Bye Peabody...

I just realized that I left some jewelry (nothing of value beyond the sentimental - I wasn't about to bring anything expensive to college xD) in my dorm...!!! So now I'm posting this here to document that there WAS jewelry there, and if it's GONE I'm going to be INCREDIBLY UPSET!!! My roommate had a glass mug that went missing during Thanksgiving break. I don't know if someone went in there, knocked it over, broke it, then didn't say anything, or just decided to take it over the laptop and printer sitting on her desk...! It's disturbing to say the least, and I'm very concerned. Which I shouldn't be, considering how much we're paying for this RESIDENCE.

There are cat videos on the internet...

Irrelevant, but true. 

This is the video Mozart would've directed for his piano concerto (No. 21 in C major, K.467: andante (nicknamed "Elvira Madigan")). Trust me.  

Bookbinding!!!

Nothing signifies elation more than the end of 2D folios (for this semester, anyways)! And nothing signifies the end of folios like a freshman tutorial on bookbinding!


In spite of the disorganization, the lack of time to complete the task and the constant confusion of our instructor (who couldn't always figure out what was going on, and had to run out of the room to ask another teacher if she was doing it right), I had a lot of fun learning this historic bookbinding stitch. I've never bound a book before, but I do enjoy textile arts, and therefore found the slow, methodical stitching process to be rather relaxing. I brought my little book back to my dorm, intending to add more pages and to finish the bind (we ran out of time, haaa!) at a later date. My only concern is that this process takes time to do correctly - especially for us inexperienced freshmen - which means that 2D for these remaining few weeks will be more stressful than I could ever imagine. I'M SCARED!!!!!

Lead pencil studios

This week's visitor was the leadpencilstudios team (my friends and I were getting really distracted with debating whether or not the two were a couple...why is that? Because their work wasn't interesting enough...? Or because in our society we can't see a man and a woman working together without wondering if they are an item? ...but I digress) who make fascinating wire sculptures all over the place (among other things; wire seems to be their forte).


I dunno...in spite of the impressive size of some of their installations, I'm not entirely convinced that I like their work. It seems...a little overly common; I'm not deriving a particularly moving message or statement from viewing these pieces, which (I am just realizing) I find to be an important quality for artwork. On their website it says that there will be a display here at Temple on Dec. 1. Maybe if I view some of their work in person, it will better convince me of their authenticity...

Self Portrait

CAN HAS JOB?!?!?!

This past week, several folks from the career center talked to us about their internships and how one should assert oneself in order to ascertain these positions. One student described to us her internship with one of the sculpture professors which she procured her freshman year, and how it was insanely stressful but also very rewarding to work side-by-side with an independant artist on strange new artwork. The knowledge gained from this experience was also invaluable: the student learned about goldleafing, time management, the mechanisms behind shipping artwork across the country for an exhibit, and performing to the expectations of the person in charge. Another student - and this I found most remarkable - utilized her bursting personality and interaction skills to attain a relatively prestigious internship with Hallmark. She repeatedly made her presence known, and it is astounding to me that one could be so comfortable talking to higher-ranked officials within a company. This approach served her so well that even if another candidate had timidly presented themselves with a mind-blowing portfolio, this intern would have been accepted over the other because of how pleasant it was to converse with her, to bounce ideas off of her, to receive thoughts and opinions from her,  and to feel confident that she would be a strong member of the Hallmark team. I desperately need to do this with my life: I am so soft-spoken, I doubt I give off a good first-impression beyond being a timid yet kind girl without much to say. I NEED TO ATTACK PEOPLE AAAAAARRRGGHGHGHGHG!!!!! ...attack them in a good way.

Community art project guy

Hmm, maybe I should start writing down the speakers' names...

Anyways, this guy said many awesome things (whoever he was), and although the thesis of his speech was finding a studio space (his was in the unused gym of a sunday school or something - awesome idea!), I once again focused on the description of the artist's work. He told us about several community projects he had worked on: the one featured above involved many Philadelphia citizens ranging in ages from really young to oober old. Another project involved students from a problematic middle school, and they made some amazing wood installations that I don't think most adults are capable of making. The collaborative aspect of his work was very inspiring, and he seemed to have a wonderful time working with these kids; his artwork is not only beautiful to look at, it involves a beautiful process. ...is it even his artwork anymore? Ah, orchestrator gets the credit I say. Whatever, this makes me want to do something on this theme: I really like my elementary school, and although the kids are far from being problematic, I think every child deserves lots and lots of art in their schooling experience.

Jessica Hische

...sigh...

...

...well, nothing makes me feel more awesome about my life than listening to the outrageous successes of another's...

...that was sarcasm by the way.

Okay, I'm not that down on myself, but it can be a little discouraging when one compares themself to somebody who's capable of freaking making THIS --> and who was recruited straight out of college to do work, and who appears to be perfectly happy doing all these things in their life. Yeah, all that seemingly unnatainable awesomeness aside, it was incredibly interesting to hear about the type of work she was doing her foundation year at Tyler, and the level of commitment she had to her work. Based on her oration, it seems that she pinpointed her artistic interest - lettering, etc. - relatively quickly in the game, which allowed her to focus on honing her skills in said field throughout the duration of her college years. I find this to be absolutely incredible, and as I have responded to other lectures we've been required to witness, I desperately hope to find the specific field that interests me relatively early in the program.

Back to lecturing about the artist's studio space...

(ACK!!! This saved instead of posting!!! T_T)

I don't know if I want to be lectured about studio space anymore, it's getting me stressed out. I need to figure out what I'm going to do with my life before worrying about how I'm going to do it, because that will fall into place. Aaaaaaarrrgggghhhhh...but I digress. This dude ran his studio from the basement of his grandfather's bakery, which is absolutely badass.to say the very least. But rather than getting myself caught up in the nonsensical talk about how "his studio is almost like home and he collects chairs and locks himself away for a day or more to force himself to work, blablabla", I focused on his progression through the artistic field and finding something that he actually wanted to do. I admire how he found his area of interest - woodcraft/construction - and within that field he continues to shift his focus in a constant search of new ideas and processes - from constructing segmented room installations to whittling toy car engines out of wood. He looked so happy, sharing with us his artistic adventure through life, and although I know I'm not interested in being an entirely free-lance artist, I just want to find the same enthusiasm about my life as all these people who've presented their to us.

poirates

RUN JOHNNY RUN!!! There's a Swarovski crystal store back there (this is in the Gaylord Hotel in Washington DC) with a massive rotating cut cube of sparkling glittering awesomeness on sale for only $500,000! HAHA...!!! A pirate's worst nightmare. This place was rediculously expensive - they had just opened so our school got an unbelievable deal to help "stir business" or whatever. So anyways, following the assignment, I utilized such sensitive images as an artwork from the ArtWhino exhibit in DC (featuring young urban artists from notable cities across the country), the Jeff Hamilton trio (hahahaaa they said I couldn't take a photo but I did, I did...), one of Obama's secret service manly dudes, and captain Jack Sparrow.

Crackheaded politics

Stalin with a photoshopped crackpipe - I am eternally fascinated by the incessant positivism portrayed in the propagandist imagery of such notable dictators as Stalin and Hitler. They are SO fabricated, it's absolutely astounding, so that when we were asked to add something to a pre-existing image so that its message or meaning was changed, I decided that desacrating something as periodically sacred as a photograph of Stalin smoking a pipe would have the most profound impact.

FACE!!!

For this project, we scanned our face and traced over the image using the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator. As if I wasn't pissed at AI already...

((couldn't upload JPEG because my computer is challenged in all things computer-related; will upload tomorrow on a MAC))

Doug Bucci!

This was the BEST speaker to date: Doug provided us with a very detailed and inspiring recount of his achievements and struggles through art school and his eventual art career. It took him a little while to discover that which interested him most within the educational institution - a difficult task made even more difficult by having to simultaneously provide for a wife and child - and yet Doug persevered, finding it most beneficial to be in a constant state of discomfort while making art, because if you're comfortable with what you're doing, there is nothing being developed or learned. He encouraged us to continually take risks within our work, citing the frequent alterations in material and methods he used while sculpting jewelry. Through this process, Doug progressed from an abstract jeweler without any specific motive (per se) to an inventive mind using the highly unique process of printing jewelry designed with a strong influence and message of his lifelong struggle with diabetes. And the best part of all was his telling us that life's not getting any easier from here (hahahaa! haa...*cries in the corner*)

What I find to be most admirable about Doug's work is how personal he has made it: the motif of diabetes is very "unique" (relatively speaking, and especially when it comes to high-end jewelry) and it was easy for the audience to tell that he took great pride and joy in his work. What more could we ask for? The progression from abstract modernistic jewelry designs to highly specific models of biological misshaps and ulcers and all things diabetic to an intricate line of honeycombed blood cell-shaped bracelets and necklaces...! It's quite the journey, and who knows how he'll progress from there? Apart from the inspiring progression, I simply adore how personal he has made his art, and I find myself fascinated by his use of "horrifying" lesions and other breeches in the human body as a result of diabetes, and then to use these "grotesque" images to design decorative jewelry! It boggles the mind; who would wear a brooch depicting an ulcer in relief? (somebody awesome, I'd say) I too am fascinated with biology as an art, and look forward to finding my own ways of expressing myself within the artistic discoveries to be made in the years to come.

Animating a cell

The subject that appealed most to me while browsing through the lectures was one titled "Animating a Cell" with David Bolinsky: he's a medical illustrator with a knowledge of animation, and is currently working in accordance with Harvard University to digitally express the functions and inner workings of cells with complete atomic accuracy. This is positively groundbreaking: now digital art can help us visualize that which cameras have yet to capture (due to the teensiness of molecules...), and although the project is not yet complete, the examples David displayed were mindblowing. Never before has an illustration (that I've seen on the internet anyways) so accurately expressed the complex molecular shapes of the proteins constantly working within the cell apparati; I recognized ribosomes, a golgi apparatus, vacuoles, something I believe was a synapse firing (or building a charge perhaps?), or maybe the export of neurotransmitters through the vacuole (or whatever the sac encasing them is called, I'm too lazy to look it up right now) and its binding to the cell wall at the molecular level!!! This will SIGNIFICANTLY increase our understanding of the inner functions of a cell through their visualization, and will no doubt increase a student's ability to visualize and understand these notions that are explained with such complexity in our biology textbooks. And if these originally complicated ideas of the innerworkings of cells becomes common knowledge within a student body, then there will no doubt be further strides taken in the near future towards fully understanding this complicated system we hardly know anything about!! What I find even more astounding is the role visual art plays within these advances: the visualization of a process is the easiest way for the human brain to comprehend a subject, and until technology can provide video footage at the molecular level of these processes, artistic rendering and atomically correct animation is the best alternative!

mariane!

Last week, the soft-spoken bookbinder Mariane came to talk to us about developing our interests and studio spaces. I found it incredibly interesting that she left art school thinking that she would be a photographer, and then after an "internship" out West with an elderly master book-maker with only the desire to learn how to bind her own photography book, she fell in love with the craft and has been honing her skills ever since. Her story had a resounding impact on my outlook: that at any point, in even the most insignificant situation (for Mariane, her medium of preference was discovered on a whim), the most important thing could happen to us. We could discover the most profound thing about ourselves in a situation that happened under the slightest odds imaginable. Fate is positively mindblowing, and if Mariane enjoys bookbinding as much as she leads on, then I desperately hope the same circumstances will arrive for me! Until then I will continue to explore!

Returning to her second resounding point about studio space, I don't necessarily agree with the degree of importance she places upon it. Although it is most certainly a crucial part of the artistic process...I just don't see it as something that needs to be addressed so early in our journey through the art program. More pertinent issues I'd find to be time management and guidance through the curriculum; studio space is something I don't plan to be particularly concerned about until junior or senior year, or even thereafter depending on whether or not I know what my preferred medium will be! And although Mariane makes a valid point - that building up a collection of tools pertaining to your medium over a long period of time relieves a lot of fiscal stress that purchasing everything at the same time would cause - the issue remains that we have no conclusive idea what we want to do with our lives. This lecture was...a little TOO forward-thinking for my taste...

WARNING!!!

(note: this was completed on time, I didn't upload it until today because I normally upload after computer class. It was uploaded onto my Facebook account the night before it was due - if there are any issues regarding the time of upload for this piece, its date of completion can be proven)

Candy Depew

In my authoritative opinion, this was the best speaker to date for our weekly presentation. Candy - although being a little too ego-centric for my taste - was highly inspirational for her ingenuity and well-rounded, highly accomplished artistic experiences. She spoke of apprenticeship as being a wonderful opportunity to learn new artistic techniques and to master new mediums, and instead of paying tuition for this priceless knowledge, one simply helps the instructor with their own work or installations. Through these means, Candy has become a master silkscreen artist who is also highly accomplished in the areas of sculpture and ceramic molds, prints, etc. - truly multi-media.

Labor in exchange for art skills? Sounds like a fair trade to me, if not advantageous for the apprentice! And although I was aware that practices of this nature existed, I had no idea how accesible - widespread even - they were to art students! I would have to be clinically insane not to take advantage of this opportunity at some point in my life, especially considering my own financial impairment.

Text Drawings

For last week's assignment in computer class, we were instructed to create 3 text drawings using Adobe Illustrator: 1 was to be an abstract piece; the 2nd a realistic representation of an object; the 3rd was the pictorial representation of an action or state of being. This week we were to redo one of our drawings.

Might I just say that in summary of this experience, I find Adobe Illustrator...to be...the...most...infuriating...thing...ever...mostly because it can't read my mind, which is always an annoying quality for software because then it doesn't understand that I JUST want to move this one object up to join with this other one, or I JUST want to select these three figures WITHOUT selecting everything behind them, or I JUST want to move this one object but you won't let me click on it...!!! ...but I digress.

Anyways, I suppose I should explain my thought processes to some degree: I began with the abstract piece because I had zero experience with Illustrator prior to the assigment, and I figured that playing around with the tools, fonts and mechanisms would leave me with a pretty abstract piece regardless. Two birds with one stone! And although after creating whatever...that image was...I am no Illustrator master, but at least I had a better feel for the program's general capabilities (for this piece, I really focused on moving letters/icons around, arranging them, etc). Following this, I tackled the "representation of an object" piece and decided to make a bunny head using the "little bunny foo foo" lyric text repeatedly to fill the spaces and create the outlines. I wasn't thrilled with the result because it looked rather messy and wasn't the most proficient exploration of shading with letters/text, however it provided me with additional experience to carry into the next piece! For my final creation, I chose the word "pointy" and, after much deliberation (i.e. searching for the pointiest symbol on the keyboard), decided to formulate the word and background with "^". Sharp, eh?

After viewing everyone else's work, I decided I would recreate the bunny using only letters (in Arial font because all Illustrator versions have that and I was tired of losing text moving from computer to computer...) because it seemed fun and most true to the assignment.

WELL...there it is! (haha, Amadeus quote. Anybody get it?)

Artist's studio (and death to powerpoint) - lecture response

Of all the lectures we've sat through, this one was by far the least engaging. I found this ironic considering one of the artist's underlying messages was "powerpoint is boring, so I will use this alternative presentation program to capture your interest".
My attention was far from captured. And I found the presentation - or my interpretation of the presentation at least - to be lacking in relevance or value to our artistic journey. "The artist's studio"...? Does this truly need to be explored? The studio - again, in my own opinion - should be an expression of the artist; a comfortable environment that expresses their interests and offers some degree of inspiration. If your studio does this, you're golden. But I'm not entirely sure why one would create art in a place that isn't condusive to the practice. Wherever we are making art, it's some extension of our studio.

BAUHAUS

I find myself to be largely supportive of the bauhaus approach to art education - an introduction to all foundation branches of art, and then working towards a specialization after considering all options. For not only is it a wonderful opportunity to be able to experiment with everything to be absolutely certain your specialization is the one you enjoy doing the most, each medium or category of art has its own approaches that the student will learn when taking those courses, and therefore be able to incorporate different angles of art into their work. By extension, I am also largely satisfied with the foundation program offered at Tyler: although foundation courses are tedious and highly demanding, it's wonderful to be offered a wide array of approaches and aspects of art before selecting and specializing. However, I am highly upset by the weak array of general education courses offered to satisfy our general education requirements at Tyler. I am a strong advocate of well-rounded education, and an equally strong advocate for not wasting my time and money. Having suffered through a rigorous academic program throughout my middle- and high-school years (IB program), I have already received a VERY well-rounded and meticulous education and feel as though the gen-ed classes offer me little to nothing (speaking in terms of attaining knowledge). For instance, I recently switched out of an "evolution and extinctions" class because the professor started talking about items like photosynthesis and general animal skeletal systems as an overview for things we would learn that semester. I have already passed through college-level classes in all of the core subject areas: math, science/biology, english, history...and now they're making me pay for knowledge I already have in order to obtain my degree?? There is something fundamentally wrong when your academic advisor tells you there is no way out of the gen-ed requirements, and that "at least it will be an easy 'A'".

Is it legal? - collaged music videos

The conclusory stance of the previous post: utilizing the image of somebody else in a slanderous way for monetary gain without their consent is highly inappropriate and deserving of monetary compensation. I find this especially true if the image was only slightly modified by the user: for instance, Alison's photo was minimally modified with a sexually-indicative and humiliating caption.
However, in the case of "anime music videos" and other meticulously-assembled videos combining pre-made music with snipits of pre-made networking, I find these to be perfectly legal and void of harm to the orignal video/music artists. These free-lance internet collage artists take original works and painstakingly cut and rebuild them into something truly their own without monetary gain (although internet popularity has some degree of unnamed value). These collaged music videos don't detract from the sales of the original artists. If anything, they boost their popularity by advertising the works all across the internet to millions of viewers! I myself have come across songs in personally-made music videos on YouTube that I didn't know before, found myself liking, and then proceeded to purchase them on iTunes.

If a person can take the images of other popular works of visual art, cut them up, reassemble them, and call the finished piece their own, why can't the same be done with videos and music recombined in a completely unique way?

Poor Alison...

Understandably, if a picture is posted on the web without a copyright, it becomes public property. However, I find it highly inappropriate for a company to utilize the personal photo of a minor with sexually-indicative captions for monetary gain. It is my firm belief that Virgin Moblie (Australia) is in the wrong for having taken the photo of the young teenager Alison without any sort of authorization or parental consent.
What if the same caption was applied to the image and it was posted somewhere popularly viewed on the internet by an anonymous body who didn’t gain any monetary surpluses? I wouldn’t have the same reservations…although internet popularity becomes another object of value. I find that the best-case scenario would be if someone were to use the photo for a reason largely void of gain (ex: a collage) without slandering or humiliating the subject in a public place.
Were I Alison, I too would be pressing for monetary compensation. Is this approach ethical; does it pose a true solution to the problem? With the value placed in money, I’d say so: if Virgin Mobile (Australia) were fined a sizeable amount for their ignorant use of internet images (the ignorance being a failure to seek out undoubted permission to use said image), it would raise a warning to all other companies (etc.) that there are still lines to be crossed when dealing with items posted in public domains on the internet.

Artifacts and sketches from Chinatown

View all

Get your own

Adventure to Chinatown

View all

Get your own

Exploring Philadelphia - chinatown edition

Well, I grew up and have always lived in the suburbs of Wilmington, DE. We have a section of I-95 running in close proximity to our neighborhood, and there's the city of Wilmington right closeby...that's it, the rest is very plain and inaccessible by foot. The nearest store is over a mile from my house, and there aren't any sidewalks so driving is the safest option. Buses hardly ever run through our neighborhoods; I've always been highly dependent on my parents for transportation to, well, anywhere.

SO, this whole independence thing and lack of cars/parents driving said cars is incredibly, INCREDIBLY new to me. I gathered a couple new friends - Marilyn, Kirana and Marilyn's boyfriend Carlos - and coerced them into accompanying me to chinatown. We took the broad street subway to the vine-race station (they had to explain to me how to use the day pass: at first, I tried swiping it without activating it first. It was soooo confusing) and then walked the three or four blocks down race street to the Chinatown area. Surprisingly, I was the navigator! Me! An out-of-state girl who's not only directionally challenged: I completely lack common sense and am a horrible leader. By some miraculous stroke of luck, I led our party there and back without incident. AMAZING!!!

While in Chinatown, we did some light shopping and stopped for lunch at a corner restaurant that served general Chinese and Vietnamese dishes. First, we jumped into a cool little cafe on race street that serves bubble tea in adorable Hello Kitty-print disposable cups! At a 99 cents store (I don't think the store owner understands the concept of "99 cents", because half the items in there were over $10 O_O), Marilyn and I picked up some delicious red bean mochi while Kirana selected a bag of dried fish sticks. They had some seriously awesome and exotic packaged food at astoundingly cheap prices: pickled ginger, ginger candy, dried pickled plums, those fruit-filled marshmallow things, dried sardines, etc. etc. Afterwards I insisted on stopping at a produce store in search of canned lychee nuts, because they're delicious and food stores NEVER have them. But I digress. Of course, being a group composed of mostly girls, we stopped at the "Sanrio" store right down the way from friendship gate, although we refrained from purchasing anything because the prices at this particular shop are nonsensically high. Finally, we made a stop at one of the many Chinese bakeries in the area where I picked up a couple bean buns and almond buns (I don't think anyone else followed suit), and then we made our way back to the subway, arms laden with bags.

Finding our way back into the subway system was another adventure entirely. We didn't realize the vine-race station was only an exit, and it took us about an hour of interrogating passers-by and wandering back towards the Ben Franklin building that the only accesspoint was in that direction. GRAH it was infuriating. And THEN, while we were waiting for the train, two people started fist-fighting several yards to our left! This attracted a sizeable crowd of onlookers, and even a Septa worker stopped to watch for a second before wandering off again, and just as the punches were gaining accuracy, the train made its noisy entrance and dispersed the crowd - even the fighters.

I refuse to ever ride the subway alone. EVER.