On Monday this week, I had a portrait due in painting for homework and we started a new figure painting. I did a painting of my grandpa from a photograph, and it ended up turning out kind of like Walter White from Breaking Bad..oops! The new figure painting in class will last for four classes, which is our longest painting yet! I’m pretty happy with how mine is looking, I put down the under-painting on Monday and started getting into more detail on Wednesday. Also on Wednesday, I got my grade back from last week’s math test, I got over 100% because of a bonus question! Hopefully the rest of the math this semester comes as easily to me.
On Tuesday in Seminar, we went over the final stages of our Janus double self portrait project. I was stressing out that morning because I had completely thrown out the idea I was working with before, but I went over it with my professor and my class and I’m feeling better about it. I’ve decided to keep the general concept of my former idea, which has to do with a memory map, and change how I will portray it. It should be up and installed in NESAD by Tuesday, so I will post about it next week!
Tuesday afternoon, our seminar class took a field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts School Gallery and the gallery at MassArt. There was a photography show up at MassArt that I LOVED. The show, Reality Check, “brings together seven artists whose work strikes the present-day viewer as digitally altered. However, the exhibition’s extraordinary images are the results of other, often slow and painstaking, non-digital processes. Despite many viewers’ jaded expectations of retouching, the artists in Reality Check capture intriguing moments and phenomena in the world around us. The works on view expand our vision, challenge our preconceptions of contemporary photographic processes, and celebrate that, even as the digital world occupies more of our lives, there are innumerable strange, surprising, and magical quirks left to be discovered in the real world.” One photographer, Matthew Brandt, had huge photos that were prints of lakes and bodies of water, which he printed and then left to soak in the same lake. This made the separate layers of ink run and combine in beautiful patterns. The result is an amazingly colored and unique photo!
For Thursday, we had a project due in Contemporary Trends & Practice that was based on Embodiment. We were assigned to create a work that shows how our bodies relate to ourselves, how they are a lens through which we experience the world, and how our bodies change how we experience different things. I was inspired in our lecture by an endurance artist, Chris Burden, who had different pieces of performance and endurance art that showed his embodiment in many ways. I decided to focus on the physical touch aspect of my life, an aspect that I think I take for granted sometimes. I tried my hardest to not have any physical human contact for 48 hours, and I only had a few accidental touches over the 2 days. Using these touches, I created a life size map of my body, which I made dark except for the spots I was touched, which I illuminated. I wanted this to show how lonely I felt for those two days, and the times I was touched felt like I was in touch with the people around me again. Now that I’ve stopped avoiding touch, I find myself hyper-aware of whenever I am touched or touch someone. I love this side of making art- the side that doesn’t just affect the viewer in a certain way, but that is performative and also affects the artist.