Catherine




 * Concentration 3: __Ambition__**



//In the final quarter you will be focusing primarily on making sure everything gets done. This quarter may be your last chance to really push your understanding of your project. You now know what you are doing and have developed some expertise in materials, techniques, and ideas. What are you attempting that is more ambitious than anything else you have completed thus far? Is it more intricate, larger scale, more images, deeper idea, etc. How have you pushed your project beyond its current state?//

This quarter I really worked on experimentation and finishing up my unfinished work. I think the most exciting thing I've done was a transfer print on fabric. I'm going to try turning that into a larger piece. I've nearly completed my international piece, and have started enough pieces to bring my total to eleven pieces so far.


 * Concentration 2: __Evolution__**



//How has your project evolved from its beginning stages? What did you change deliberately? What has changed naturally as you got a better understanding of what you are trying to accomplish?//

After doing the contemporary artist research project and readng about Robert Rauschenberg, whos work has inspired many of my pieces, I decided to investigate transfer printing as a new form of collage. I like the unpredictability and "rough around the edges" look acheived through the transfer prints I've been doing with gloss medium. I think it adds depth to the pieces that would otherwise just seem like collage. On my first piece for this quarter, I enlarged a photograph from the old yearbook that I've been using, and tinted it pink using photoshop. I then transferred the image to a piece of wood. I had no idea how it would turn out, and I was pleasantly surprised. I can vary the intensity of the image by choosing how much of the paper to rub off; with all the paper gone, I get a subtle pink image, but with some of the white remaining I can get a more prominent image. In my second piece I've been experimenting somewhat with what types of paper to use as well as transferring on top of another transfer. As it turns out, the cheaper paper tends to make clearer prints, probably because the fancy glossy pages of National Geographic leave some sort of residue behind that clouds the final images. It's nice to explore these things, though, because they can help me add variety to my work. Transferring on other transfers is also really cool to do, especially if it's a black-and-white image on top of a colored one. I'm going to look into doing more with that on my next piece. After my comments from last quarter, I tried to create a more specific center for my pieces. In my second piece, I'm using images of children from around the world to demonstrate the experience of learning that not everyone has a life like your own, and the loss of inocence associated with learning about poverty, disease, strife, and other problems. I definitely feel like it's getting easier to come up with ideas for new pieces, and I have some crazy ideas planned for the next quarter.


 * Concentration 1: __Generation__**

//Generating something is different from creating it out of thin air. It implies that something needs to be built up over time in order to reach a certain level. How have you gone about generating this project ? What has proved challenging about your materials/ idea/ sources that you had not anticipated? What have you learned that you will take with you into the second Quarter?//

I've mostly been working with an old yearbook that I bought, cutting out pictures and collaging them on boards, working in spots of color. I also bought a colored-in coloring book, which is incredible, and I've been using that some but just for collage. I think I'd like to use the coloring book aspect in some of my next works, and I'm going to visit my cousins next weekend so I might bring a coloring book with me to see if my five-year-old cousin can give me some more material to work with.I've been thinking a lot about various elements of not just childhood, but how we view it and how our memories of it change as we grow older. In my first piece I was playing with how we remember childhood, and I used photographs from the yearbook along with light blue and green paint. I used black and white pictures to represent nostalgia and looking back, and the only color picture I used was one of the senior class celebrating, and I wanted the color pictures to represent the present. The pictures were of people of varying ages, because I wanted to show all stages of youth. This piece was sort of an illustration of what I've been feeling during senior year--how I look back at the days on the playground, the middle school dances, and so on. I want the viewer to see the pictures and draw from their own experiences and reflections on their growth and progression through life, most notably school. In my unfinished second piece, I went off the rhyme, "Sugar and spice and everything nice, / that's what little girls are made of. / Snips and snails and puppy dog tails, / that's what little boys are made of." I'm trying to explore the differences between girls and boys and how those perceived differences change with age. For example--in early elementary school, the opposite gender has "cooties" and then in middle school lots of girls go "boy-crazy," etc. I painted a snail (really just the outline for now) on there because, well, sugar, spice, everything nice, and snips and puppy dog tails are all hard to portray. I was using lots of yearbook portrait pictures and using blue and pink - the traditional boy and girl colors - to differentiate between boys and girls. I'm not sure what I want to do next on this piece, so I might put it aside for a while. In my third piece I was exploring perceptions of nature--a more narrow forcus than the other pieces. When I was very yough, I loved digging for worms, playing with roly polies, and all sorts of bugs, but then I saw that it wasn't "normal" for girls to not be afraid of bugs so I pretended I was afraid of them, and now I actually hate insects. So I'm playing with that as well as the perception and portrayal of bugs for little kids. Like how ands and spiders and butterflies are often portrayed as colorful and cartoony with cute little faces. In this next quarter I'm really going to try and explore other ways of working, although I plan on sticking with collage/mixed media, but I want to start using objects and not just pictures, and I want to make sure not all of my work looks the same.


 * Digital Project**



//What aspects of working in Photoshop did you find helpful while working on these pieces? What do you like more about working with physical materials? How can you make use of the program in designing your conentration?//

Definitely the best part about Photoshop is the ability to go back and change something. Something else I enjoyed was how I could save multiple versions of my piece. I feel like I have more control in a sense with physical materials, and I like the unpredictability of them--like you'll never know just how paint will drip. I think I could really use Photoshop in my concentration since I'm working alot with photographs. In fact, I might use it later if I decide to use straight photography in my concentration.


 * Embracing Chaos**



//How would you describe the purpose of this project? What could you take from it to help you with future work? How would you describe what happened on your individual piece throughout the stages, and what enabled you to bring it all together in the end?//

I think the aim of this project was to distinguish our artwork from the background we were working on, and not to let that take over. I think it was a good way to teach us how to deal with the unexpected, like if later on someone acidentally spills paint on one of our pieces, it could actually be really beneficial to our piece. I also think this was very much about making our work dominant, even though it was in most cases the simplest part of the piece. I'm DEFINITELY not finished with my piece, and I have lots of ideas for it, but I have a hard time articulating them. I want to stitch the panels together with probably some sort of thick orange thread, or maybe some leather string could be cool. My piece sort of has an Indian (not Native American, the actual country)/ethnic vibe, so I want to find a way to pull parts of the backround pattern forward, either using more transparent color or something else. I also might want to add more detail, like maybe painting in some of the flowers from the background. I really enjoyed making this piece, and I want to make it really good, so I'm definitely going to work on it over Christmas break, because it could end up being my favorite piece of this semester, and maybe I can carry over some of the process I used for it into my concentration pieces.


 * 3-Layer Space**



//How would you describe the strategy we used for this project? What did it enable you to accomplish in your work that you would not have been able to do without this structure? What is simple, and what is complex? I want an in depth response to how the idea of strategy is essential to executing a successful concentration. What strategies could you come up with and what could they enable you to accomplish?//

This project made us think very concretely about the role of foreground, middle ground, and background in composition. By forcing us to work in terms of three separate layers of space it made me think about how to create a unified scene while keeping it in separate strata of activity. I chose to use five layers instead of three, with the middle two layers (SCUBA Steve - that's his name - and the octopus) interacting to create a dynamic for the piece. I used a palette knife loaded with various amounts of yellows, blues, and greens to create a sense of swirling entanglement, mimicking the octopus' movement, making it more yellowy-green around the diver and octopus to draw attention there and also to give the water a more theatrical look with an almost eerie glow. I was inspired by the way David Hockney used varying techniques to portray texture in his paintings, such as using the back end of a brush to make lines in paint, which I did on the octopus. I tried to use a different texture on each layer, with the flat swipes of color for the water, spiky blobs of blue and white for the bubbles to create dramatic movement, and one of those fan-like brushes to crate texture on the rocks. I pulled from my experiences diving and tried to make things a bit bluish, or at least I tried to remove the red and orange tones from things because those are the two colors that go first when diving, but I let the yellow of Steve's goggles stay bright because that neon stays bright pretty far down.


 * Dramatic Self-Portrait**



//For this project I want you to think about what your piece could mean. If light was a metaphor, what would it symbolize in your image? How does your expression interact with this meaning? What could this say about you or an imaginary persona you are creating in this work? What did you bring, (not necessarily physically), to the photoshoot to help create this one image that was far above any other. IMPORTANT//...What lessons are important for you to take from this project into the concentration process?

I'm not very photogenic, but I was trying to portray a sense of silent fear in this image. The light comes from behind me and hits my face in a way that makes it look like it is the fear that I am trying to escape. For the photoshoot I brought all of my most sparkly jewelry and a fur cape. I wanted to use these things to portray privilege and then use my facial expression to show that there was some unknown fear hiding behind all of the fancy things. Of course, you can't see the fur cape and the only jewelry in the picture is my ring, but I still think the elements of fear are still there. I would definitely consider more (smaller) drawings like this one but with more of the jewelry showing in it for my concentration.


 * Object: Amoeba**



When we drew those ten familiar objects in our sketchbooks, I drew an amoeba. I'm not really sure why that came to mind, but I really like the Farside cartoons and a lot of those have amoebas (amoebae?) in them. Then, I looked up pictures of amoebas in real life, and several of the pictures had the caption "amoeboid motion," which sounds really cool, but actually could not be less exciting in pictures. Basically what happens is the amoeba extends a pseudopod into an area and then all the stuff inside it fills in the empty space. So I started thinking about amoebas that were filled with energy, unlike the slowly moving amoebas in real life, and how the insides of them looked sort of cosmic, and that's how I got my piece. I used the hard green outlines to create the solid forms of the amoebas, but then I used the watercolor crayons to create a sort of explosive color coming out of the amoebae. By applying water on top of the watercolor crayons, I sort of let the color have a mind of its own, and let it flow in whichever direction the paper allowed, sort of like how the endoplasm would flow in an amoeba in reality. I painted the background black to bring the amoebas forward, and then I put gloss medium over the "amoeba explosion" that was outside the amoebas, and tinted it a bit to show a contrast between the inside and the outside of the amoeba. I also applied watered down gloss medium, which I sprinkled with watercolor to the inside of the amoebas to give it a sense of being gooey, like you would expect endoplasm to be. If I were to continue this as a concentration, I would probably spend some time exploring the surface of amoebas and maybe more of the insides. I would definitely consider doing some realistic drawings or paintings of amoebas because I think they are pretty amazing, and I really like the one I did in my sketchbook.

And just for fun, here's a video of an amoeba in motion: []


 * Cards****