey painting (Thursday). Perhaps I will create the more with this method- it more properly shows how the feeling of anxiety creeps in.

I’m continuing to do my emotion/anxiety paintings as a reaction to how I feel when I get home from work. I’m working on a smaller scale right now (fitting 5 days ono one 16×20 canvas). I definitely like working bigger with these types of images as it really lets me work more with my arm movements, but I really like how the composition is turning out!

In the excerpt from “The Creative Habit” by Twyla Tharp, Tharp goes into detail into describing scratching.  As she describes it, scratching can appear to be appropriating at first, but upon looking closer, it is a vital part of our creative process. Tharp brings up a lot of ways that we already, and unknowingly, utilize scratching in creating our work now.  I especially appreciate the  idea that inspiration comes from everywhere around us. Personally, I am constantly using my surroundings, conversations, and experiences, both past and present, in my art-making and consider those influences to be vital.

Also in the article, Tharp begins to explain how we must utilize small ideas to create big ideas.  This issue itself confused me a little bit, particularly as she went on to describe big ideas as being “meaningless” and ultimately all consuming of what she is doing. However, I  find big ideas to be not so meaningless. While I do agree with Tharp that little ideas play a large part in the existence of big ideas, I do not necessarily means that you have to only focus on the little ideas when scratching.  We should not focus on only thinking about little ideas, but allow ourselves the exploration of making connects between big ideas and little ideas. To limit ourselves in a way of thinking in which big ideas themselves are meaningless, we do not allow for opportunity to learn and make such connections. Whether it is through putting little ideas together to create a big idea, or having a big idea and recognizing the little ideas that come to play in it, both actions are vitally important.

Furthermore, Tharp claims that we should never scratch at the same place.  While this idea may seem helpful in terms of trying to expand our ideas, I ultimately disagree with it.  Again, this brings up the ideas of limitations.  To take away something that has inspired us before ultimately limits our inspiration.  Growth is the key to continuing to create new ideas and if we prevent ourselves from going back to something to continue to learn and re-adjust our knowledge, we cannot really grow our own knowledge but rather can be stuck on one idea.

So this week was a really good one for my art-history loving self. We had two days off from school this week, one one of which I went up to the Thomas Cole House in Catskill, NY.  It was really cool to get to go to the home and studio of the founder of the Hudson River School of painting. To be honest, I really only got to learn about this art movement and the artists involved in it until my last year of undergrad.  I had initially just thought they were boring landscape paintings, but had the chance to really learn about how the development of the style was tied to the social/cultural beliefs at the time and changed with the development of science.

The Thomas Cole House itself has a variety of art works done by him and other artists from his time, including some small pieces from his student Frederic Church (honestly one of my favorite painters ever). In one room, it showed different pieces of Cole from how he developed and created the works. One of my favorite works was actually a large  study Cole did similar to a color wheel, entitled “Diagram of Kontrasts”.

It was really cool to see the materials that artists had to use to create their paints at the time. The colors here included raw umber, burnt sienna, naples yellow, vermillion, carbon black, and white chalk.

There was also a contemporary artist on display named Jason Middlebrook. His work reminded me a lot of some of Lindsay B’s work with the lines and designs he used. Also, his choice to utilize natural resources (in this case wood) reminded me also of some of Brette’s ideas she is dealing with in terms of mandmade things interfering with nature.

I really liked looking closer in at the picture and seeing how individual sections of the piece looked by themselves. I think I may like this better than the rest of the picture. Maybe I will try to create a piece similar to just this section.

After making the work above, I wanted to continue utilizing the same color blending technique and use of black in the center and created another one similar to it, but related to my emotions on the day I made it.

I feel like this one is a lot calmer than the previous one I did. The black is more contained and the colors overall ended up being softer. I am interested in trying to make more pieces like this in response to my feelings everyday, though also trying out different mediums.

I just saw this artist on Facebook and thought his art was really in interesting and connected to the art that I was playing with using letters/language. He’s from Nigeria and uses the indigenous symbols of Nsibidi.

https://www.facebook.com/thisisinsiderart/videos

Burton discusses the different phases/steps of development in children and how each step affects their art-making. One particular point I found most important is her emphasis on fostering student’s expression of personal experience with their own imagination.  By doing so, art could remain a vital part of the student’s education and life. Of course, with the current push for standardized-learning, it can sometimes seem impossible to actually do so. In this way, I feel that it is just important to push for adults to consider the freedom of art-making and show them how art-making does not have to necessarily follow specific rules and regulations, but instead can allow for great opportunities through the freedom of art-making.

For my own artistic response to Burton, I went back to some of my own artwork growing up and sought to re-create it. Though I knew it would be difficult, it was a lot harder than I initially thought it would be.  Especially in the beginning, I was having constant doubts in my head and having feelings of second-guessing, though as it went on, I grew more comfortable. I’d like to say right now that though I understand many people have issue with doing direct copies/replicas of other artworks, I find that doing direct copies actually can provide many good learning opportunities, especially when it comes to figuring out specific art-making techniques originally utilized. Many times as I was working, I stopped and thought about the logic behind how the originally image was made and contemplated on what my original thought process may have been. I found the whole process very reflective and allowed me to also consider how I can often feel limited by myself when I am making art.

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a life time to paint like a child”- Pablo Picasso