Midterm Critique/self evaluation

Yesterday's critique was extremely useful, also in context to people's responses to things.

I've got a lot of positive feedback on the fabric, and also people telling me to use it more. I would like to at least start responding to it in the same way that surrealists do (Might do a small set of studies involving this), but including it in the figures in some fashion would be useful. And emulating different patterns within the figures, which is something I've been interested in doing for a long time. On "The sleep of reason", the spotty pattern people responded to was sort of like that, though usually i do it more extensively.

Here's probably a good time to upload the shit i do for hobby art:

 I make these characters who often have symbolic associations and some of them end up being used in paintings and such (though not all of them). They're not terribly serious, but color/pattern/texture comes into them (these ones being relatively calm/simple examples), and that interest in color/texture/etc is echoed in my paintings I think. This tendency is directly informing how I make AON every time and the patterns I find on AON, which people seemed to like. So I'll do it more.

I've been encouraged again to give consideration to the display of the things. I recall some people liking them up on the wall (which, ideally, is how i'd display them), but my thoughts of mounting them on scrollforms etc were well received.

I have been making deliberate sacrifices to western perspective styles in my paintings but that is only seen as effective in the big red tapestry-cloth painting; in the Sleep of Reason it looks accidental, which means my intention is unclear and that's a problem. Thinking of putting objects ON the desk to make it's clear that it's been tipped up to show the top surface along the side, though then that might still look accidental (since most people still think it's accidental and a product of lack of skill in N. Renn paintings, I'm probably unlikely to break this trend in thinking no matter how intentionally I do it.) I probably should replace the chair in that painting with something less office depot, too.

Brook actually had an idea for my rendered watercolors, which are extremely poorly served by going up next to my splattery drawings and my big paintings (but I still like doing them!). She suggested binding them in a book together, so that they could be as much of an object as the paintings are.

And of course my splattery drawings got good response and I will carry on with them, despite the tragic toll they take on my pen nibs. They are sacrificed for a greater cause.

I'm happy with how ambitious I've been with size and with the amount of materials experimentation I've been doing; results have been good, and even the failures are useful. I'm somewhat less happy with hte large painting that has been stalling, so i shall take trace's advice and put some thread on that to see how that goes.

I'm not entirely happy with how productive I've been, but I never really am. I feel like i could spend more time painting (but doing so would probably involve spending less time doing stuff for other classes, and therein lies the problem.)

My goals for the rest of the semester is to spend more time painting, to finish the 3 paintings that are on the wall (which actually I'm not that worried about, I think I can manage that in the time I've got. Also figure out how to display them (which may be more problematic, in terms of actually building the scroll or the frame or whatever I intend to do.) I'll have to really push myself to do that.

I'd also like to produce more studies, and probably more digital studies, in the upcoming next few weeks. I'm currently overflowing with ideas of things to do for studies and I need to get some of those out on paper.

And, of course, there will be more ink things. Because i really really really really really am enjoying those ink drawings.

ARtist Research: Raymond Pettibon

Wikipedia Art21 Actual website

Subversive, ink drawing.

Quotes from the art21 video:
"I spend a lot more time writing than i do drawing... i really want to make that distinction"
"The fact is that i make work that require both."
"all those books downstairs, thousands we have-- he reads those all the time."
"He just has a large range of things that interests him... it can be anything, from erotic to a bowl of fruit."
"A mind that can be that interested with a wide spectrum... has to be kind of busy."
"It's not just drawing pretty picutres, he has all these ideas."
"The way i think and the way i write... it's not always very direct. It can lead anywhere. So I want it to be as fluent as possible."
"it becomes almost instinctive."
he works on a board in his lap like i do~
"More of a narrative than it is a cartoon... there still is an element of caricature and cartoon that my
work contains..."
doesn't respect hero worship/the decadent/ the great/ authoritian.
doesn't consider himself a political artist. "But i'm not going to apologize and shy away from it."
Irreverent~
works washy and then darker; or works darker and then adds washes.
motifs that reoccur: "They start as one image, and, for whatever reason, they had some kind of resonance with me, that brought them back."
works are displayed on the wall in a big wall jumblepile.

Words in his work are important. Apparently has a degree in econ. in college when he was 15.

Not all of pettibon's imagery or cultural interests excite me (actually, most of it doesn't, except for when color happens), but the words make it interesting. Darkly cunning. I can appreciate this human's intellect.

There was an interesting discussion in the art 21 video about how cartoon characters are more real (earnest) then people like politicians.

Pictures are hard to acquire because the main websites for him work on hovers and do not actually leave images up on the screen, but here are some:

Prompt: Movie's visual qualities

I'm actually a huge fan of visually based and animated movies, so I'm going with Spirited Away for this one.

The movie is about a human who gets trapped, perhaps temporarily, in a fantastical fairy-tale world. A bath-house for the spirits. In particular, there's a set of scenes at the beginning where Chihiro (the main character)'s family discovers what they think is an abandoned amusement park, and explore it. In the evening, the park reveals its true nature: the spirit's bath house.

The above are from BEFORE the bath-house is revealed. It's a small difference, but the images are slightly paler and more pastel. This may also be a result of the bath-house's nature being revealed at night.

Haku's arrival signals the start of the bath-house becoming a supernatural place, and the colors darken and the image becomes more serious in response.

 

Images from when Chihiro has found out the truth of the bath house. The colors are more serious, more ominous. though also warmer.

Partially because the main character of the movie is a child, and partially because she is a human in the land of spirits, chihiro is outsized. Everything is larger in scale, more panoramic, when she is in the picture. She's usually placed so as to be small, to seem smaller, especially in the beginning of the movie. This is NOT true of all media by this author, all media involving child protagonists (who sometimes seem larger then they should be because they are  a large part of the story and the focus), or even all miyazaki films involving children. Haku's human self also resembles a child, and his presence in the film is larger/any scene he occupies.

The bath-house's colors are more serious and somber. Everything in the movie is high-color (though not nessicairly high key color all the time), which is a feature of Miyazaki's often fairy-tale-like narratives. This one is particularly colorful. None of the color is nonsensical, but more opportunities have been found in this story to express color-- because this narrative is a highly fantastical narrative, possibly the most fantastical narrative in the [my list of] Big Three Miyazaki films (Princess Mononoke (which is way more adult-oriented and somber), spirited away, and Howl's moving castle (which straddles the line between fantasy genres and intended audience.)) The bath house's color tends to have deeper shadows in places, and the colors are often more intense there then they are in other settings, where they become almost pastel.

Most of the settings are extremely linear, and project upwards. This helps the scale, because chihiro (constructed primarily of softer, round shapes) is more of a contrast. The sharp upward direction also makes her seem smaller, and makes this fantastical setting seem larger, with more space for there to be story. This is not a cramped setting, and its colorful cast of spirit-creatures fit within it's confines.

The texture of this movie is fairly smooth-- significant because i think most of the backgrounds are paintiend; but they have appropriate textures where it is relevant, and it's not the artificial smoothness of some animated movies where the visual shorthand/language aspect of the drawings is what's important to convey clearly where they are and what's happening, but otherwise richness of imagery is not important. Miyazaki films are smooth enough to be clear but also created with concerned with the aesthetics of the scenes. They are bot very painterly, with brush strokes visible, which is what I usually equate with texture, but nevertheless background textures are employed nicely.
Textures are not really employed in the figures, but that is fairly typical for this style of animation.

Prompt: Quote, 1

CORY ARCANGEL

“Keep doing what you like to do. That’s all it is.”

My relationship with art over the years has been extremely complicated, which is part of why i will have done college for so long; I resisted the things I do well hard and tried to do other things instead. Art and Writing were too personal, being my few skills (my prowess at which I actually doubted), and I didn't want people to take those things away from me by trying to do them seriously. There was this perception on the inside that if people told me how shit I actually was at them, that then I wouldn't enjoy them anymore and there'd be no point in the pursuit. I had few enough skills, and I didn't want to sacrifice the ones closest to myself.

So after about 3 years of chasing the wrong major I gave up and threw myself wildly in the direction that everything kept pushing me towards-- painting-- and I also found out how wrong i was.

There's a lot of discipline in art creating; a lot of making myself work when I'd otherwise rather be languishing. There's a lot of frustration and tears and I'm still floating uncertainly in terms of what my stuff is worth, intellectually and otherwise, but I think that's endemic to the process, or, at least, my process. But I do actually enjoy it. And following it seriously has not, and hopefully will not, remove the enjoyment factor from the thing. I have also since learned that people cannot take this from me-- I might leave certain circles which are unwelcoming, but the artmaking is a product of myself. I must make myself continue it, but as long as I do, it won't be removed from me. 

Even within the art practice, development has mostly been a case of tearing down artificial walls I created between teh concepts of what I was allowed to do and what I wanted to do. I created these ridiculously complex hierarchies of hobby art I do in my spare time, and "Real art" i did for school (and I still address those, even though I have realized that if I draw that distinction, when I actually have time to CHOOSE what I'm doing I won't work on the "Real art" unless the real art IS the art I want to make.). I never thought I'd ever be allowed to paint on bits of cloth or spend so much time and effort on materials experiments, which do fail. Quite a lot, actually. And they might yet fail-- it's very possible that every painting I'm currently making in cloth will literally disintegrate over the next five years-- but as of right now, people respond enthusiastically to the paintings on cloth. I also never thought that it would ever be appropriate to paint AON and my cast of other extremely fantastical, symbol-laded, colorful animals. Their symbol-laden nature allows them to function effectively as allegories for what happens in my daily life, though, to make points in my paintings or other things. I'm still pretty sure it'll hard to get people to take them seriously, but that doesn't rally matter anymore; I'm taking them seriously, and enjoying it, no matter how delightfully childish it is, and I'm pretty sure that's the only thing that matters.

This whole learning process has mostly been a set of euphoric discoveries that yes, I am  really allowed to do that. That there is nobody telling me I'm not allowed to do that. If I can justify something, I can do it. It may not work, it may not net me any success, but that only matters if those are the end goals. If my goal instead is to have a dialogue with a piece of cloth and some colored dirt suspended in plant goo, have a good time with it, and paint something I want to paint, then i've achieved my goals, and all other goals are secondary.

FOR MY OWN NOTES, the quotes to choose from were;

CORY ARCANGEL

“Keep doing what you like to do. That’s all it is.”

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

“I start a picture and I finish it. I don’t think about art while I work. I try to think about life.”

LYNDA BENGLIS

“I totally believe that art is an open dialogue and that it is not logical. It does not always make sense.”

EDWARD HOPPER

“So many people say painting is fun. I don’t find it fun at all. It’s hard work for me.”

YAYOI KUSAMA

“I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live.”

GLENN LIGON

“My job is not to produce answers. My job is to produce good questions.”

AGNES MARTIN

“That which takes us by surprise—moments of happiness—that is inspiration.”

ANA MENDIETA

“My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that tie me to the universe.”

ELIZABETH MURRAY

“I want to make a beautiful, beautiful thing, something that gives you ideas about how life can be.”

BRUCE NAUMAN

“What is it that an artist does when he is left alone in his studio? My conclusion was that if I was an artist and I was in the studio, then everything I was doing in the studio should be art . . . . From that point on, art became more of an activity and less of a product.”

LOUISE NEVELSON

“I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.”

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE

“I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way—things that I had no words for.”

SUSAN ROTHENBERG

“I think artists almost always end up turning to what’s around them, what’s in their environment or outside their window.”

CINDY SHERMAN

“I wanted to create something that people could relate to without having read a book about it beforehand.”

 

KIKI SMITH

“I think making things beautiful is important. But often what’s first considered ugly is beautiful, too.”

CHUCK CLOSE

“Inspiration is for amateurs.”

SAMUEL BECKETT

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."

LARRY RIVERS TO DAVID HOCKNEY

"Do you want your work to be beautiful or interesting?"

ARtist Research: Nunzio PAci

Website ; little featurette thing, another short feature

International artist. He seems to be based in italy and thus his website is in italian. I do not read italian. Parts of his site are in english, though. Statement says he is trying to seek balance between the real and hte imagined, and discuss the relationship between man and nature.

Pencil and oil on canvas. Technical marks appear to be very pencil, with the color areas done in oil. Also seems to do large areas of toning in wash.

Website worth visiting due to a high number of detail shots with each painting. Undeterred by strange media: This is pencil and oil + resins, enamels, and bitumen. Bitumen is an extremely interesting choice of substance.-- asphalt. Bituman has a history of use in ancient cultures as well.

Casually breaking all the rules about white space, but that directly calls forward the reference to anatomical textbook. also drippy oil paint section to mirror that tree-growth. No idea how this artist avoids smudging

Does some with animals, often with these tree-limbs sticking out of them. All images are on a white backgruond that is slightly toned to resemble old vellum or pages from old manuscripts. 

Some of the animals will sometimes be interacting with one another, if there are two, but often not; the two horses is called "Cannibal Horses". 

Very clearly inspired by classical and renn art, which is not surprising at all for an italian artist; bu tthe anotomical drawings are the kind which first emerged in those times, and the stained canvas and exclusive use of earth tones 

Occasionally these landscapes created in the anatomical diagrams will host other small animals, like birds, who interact. 

DETAILS, which lets us see some of the drawing amongst the paint. Paint seems to be washy in most places. drawing is sometimes nice and clear despite it's canvas support, but othertimes it has that bumpy quality that comes from being done on a canvas. and there is smudges, you can just barely see them in the larger comps.

 

I would love to know if there's a preservation coat when this artist finishes to make sure that things don't smudge further then they want.

Textures which presumably come from some of the non-paint this artist uses, like the resins and such. becomes almost waxy. in some paintings actual leaves are also affixed to the canvas. On the right, oil paint bloom used to good effect.