Art Dump! - Sculpture Installation

The goal here was to set up an installation of sculpture that had to use its environment as part of the work. Since we had been working on making moulds and cast objects,most of the class decided to work with this approach. Of course this includes me,next time I'm going to try something else. I will be sticking up pictures of how I came to this and pics of the site without any art in it.

Me setting up.

Finished!



Details

After the weekend

This block of pics was taken by my teacher Scott Avery. Thanks Scott!

An October update

Right now I've been trying to juggle assignments so I've been negeleting my art blog. I'll be dumping huge amounts of post come the end of November so look forward to it. This site relates to a colour theory assignment I'm doing which is to do some clothing design based on the work of Issey Miyake who work I do like even if it is fashion design which is something I don't bother about.

What do you get when you mix an a/c unit and a shirt? It may look a little something like this and for the offical documentation on it - The Wind

We're doing some work in drawing class related to pop culture,which I'm excited about but I'm not sure if I want to explore it the way we are in class.

Something exiciting is going on. My sculpture class has a collective sculpture in the end of year show. It's very interesting,so now I have to go to Opening Night.
Edit: This is what it looked like. Typically I am the computer mouse.

A word

I was going though my digital art magazines when I came across this quote. "I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to,and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration." Frida Kahlo

I'd really like to use that as a reason as to why I should not explain my art because sometimes I just really can't.

Don't go over my head with this one

Can't belive I forgot to write something about this - Metaphysical painting As liberally poached in the middle of the night from the dark forest itself. And can also be found here.

Actually I should have read this much earlier and then Chirico's paintings would have made much more sense to me.

"Metaphysical Painting sprang from the urge to explore the imagined inner life of familiar objects when represented out of their explanatory contexts..."

I think I was on the right track with my last entry when I tried to explain where my picture was headed. It wouldn't really matter what I said since it was a reality constructed from my own mind or from some other reality.

"...represented a visionary world which engaged most immediately with the unconscious mind..."

According to everyone's favourite internet monkey,Metaphysics deals with explaining the ultimate nature of reality, being, and the world. And asks such questions as:
* What is the meaning of life?
* What is the nature of reality?
* What is mankind's place in the universe?
* Are colors objective or subjective?
* Does the world exist outside the mind?
* What is the nature of objects, events, places?

And blah blah dealing with subjects that beyond the physical world. And now a lot of words from Promethea by Alan Moore and J.H Williams. It has a fair amount of metaphysical theorizing,which is why it is appearing here. This tidbit is from a section that looks at man's journey through history and life. This particular section refers to The Tower tarot card.

Like,Babel,meant to heaven reach,
all towers men build a lesson teach.
Lightning,descending from the sky,
reminds man there's but one most high.

Painting Assignment - Development 2

More of how the painting came to be. This is a progression shot of the picture during my first lesson. I was aiming to get simular colours to the original painting here. As it turned out I had to make the background more interesting later on. I admit it looks pretty flat at this stage.


Adding in the towers,it really annoyed me that I didn't have very good brush control here,but I don't think I've gotten much better since then. I was aiming for some kind of lonely and mysterious place that was errected as something impressive or as a monument to someone. Incidently,the tower ended up looking like a lighthouse. So the picture looks more like a abanndoned sea that dried up eons ago. I did ditch the little shadows that were going to look like gateways. In my original sketch,it was a mysterious set of pillars and towers that had shadowy gates that lead to who knows where. I might do a version of that idea during the holiday.

Now for something vaguely different. I present a tower of another sort. You could go and make your own conclusions here but really I just saw it and said "It's tower-esqe in composition" and took a picture of it. I think the most disturbing thing is,it looks more forlorn than my painting.




This is more or less the final product,I am going to take a better picture of it by the end of the week. But now the tower has a lot better shadows and looks like it's expecting a light from above or falling stars. Go figure. I did learn a lot from painting this,but it seems I forgot most of it when I started my next one. I really don't know where this all ended up,I think I was heading towards a tower in an endless void and it turned into something else. Surprisingly it is somewhat impressionistic which I like.

Towers

A few things about towers since the subject of the paintings are tower(s).
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower
Towers are tall man-made buildings, always (and usually much) taller than they are wide. Towers are generally built to take advantage of their height, and can stand alone or as part of a larger structure. Examples of the various uses of towers include:

* To save ground-level space: skyscrapers, cooling tower, chimney
* To enhance views: tourist towers, air-traffic Control tower, railroad yard tower, harbor control tower, filming tower
* To increase strategic advantage: prison watch tower, defensive walls, siege tower, fire lookout tower, camera tower
* To increase potential energy: storage silo, water tower, drilling tower, ski-jump ramp
* To enhance communications: radio mast, lighthouse, light tower, minaret, bell tower, clock tower, weather beacon
* As support: suspension bridge, cable-stayed bridge, pylon, aerial tramway support pillar
* To access tall or high objects: launch tower, service tower, supply tower, scaffold, tower wagon
* To access atmospheric conditions aloft: wind turbine, meteorological measurement tower, tower telescope, solar power station
* To protect from exposure: BREN Tower
* For industrial production: shot tower
* To drop objects: drop tower, bomb tower, diving platform
* To test height-intensive applications: elevator test tower
* To improve structural integrity: thyristor tower
* To mimic towers or provide height for training purposes: fire tower, parachute tower
* As art: Eiffel Tower, Shukhov Tower, Space Needle
* For recreation: rock climbing tower
* As a symbol: Tower of Babel, The Tower (Tarot card), church tower

Skyscrapers are often not classified as towers, although most have the same design and structure of towers. In the United Kingdom, tall domestic buildings are referred to as tower blocks. In the United States, the now-destroyed World Trade Center had the nickname the Twin Towers, a name shared with the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur.

Inccidently "The Tower" is a poem by William Butler Yeats which is a passionate indictment of a man wrestling with age. It can be read here.

Towers also relate to The Tower card.

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This post is part of an art assignment to research a painting,document this research and produce an interpretation of said painting.

Meaning Influential

For this lesson,you will require a dictionary.According to dictionary.com

Nostalgia noun
1.A wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time.
2.Something that elicits or displays nostalgia.
3. The condition of being homesick; homesickness.

Infinite adjective
1.Immeasurably great: an infinite capacity for forgiveness.
2.Indefinitely or exceedingly great: infinite sums of money.
3.Unlimited or unmeasurable in extent of space, duration of time, etc.: the infinite nature of outer space.
4.Unbounded or unlimited; boundless; endless: God's infinite mercy.
5.Mathematics.
a.Not finite.
b.(of a set) having elements that can be put into one-to-one correspondence with a
subset that is not the given set.

Infinite noun
6.Something that is infinite.
7.Mathematics. an infinite quantity or magnitude.
8.The boundless regions of space.
9.The Infinite or the Infinite Being, God.

10.The unlimited expanse in which everything is located; "they tested his ability to locate objects in space"; "the boundless regions of the infinite".

Influences
De Chirico won praise for his work almost immediately from writer Guillaume Apollinaire, who helped to introduce his work to the later Surrealists.

Yves Tanguy wrote how one day in 1922 he saw one of De Chirico's paintings in an art dealer's window, and was so impressed by it he resolved on the spot to become an artist — although he had never even held a brush.

Other artists who acknowledged De Chirico's influence include Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Philip Guston. De Chirico strongly influenced the Surrealist movement.

Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian film director, also claimed to be influenced by De Chirico. Some comparison can be made to the long takes in Antonioni's films from the 1960s, in which the camera continues to linger on desolate cityscapes populated by a few distant figures, or none at all, in the absence of the film's protagonists.

Modern photographer Duane Michals was also influenced by De Chirico.

John Ashbery has called Hebdomeros "probably...the finest [major work of Surrealist fiction]." [1]

Fumito Ueda's critically acclaimed Playstation 2 game Ico (and also its sequel, Shadow of the Colossus, in a less direct way) was strongly influenced by de Chirico. Both games feature children wandering though huge, ancient and otherwise uninhabited buildings, are predominately yellow and green in colour and use music only for cut-scenes, enhancing the feeling of space and sparseness. The box art for Ico used in Japan and Europe is particularly imitative of de Chirico's Melancholy and Mystery of a Street and The Nostalgia of the Infinite.

The 1914 painting Melancholy and Mystery of a Street was used as the cover for the "adult version" UK paperback edition of Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife, part of the His Dark Materials trilogy. It is appropriate considering the novel's setting of a southern European-looking town that was abandoned by all but a few disowned children.

De Chirico's 1915 painting The Seer (or The Prophet) is featured on the cover of jazz pianist Thelonious Monk's 1958 album Misterioso.

Personally I belive The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan has some inspiration to de Chirico's work. But that is a personal consideration by me.
(c)by Shaun Tan

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This post is part of an art assignment to research a painting,document this research and produce an interpretation of said painting. Such is the power of the internet and the immediate quality of blogging.