Grace+T

=**Concentration 3:**= __**Ambition**__: Due at the beginning of class, Thursday, April 7th.

In the final quarter you will be focusing primarily of making sure everything gets done. This quarter may be your last chance to really push your understannding 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?

In this quarter I tried to get as many pieces done as possible, as I want to be able to take my time fixing up my pieces at the end to make sure they are exactly right. I also tried to focus more on the design of my pieces, instead of the stories they tell, as I can see from past quarters that although the stories are interesting, sometimes they don't come across, and usually they hamper my ability to create a piece that is not only illustrative but artistic. So I have been more ambitious stylistically during this quarter. Also, I think the idea that I am simplifying complexity, instead of making that which is simple complex, is more in line with my original idea. I am glad to have finally figured out precisely what it was I liked about my original doodles--that they managed to take a complex scene and stylize it into a few lines. With this in mind, I intend on, and have been, pushing my project farther by focusing on how to present a subject convincingly, simply, and artistically.

=**Concentration 2:**= __**Evolution**__: Due at the end of class, Friday, March 4th.

Or What You Will (Twelfth Night) nature Iliad

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?

My ability to manipulate watercolor, especially my understanding of how to work with Doc. Martin dyes has increased since I first started my concentration, and I find I am able to experiment more with the various colors produced by different pigments. For example, in my nature piece, I manage to produce a pink stain using the blue Doc. Martin dye, and a green stain using the brown, which I had a fun time experimenting with. I also decided to work in oils, as although oils and watercolors are very different mediums, a lot of the basic concepts of how to manipulate them are actually kind of similar. And they both produce an almost ethereal effect at times which I like working with. I have also deliberately made my pieces more complicated, as per your advice, and also because I really did want to do more complex pieces in the beginning, but thought they would not be stylistically adequate. I am really enjoying seeing the improvement that adding details provides for a piece. I have also realized that most of my pieces hinge on a narrative element, and I have become more illustrative in my compositions as a result, although, of course, I still try to make the pieces compositionally sound, even if they were to be seen upside down.

=**Concentration 1**=





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 began developing my idea for this concentration in tenth grade. However, my original idea was to explore different forms of evil, a far cry from different forms of happiness. During eleventh grade, I began making elaborate doodles of scenes from various books, plays, etc. that I enjoyed. As I do not particularly favor sad scenes, I noticed that most of my complicated doodles involved various portrayals of happiness. As I was already using my stock stick figure, whom I have doodled since fifth grade, my concept that happiness is an underrated emotion with complicated depths blended seamlessly with my hokey smiley-face doodles, which I nonetheless spiffed up in my intricate drawings. I think the most challenging part of my concentration so far has been my layout of the various pieces. I suppose I must be more illustrative, but I have always found graphic explosions of abstraction, or bold, dramatic forms sweeping towards the viewer, potentially amateur-ish design elements. I have always thought a work of art should be able to grab the viewers' attention without having to resort to dramatic tricks of perspective (tricks of perspective are cool). However, while working on my concentration, I of course realized the legitimacy of the complaint that these forms remain 2D. It has been hard for me to sacrifice something I consider aesthetically pleasing for what the AP board will consider as artistically sound. In the end, I think I would rather sacrifice the concept of space, in order to keep the unique simplicity which has always been my main attraction to these pieces. With a more graphic style, I feel the more ephemeral, happy qualities of my pieces are lost. However, I have learned that I do need something to convince the AP people I am an actual artist, instead of a complex doodler. But I have also learned that relying on graphic displays of perspective is not really my thing. I would like to use variated line thickness to represent importance in a piece, for example, and not what is closest to the viewer. Hopefully by generating complex compositions I can circumvent any doubts the AP board may have as to my legitimacy. On the other hand, a subtler way to indicate space would be greatly appreciated. I have tried doing this with the billowing folds of the robe of my Rhodian Genius (fellow with torch), and my dancing Apollo (with the illustrations of the Alcestes (spelling?) narrative). I also need a way to have dynamic edges, while still maintaining a sense of ungrounded whimsicality. I think editing these three images further on photoshop could be a nice compromise. That way I can keep my pieces the way I personally like them, but still produce something potentially more appropriate for an AP art class. In this sense, none of these pieces are definitively finished. However, I would like to experiment with the before-mentioned design elements in future concentration pieces before deciding what I should do digitally with these. I am hoping a future design will inspire me with the appropriate approach to finishing these. I can definitely see what you are saying about how spatial elements and dynamic edges make a more complex, artistic product. But I don't like that product as much as my more simple pieces, and I think there is something unique about their happy, ephemeral design; maybe because few people have ever tried remaining 2D. Do you have any ideas that might solve this dilemma?

=**Digital Piece**=



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?

I have never worked in Photoshop before, so everything we learned was new to me. I think a lot of the things I learned can help me edit my pictures of artwork later to make sure their photos are doing them justice. I especially found the magic wand tool helpful, and the levels and color balance tools. I also discovered how to twist an image to make it look like it is coming out of the screen at the viewer. This is a very cool design technique I would like to use in my concentration. I also want to use this program to complete the final steps of each of my concentration projects. This way, I can make my work appealing to artistic sensibilities on photoshop, but still keep my original, less stylistically complex, pieces. Of course, I hope that as my concentration continues, I will not have to rely on photoshopping to produce desired spatial effects, but will manage to incorporate this design element into a work that is still intrinsically pleasing to me. I think I like working with physical materials more simply because there are so many tricks that you have to remember in order to make a satisfactory composition in photoshop. Physical materials leave the element of control entirely up to the artist, and it is less easy to make drastic mistakes that way.

Chaos Piece



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 would say the purpose of this project was to help us fix pieces of art that we have gotten into a tight spot with, if that makes sense. It helped build our skills at problem solving with a piece of art--seeing how to fix certain blunders and bring a piece together as one contextual whole--after we have already strayed from an orderly and balanced piece. In this way it helped further our conceptual skills as well, because we had to relate before unrelated objects. For me, my piece got more and more discombobulated and complex throughout the process. Even when I tried to bring it all together at first, by adding what were supposed to be type-written words across the piece, it ended up looking way too detailed. In the end, I had to take out a lot of my small details, blocking in some very large spaces of solid color in order to emphasize the details and complexities that remained. This enabled me to bring the work together in the end, as I made sure the colors of the piece were also balanced by these additional solid colors. I also decided that different types of art would be my theme, so it helped to add a theatrical mask to the bottom of my piece in order to further balance its overall composition.

Layers Project



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?

The strategy for this project was a bit like starting out simple and gradually getting more and more complex. However, having to think of each layer as a physically separate piece of paper enabled us to be able to more fully plan how different layers within the piece were going to interplay with one another. This let us plan our pieces to a greater degree, taking into account how several different layers ultimately coalesce into one scene. With this planning I was able to better organize the overall structure of my picture, which was very helpful, as I was able to better balance my piece, and emphasize my butterfly and deer by making the left-hand mountains and right-hand antler curve towards one another. It also helped me contrast individual layers within the piece by working with them in different ways. While I used a lot of charcoal on the antlers in the foreground, the farther back my painting went the lighter were the colors and strokes I used. I then contrasted the sky by using paint, an entirely different medium, to accent it against the middle-ground mountains. By going back in and adding white accents to both the sky and the mountains, however, I managed to keep them in the background, while retaining ultimate focus on the darker figures of the antlers, and the deer in the middle-ground. I would not have been able to think through this complexity without having planned my structure before hand. Although the different layers of my piece started out simple, they gradually became more complex. I united the farthest-back layer of the sky with the top half of the middle layer, the mountains, by using the same mediums on both. I then split up the middle layer by using dark, harsher lines, and less realistic colors, on the lower-half of the middle-ground, the deer. I united this lower half of the middle-ground with the foreground, by using the same techniques and colors. In this way, although at the beginning my layers were relatively simple, the interplay which ultimately developed between my layers became very complex. I also added the Korean word for 'I love you' to bridge the gap between the antlers and the deer. In this way, I further united the foreground and bottom-half of the middle ground, while adding to the overall theme of my piece. The idea of strategy was essential to creating my concentration, not only by helping me organize the piece, but by helping accent my theme. Because the layers had to be separated, I came up with the idea that the foreground, marked by the number 38 (as in, the 38th parallel that separates North and South Korea) was the farthest boundary to which the deer whose antlers we look through could go. His message 'I love you' is therefore sad, because he can never reach the doe he loves, and the happiness that she symbolizes (the letters parallel to her back are 'happiness' in Korean). However, because I united the lower-half of my middle-ground with my fore-ground, I showed that because they are separated does not mean they are entirely foreign to each other. It also means that the doe cannot completely partake in the happiness surrounding her, represented by the brighter colors and white accents of the mountains and sky, which she lacks. In this way, the strategies of my project, to create a sharp contrast between the foreground and background, but then to split the middle-ground so that half is connected with the background, half with the foreground, strengthened the overall themes of my piece, while strengthening it structurally as well. By taking time to think about the overall layout of my piece, I was able to come up with a more striking effect for the viewer, but also a more striking parallel to the ideas I wished to get across in the piece. I think in the future I should use the similar strategy of minutely planning out the details of my paintings to make sure they all form a coherent whole. This enables me not only to create a better focus (in this piece by bending the mountain and antler to curve around the doe and towards the butterfly, my two emphases in the piece--the butterfly, by the way, just to clarify, represents the epitome of happiness the deer whose antlers we see can not attain, but desires--this is why the 'I love you' stretches towards it, and why it is one of my main focuses), but also a better overall cohesive feel to the piece, and a more thought-driven work. It helped not only to decide the interplay between grounds before starting, but also to label and decide on how I was going to work within these sections of the painting before working too. This will be a very helpful strategy to use in the future.

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 think the light in my piece would symbolize the good and bad sides to a personality. The light in my piece is very polarized, but the peacock feather enables the dark parts of the picture to seep over into the lighter half of the portrait via its fronds, and vice versa via the reflection of light on the fronds lower down on the peacock feather. This could show an intertwining of both good and bad elements in a persona. My expression in this piece could be read as that of a joker, with an element of dark quirkiness though ultimately playful. In this sense, my expression and the light work well together, as both contrast two fundamental opposites, light/dark, good/bad, etc., mixing to create a composite of both--something slightly malicious looking, yet not too creepy. Or, you could take it more ominously, like the imaginary persona in my work could go either way--they could be good or bad, but you don't quite know; and this would go along nicely with the fact that the feather is hiding half of my face--like the trickster doesn't want to be fully unmasked. I had an idea when coming into the photo shoot that it would be fun to have something slightly sinister underlying what might otherwise be a happy work of art. I tried to put the hat on my head at an angle that would be slightly too jaunty to be up to any real good; and the idea that the peacock feather would feign my second eye furthered the idea that there would be something slightly off-kilter about the character I wanted to create. I enjoyed working so realistically, as I have always kind of wanted to try this, but I think the most important lesson to take from this project would be the ability to portray character more subtly than with pure facial expression. The lighting can definitely add to the mood of a composition what otherwise would be nonexistent, and the placement of props ended up being key in my portrayal of my creepy little imaginary character. I think an interesting point of view I've gained from this project is the idea that exterior additions to a face which would otherwise be perfectly everyday and normal looking, can completely distort it and turn it into something almost exactly opposite what it was to begin with--as I was just smiling a normal smile at the camera. Also, the angle of the piece added to this effect, another thing to think about as an asset to bring into my concentration.

Project 2



When I started this project I didn't know how I would portray a ghost as something it is not. I finally decided it would be interesting to play with figure ground relationship and make other elements in the piece create the ghost's shape. I also thought it would be interesting to try to create other ghosts throughout the piece with how I shaded the curtains and radiator that would make up the original ghost's shape. Because of this, I was able to present my object as a product of people's imagination, as every 'ghost' in my peice can be seen either as a ghost or just a fold in the curtains, a reflection of light off the radiator, or a coincedence of the shape made by two curtains blown back. Although this is technically what a ghost is, by portraying its shape as not-quite-there as well, I hoped to differ from traditional representations of what the shape of a ghost looks like. By using watercolors, I hoped to show how illusive the concept of a ghost is, as the contrasting diluted or concentrated water colors reflect how one second the ghost is visible, the next it is not. By using bright colors I hoped to make the elements around the object seem illuminated, in contrast with the dark background. The differing textures of watercolor and charcoal also added to this effect. I also used white paint to emphasize the shape of the ghost, without drawing solid lines around it. If this were a concentration, I would continue it by using the same media to show other spaces interacting with an object which makes them luminous.

Project 1