Cactus Man (Writing Inspired by Images Project)

 

       (Top Left: My picture of my little Cactus, Bottom Left: Picture of a man standing amongst big cacti in a desert, Right: MC Eschers Self-Portrait)

   
       

George is 37, trying to get over a cigarette addiction, and is on a plane to Arizona from Vermont because his therapist told him that he needed to get out and see nature in a completely new place.

    George doesn’t think it will do too much to help him, but he has an inkling of hope that it might, so he went anyway.

    George has always liked plants secretly, (he’d be too afraid to be judged by anyone if he told them.) so he decided to go out to see the cacti in the desert. He didn’t want to do something too stereotypically tourist-y so he wouldn’t have to be around that many people.

    

    The woman who runs the Inn that he’s staying at has a hairless cat that looks angry all the time and it bothers George. He’s starting to take note of how weird everyone is, and it makes him a little less insecure about being himself and having little quirks. He’s starting to see how this trip is successful so far. Maybe he’ll call his mom later and tell her about it.

   

    The next day George goes out to the desert, and with the help of a few locals, gets directions for some good places for cacti and other desert plants. He finds himself amazed by the size of the plants, and appreciates them more. He loves the heat and feels good about himself. He’s having a good day.

    On the second day, he’s asking a man he met out in the desert about the plants. The man works with the local Horticulture club and they get in a surprisingly deep conversation about how George’s therapist was right about nature being therapeutic. The man invites George to stop by the nursery the next day to check out all the interesting plants. George agrees to go.

     The next day George has a lot of fun learning about all the different plants, how they can be used to help people, and how they’re grown. George has never felt so interested or passionate about anything in his life. The people who take care of the plants tell him he’s a natural when he helps plants a new baby Thyme plant, and he jokingly says “maybe this is my calling”, but it wasn’t really a joke at all. He feels like he belongs in this place. The environment makes him happy.

   A week later George has officially moved to Arizona. He’s slowly and successfully smoking less and less cigarettes. He loves himself and his life more and more every day. He has a job at the nursery’s store and even though he has to pay off a loan, he could care less about that as long as he’s happy.

   The little cactus in the picture is the first little plant he took home for himself after he went to Arizona and before he moved there. He plans to fill his new apartment with many more little plants. He’s so happy he went out in to nature to find himself.

Self-Portrait

Wack Blind Contour+Fun Colors+Cute, Kitschy Things=Correct

   We were given mirrors, paper, and fine-pointed black-ink pens, and told to do a blind contour of ourselves. A blind contour drawing, is when you draw without looking down at your paper, and usually using only one, long consistent line to create the image.
   Then, we were to embellish the drawing with different aspects of our personality. What we like, dislike, want to be, who we are.
   I decided to take my drawing home and work on the piece with my Faber Castell markers! They're my favorite markers in the world, and the India Ink makes the outcome really pigmented and bright.
  Here's the finished product! (in bad quality, thank you phone..)

  

Empty Bowls Dinner

HEY YOU, PERSON FROM NEW JERSEY AND/OR PHILADELPHIA AREA:

     If you have no plans for Saturday, February 9th from 5:30 pm to 8 pm, and $10 to spare, you should come down to the Haddon Township High School cafeteria to eat a whole bunch of soup/pasta for a good cause! You get your own handmade ceramic bowl to keep (Made by all the art class students) and you can get as much food as you want! All the proceeds go to the Food Bank of New Jersey, so pretty much you're eating so someone else can eat.

Season-Inspired Lantern

  Fall

   Fall actually isn't my favorite season; spring is. BUT, Autumn is my second favorite, for all the cliche reasons. Not super cold (perfect for tea), pretty colors, nice smells from those cute people who have potpourri everywhere around their house, cute, cuddly clothing, and over-dramatic scenes of dead leaves flying around people in sad movies.
   We were to create a cut-paper lantern inspired by a season! I thought of those sad-movie scenes with the leaves whipping around in the breeze, and decided to base my lantern's design around that scene.

This is probably 1/3rd of the way in! Some people asked me if it was difficult to make the lines smooth, but for some reason it was really easy and actually felt therapeutic to make nice, rounded lines with the Exacto-knife (fun fact..?).

Here are some pictures of the finished product, after all the pieces were cut out, and the paper was glued to thinner tissue-like paper!

  When the lights are out and a candle's inside, it looks super cool, but unfortunately I don't have a picture of that :\
    This would probably be a really fun project to do at home though, and since you'd have more time, one could get some wack detail and do something awesome.

Note Page

This is my "note page" for my M.C. Escher project! We had to take notes with drawings on the artist's work and style.

Report on M.C. Escher

M. C. Escher

 

 Maurits Cornelis Escher

 June 17th, 1898-March 27th 1972

   Born in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, M. C. Escher was a famous Dutch graphic artist, whom throughout his whole life made 448 lithographs, woodcuts, wood engravings, along with over 2000 drawings and sketches. His mathematical talents helped him create the unique and interesting art that he did, and with this he explored the concepts of infinity, tesselations and architecture. (Fun little fact: he was left handed!)
 
   
Schooling
  In Arnhem, he attended primary and secondary school from 1903-1918. When he failed the second grade, he was put into a special school for the sickly and disabled, as he was so. His grades weren't the greatest, but he completely excelled in the arts and drawing.
  In 1919, he went ot the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts. He failed a number of subjects, mostly due to his persistent skin infection. He briefly studied Architecture, but he didn't like it too much, and switched to Decorative Arts. In 1922 he left school, as he felt he had gained enough experience in making woodcuts and drawing.
   His first experience with mathematics began with George Polya's paper on plane symmetry groups. This would inspire many works of Escher's. He never had any formal schooling/training with mathematics. If you'd like to read more about what the plane symmetry groups are, here's a good article!: [Link]

The Art!
   The first graphic work that M.C. Escher created that was really praised was a linoleum cut in purple of his father in 1916. Escher's beginning work was mostly landscapes and very real, slightly bland images. He then went on a trip through Italy and France, and got a chance to look at all the ancient AND modern architecture. He wanted to improve on the artwork of the Moors, and that's where he got the idea to start most of his work with a geometric grid as a base. His interest in architecture came back, and to put a twist on it, he wanted to make it all funky! He began to drawing images of Italian architecture binding and turning and going all off what the planes in real life looked like, sometimes this is referred to as "mental imagery". He was also fascinated with 3-dimensional shapes like the Penrose Triangle and the Necker Cube.
  

So I'll show you some of this artwork that features tesselations, infinity, and "mental imagery"!:

   
   

 "Waterfall"

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Sky and Water I"

 

 

 

 

 

"Day and Night"

"Symmetry No. 45"

WHAT DO WE GET FROM THIS, CLASS?

He was a cool guy with interesting ideas. Some quotes about his own work:

-"I think I have never yet done any work with the aim of symbolizing a particular idea, but the fact that a symbol is sometimes discovered or remarked upon is valuable for me because it makes it easier to accept the inexplicable nature of my hobbies, which constantly preoccupy me."
-"I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, not in a chaos without norms, even though that is how it sometimes appears. My subjects are also often playful: I cannot refrain from demonstrating the nonsensicalness of some of what we take to be irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure to deliberately mix together objects of two and three dimensions, surface and spatial relationships, and to make fun of gravity."

Mine: My Pro-choice Collage

  Our second assignment this quarter was to create a collage based on what presidential candidate we were for/against, and illustrate why we were for/against them!
  I chose a more morally-centered argument, but a very important one: Should abortion be illegal or not?
  For me, the answer is no. A very strong no. If a woman is raped, she has every right to abort that fetus. If a woman is forced to bear the child of her rapist, a man who has probably traumatized her for life, it is a much larger crime, as opposed to going against someone's religion. It is not ANY man's right to dictate what a woman can and can't do with her body. I could rant on, but I'm just gonna get to the art part!
  Again, I started out with pink, red, yellow and orange ink-stained paper. The colors of the paper actually inspired the whole concept. Bright colors represent to me the boldness that this issue takes on, and the neon pink especially, represents the power that women must have, and take hold of to keep our bodies out of the hands of old male politicians.
  But the assignment was make a collage! I hadn't made a collage in a while, and I just decided to jump in with whatever I thought of first. What did I think of first?

  I ended up not being able to work the image of a coat hanger into the collage, but I did discretely put a very made-up dragqueen-ish Mitt Romney in the background. I also worked in a good women's rights quote in the background. The symbol that's very prominent is the feminist fist. As I dont label myself a "feminist", I wanted this symbol to represent women in general, whether or not they feel that strongly about their rights.
   I printed out a labeled picture of a woman's reproductive organs, and that's self explanatory. 
   I found a pair of a woman's legs on the back of a magazine in a Project Runway add,and i thought that was just a cool touch to add to the "women are powerful" thing.
  I then drew on little Leopard spots on the fist, because Leopard spots are fabulous and stereotypically "feminine", and I wanted to make the collage a bit more super-femme.
  Over all of this, I glued on the word "Mine" three times. I downloaded the drippy font onto my computer, then made two of the "mine"s a light pink, while leaving one black. The one that was left black is purposely very bold. This was not meant to be a subtle piece.
  The issue of abortion is still a very dark thing though, so with red and black Acrylic paint, I dabbed on the dark, bloody-looking combination in random spots and the edges to create a kind-of burned, maybe spray painted effect. The red also represents all the women who have had to get illegal, and very messy abortions in the past, and have tragically died for it.
 
  Here's the finished product!

   

(A little pink from my phone's weird camera)