Joy: Rendered

This week in painting we started a new painting with a model that I really like! We’ll have her for 8 sessions, which I’m really excited about. I’m already feeling good about where this painting is going! In math, we’re chuggin’ along through this chapter and we have a test the week after next. In science, we’ve started presenting our research presentations, which are actually very interesting. They’re all based on current topics of science, so this week, some of the topics were: Global Warming and its effect on New England, Schizophrenia, Government Surveillance, and Current American Diet. My research project on Birth Control in the 21st Century is due next week, eek! This week, we also all presented on a different element of the periodic table- mine was Phosphorus! (which is the red stuff on the end of a match, did you know?)

Also on Tuesday, we talked about our new Seminar project: Wish Fulfillment. I’m still working on a few ideas so I will have to get back to you 🙂 In the afternoon, we watched a couple of movies about time, which were really interesting. One of them, called Run Lola Run, centered around a specific hectic 20 minutes in a woman’s day, which could have gone a bunch of different ways. The way it was organized was really neat!

The most interesting part of my week was working on my Contemporary Trends project! The assignment was to design QR Codes (those things you scan with your phone!) that lead to a website, image, or text, and stick them places that are significant to where the code leads. I chose to design a couple simple websites that show how I feel about the lack of representation of women and people of color in politics and in the media. I posted codes that led to both of these sites around the State House and a few different news channels around Boston! The third code I did led to this infographic, which centers around consent and how people should be thinking about it. I think consent is a rising issue surrounding rape culture, especially situations surrounding college students. I thought colleges around Boston would be the perfect place for these little info bits! I also posted a couple consent codes in Victoria’s Secret, since they had their own little publicity thing with consent not too long ago (more about that here).

Midterms have been making my week CRAZY but there’s still a lot of awesome stuff going on over here! There’s a new show up in our gallery by our new gallery director, Deborah Davidson! It is a NESAD Alumni show, described as follows:

At New England School of Art & Design, faculty are deeply engaged with their students. The connection between students and their teachers works in both directions, and often remains long after the academic experience ends – as a professional relationship, or as a philosophical or creative influence. Nurtured here, this group of alumni carries with them a passion for their chosen field, the skills to express themselves and their ideas, and the discipline to realize them. They have the all-important ability to communicate and connect with the larger world through relevant art and design. The exhibition represents all areas of study at New England School of Art & Design, including Illustration, Graphic Design, Interior Design, Interior Architecture and Fine Art.

The opening for NESAD Grads: Out in the World was on Thursday as well as a student/alumni discussion panel. The show will be up until November 14th, so come by NESAD soon to check it out!

As for me, my group wrapped up our two week project in Contemporary Trends on Thursday. The assignment was to, in some way, alter an environment. Our group went through a pretty lengthy thought process: we started out thinking about using the body as an environment and thinking about how we could alter that. I made a cast of my chest to bring to class after the first week to talk to my group and class about our idea, and we came up with our new idea: using multiple casts of our bodies to alter environments, particularly around our school. We made a bunch of casts with plaster tape of different body parts, and hung them with more plaster tape onto a few places where the architecture matched the body part. Afterwards, we used spackling paste to smooth it down to the wall, then sanded and painted it. The result is a sort of surreal image of a wall either coming alive or someone breaking out of the architecture.

My favorite part of this week, however, was after our critique in Contemporary Trends. Tatyana Fazlaliadeh, a Brooklyn-based artist, came to speak with us in class! She created a movement called Stop Telling Women To Smile, which focuses on gender-based street harassment and how it affects individual women. I’ve seen images of her work before so I was so excited to meet her and hear her speak! She talked about how the campaign started as a portrait of herself and the phrase “Stop Telling Women to Smile”, which is one part of street harassment she feels strongly about. After that, she began doing portraits of close friends and branching out to other women, always asking them to talk about their experiences with street harassment and using their words under their images to put a face to these words and hopefully make people think more about gender-based street harassment. Tatyana also spoke about her work process, how typically she’ll use wheat paste to post these images around her neighborhood, but now after using a wildly successful Kickstarter, she has the funds to travel to different cities to make larger scale legal pieces in new communities. Tatyana been interviewing women in Boston and will be putting up a piece in Cambridge this week, then heading to Chicago for the next stop on her tour!

Hi all! This weekend, I got to go home to Chicago for the weekend! I went there to pick up my cat from home and fly him to Boston to have him live here, and it was great to have a couple days to relax at home. After that though, the week definitely picked up speed and I’ve been playing a lot of catch up. We had our last session of a four session painting on Monday, so that painting is finished and we’ll start a new one next week. In Contemporary Trends, we’re in the middle of a two-week group project focused on altering a certain environment. The big deal this week was finishing up our Janus Project for Seminar!

I started out this project wanting to make 2 self portraits: one concerning the data (maps, ticket stubs, lists) from when I was abroad in Florence, and the other concerning the emotional side of my time there shown with journal entries and a map from my memory. I decided to go forward with the memory map idea from there. I made a few sketches of Florence from my memory with watercolor and ink, but I kept getting stuck. I switched over to something much more 3D- I started using thread and pins to make a map. A big memory trigger and symbol of my time in Florence is an orange: oranges in Italy are often a little red (like blood oranges) and amazingly delicious. I ate so many there that whenever I see an orange from now on, I will think of my time in Florence. I decided to take my 3D idea even further and extended my pins and threads onto the round surface of oranges! I took a bunch of oranges and sewed into the surface of them. Each orange, in my mind, is a different city I visited while abroad and the threads sewn into it are my memory of the streets and landmarks there. Then, after I placed these oranges/cities into a bowl, I connected different landmarks from different oranges to each other with pins and more thread. I am satisfied with the result and I think it accomplishes the project and gets my point across nicely. It feels great to have my first piece up in the Fine Arts Exhibition Hallway!

In the afternoon on Tuesday, our seminar class took a trip to the ICA! The new show up there right now is by Amy Sillman, and it was very interesting! Sillman had a large array of different types of works which she brings together with a series of similar questions and themes. Some of her pieces are huge abstract paintings and some are stop motion cartoons made on an iPad. I really enjoyed seeing the whole span of her work and was inspired by her variety and depth of skill in each area.

I got a lot of work done this week! Over the weekend, I had a tiny bit of relaxing time before a busy week: I got to spend some time with friends a log a bit of Netflix time 🙂 I also did a painting for homework for 2D of a sunflower. On Monday and Wednesday, we had our second and final third session with the same model from last Wednesday. I feel like I’m getting back into the rhythm of observing and painting from a live model. I have some photos of my painting from the end of each session to show my progress:

On Tuesday, our seminar class checked in on the double self portrait project. I’ve done a little preliminary work on my emotional self portrait, which will involve maps, but nothing too serious yet. More to come! In the afternoon, our class went to the Art Institute of Boston to see the show Beyond the Wunderkammer. A Wunderkammer is an old-fashioned sort of curiosity cabinet, the concept of which this show was loosely based on. It was interesting to compare that viewing situation with that of a regular museum or gallery that we usually visit. On Tuesday night, my science class discussed chemical weapons disposal methods in Syria and on Wednesday I took my first math exam of the semester!

Today, I had Contemporary Trends. We critiqued our project for the week: an Ephemeral Memory. It was a tough project, since it was a contradiction of sorts: to portray a memory in a ephemeral (temporary, impermanent) way. I decided to do a semi-public piece in the hallway of the NESAD building; I set up a word in sugar on the carpet in one of the hallways and photographed it before leaving it alone for the day. I took a few photos throughout the day as well, as people accidentally (or perhaps on purpose!) disturbed the fragile text.

The project for next week has to do with our bodies and embodiment; I’m early in the brainstorming phase right now but I’m considering some type of performance piece..stay tuned! 🙂

Before I write about my classes and my week, I want to brag a little bit! After I blogged last Thursday, in the morning I came to NESAD and built a desk for my studio! I’m very happy with it and proud of myself. I’m starting to feel it really is my space to create in now: I have the desk, all of my supplies, and I’m starting to hang some of my small pieces and inspirational things around. Over the weekend, I threw a party for my girlfriend’s 21st birthday which was real fun, and I tried to get caught up with all the work I have to do. It seems like a heavy work load is here to stay!

On Monday, I finished up my figure painting from last week. I ended up covering the female figure that I had left underneath the male one; things were looking a little too busy and the underlying figure was distracting. On Wednesday, we started a new painting with a different model; this one we will paint for three sessions. I started the painting with my darkest darks and I’m working in lighter colors as I go along. I’m taking my time since I have three sessions, and I’m also experimenting with painting with a palette knife as opposed to using a paintbrush all the time!

On Tuesday, our seminar class met in the morning to go over our ideas for the Janus double self portrait. It was definitely a different class atmosphere than what I’m used to, which is not to say that I don’t like it! I enjoy the change of pace of talking through each of our ideas and offering advice and constructive comments before even beginning the project. I can tell the class will be an interesting and close-knit group. I’ll write about my idea for the Janus project next week once I get it rolling!

After lunch, our class took a field trip to Somerville to the Tufts University Art Gallery to see the work of Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons. Being of Cuban, Nigerian, and Chinese descent, Campos-Pons aims to explore cultural and racial topics and overlaps in her work. After viewing her show, my class discussed if this concept came across in her work visibly or if it was not a clear enough message.

Today, we presented our group projects on Destruction to our Contemporary Trends class. The prompt was to create a work of art through destruction. My friend and I took a video of us destroying a TV with a giant sledgehammer. We were going to leave it at that, but we wanted to push the destruction and the art aspect a little further, so we took the pieces of the smashed TV, glued them to a canvas, and smashed bottles of paint over the pieces (with a sledgehammer again). The paint was very brightly colored and fun, which contrasted with the sharp glass and jutting wires of the smashed pieces. The idea was that a television is all fun and games from a good distance away, but when you really examine what it’s all about and what it represents, a television can be quite dangerous. The use of primary colors evoked a childhood feeling from our classmates, which I think goes along with our idea of people getting sucked into the culture of TV from a young age. We did the smashing, gluing, and painting across the street from my apartment in a big field, and it was so heavy and wet with paint today that we had a really hard time getting it to school. We made it though, and I’m really happy with how it turned out!

The fall semester has now officially begun! I’ve had a little over a full week of classes now so I’ve had a little time to get adjusted. On Monday, I worked from a model in my painting class for the first time this semester. Then on Wednesday, we painted from a different model, and since we’ll be doing more sessions with this model, I decided to paint over my canvas from Monday. I actually left Monday’s figure in the background and it turned out pretty interesting. Also on Monday and Wednesday, I had my Finite Math class. We’re learning about linear equations and how to apply them to real world situations.

On Tuesday, I had my first Fine Art Seminar! I have been really excited for this class. In the morning, we meet with Audrey Goldstein to work on an assignment for her in the studio and in class with a lecture, and in the afternoon we meet with Randal Thurston to go see art around Boston! This week, Audrey went over the syllabus with us and gave us our first assignment: the Janus double self portrait. Janus is a Roman god with two heads: one looking toward the past, and one looking toward the future. Our assignment is to create two self portraits, one inspired and created with data and strict information, and the other from psychological and emotional information. Our first set of ideas and sketches are due this coming Tuesday. After our lunch break, we met with Randal to go over his syllabus and walk over to the Thayer Street Galleries! We went to the Howard Yezerski gallery, which had photographer Lalla Essaydi and cut paper artist Imi Hwangbo, as well as Kingston Gallery which currently has a very cool show, Gifted, curated by Nesad’s own Debra Davidson! My favorite of the shows we saw was L’Enfant-Femme at Carroll and Sons Gallery by the photographer Rania Matar. The photographs showed pre-teen girls posing for the camera in ways that the world and society has taught them to act in front of a camera: ways that are meant to make the viewer feel a twinge of discomfort, not only at the poses but at what these young girls are exposed to. The photographer is currently showing at the MFA in Boston as well in a show featuring Middle Eastern Female Photographers, which I definitely need to check out! Tuesday night, my science class met and focused on a few current science articles. I found one particularly interesting: this article focused on the lack of women in the science and math fields.

Today, I had my Contemporary Trends and Practice class. In the morning, we hung out in the wood shop at Nesad and got training on how to use the different tools and machinery! This will be useful in the future for art, and also for the desk I’m planning on making for my studio. In the afternoon, we had a lecture on Post-Modernism and Pop Art. I love hearing lecture and learning about art that isn’t from the High Renaissance for the first time in a while! We also learned about current artists who used deconstruction as a means of creating art. This is the concept our project for this week is based on, stay tuned! 🙂

This week, I started my Fall semester at New England School of Art & Design at Suffolk University! As much as I miss studying in Italy and everything that came with it, I am so happy to be back at home at NESAD. I’ve spent most of the summer in Boston working at the Front Desk here at the school, biking and exploring around the city, reading, taking photos, and doing a lot of relaxing. I also took a trip home to Chicago to go to Lollapalooza, which was amazing!

Suffolk University had classes start after 4:30 on Tuesday night, so my first class was actually Tuesday evening- Science & Life in the 21st Century! It’s a non-lab science, which means we’ll be doing mostly science reading and research. However, I think it will be a lot less boring than it sounds. Our textbook for the class is the Tuesday Science section of the New York Times! We read the articles, then discuss and debate them during class. The professor is lively and I’m looking forward to our discussions, and maybe even finding some inspiration in the science of today! Before Science all day on Tuesdays, I have my Fine Arts Seminar, but I will have to give an update after I have that class.

On Wednesdays, I have a day full of classes. I have a 2D Figure Modeling class during the day, which will be mostly painting the figure from a live model. I haven’t painted from the figure in a while, and even then I haven’t been able to in depth, so I am excited for that class! This week in 2D since we didn’t have a model yet, we took a field trip to the Mills Gallery in the South End. The show there now features a couple of NESAD faculty, including my professor and advisor Audrey Goldstein!

After 2D on Monday and Wednesdays, I have Finite Mathematics. From my class yesterday, I gather that the class is meant to find the answers to “real world” problems through math. I like the sound of it, especially since so many math classes I’ve taken have been full of lessons I will never use in real life! It seems like a good class with an interesting professor. Also, on every other Wednesday morning before 2D, I have Math Recitation. This is basically a study hall for math with a Professor who will help us out with any questions we have about our math class.

Today, I had one class all day: Contemporary Trends. We have a sort of lecture session in the morning, then have a break for lunch and have studio time based on the lecture in the afternoon. I am so excited for this class! We have already gone over Modernism in class and have been assigned a project based on the movement. I can’t wait to get started and work in the studio with my class!

Speaking of studios..since I’m a junior in the Fine Arts program now, I get my own personal studio! There is a portion of the school set aside for studio spaces for Fine Arts Juniors and Seniors. This means no more working at home in my apartment or in classrooms; I now have a space to design and work in that is all my own. I’m ready to get back into the swing of things and to start making art!

Joy: Rendered is on summer break, catch you in the fall.

After my finals ended, I had a few days to get everything together! On our last night, a few friends and I stayed up all night and roamed the streets of Florence, saying goodbye to our favorite spots and piazzas. We also found one of Florence’s secret bakeries; a collection of bakeries that supply Florentine cafes with baked goods and have fresh ones around 2 am. 🙂 At sunrise, we made our way up to Piazzale Michelangelo to watch one last sunrise. During the last few days, I packed up all of my drawings and paintings, then started the long process of repacking all of my things from my apartment into my two suitcases. I had sent home some things with family when they visited but I still had way too much stuff to pack. I was even over my weight limit on both of the bags when I got to the airport, I ended up having to wear a few extra layers on the plane! Before that flight home though, I had one last European adventure destination: Portugal!

I traveled along the southern coast of Portugal for my last week in Europe, also known as the Algarve region. I have to say it was one of my favorite trips: it was warm, the scenery was beautiful, and it didn’t hurt that it was a pretty cheap country to travel in! I flew in to Faro, Portugal, and spent a few days there. I took a ferry to an island called Ihla Deserta, or deserted island, which definitely lived up to its name. The island was all beach with one snack bar, and it was perfect for a few days of rest and relaxation. Faro in general was a really neat town to walk around and explore, especially the “old town” which had a cool old wall surrounding it and a cathedral! Next on the coast was Albufeira, where I met my friend from SACI and we hung out there for a few days. After that, I took a bus to the town of Lagos, which was my favorite spot on the trip. I spent the rest of my time in Portugal there; I explored the city and took pictures and during the day I hiked along the coast! The coast of Lagos is made up of a combination of beaches and the cliffs and trails that connect them. It was the perfect mixture of adventure and relaxation, and of course I took a million pictures!

After Lagos, I took a train back to Faro and flew back to Florence, where I picked up my suitcases and got on my flight home! I connected in Amsterdam and then flew back to Chicago. It’s nice to be back home to my friends, my family, and my own bed, but I’m already missing Florence. This semester wasn’t always perfect- the cold and wet weather definitely put a damper on a chunk of my time there- but the second half of the semester in Italy felt like it should’ve the whole time. The weather was warm, I had time to explore the city and friends to do it with. We went out and saw live music, drank wine and ate yummy Italian snacks by the Arno, and we really enjoyed the city. Of course the rest of the semester really was the experience of a lifetime: I learned so much in my classes, not only about art and art history but about the art I want to make. As cheesy as it sounds, most of what I learned this semester was about myself. I ate, I wrote, I drew, I photographed, I walked, I experienced, and most of all, I traveled. I feel so lucky to have been able to study and live in Florence this semester, and this time in my life will certainly not be one that I forget!