Zines

The first project in my book arts class this semester was the zine, short for "magazine." We had to make 5 copies, distribute three of them randomly, keep one, and give one to the professor. Here are some images of my piece, "Leaf Book":

A Curious Query:

Are there musical instruments that visual artists, be they also inclined to play music, are more likely to play?
Obviously, piano and guitar are popular instruments across the board for anyone to play, so I am tempted to throw those out of the mix.
I wonder this because in my life I have found several french horn playing visual artists, though many left french horn behind in the pursuit of the visual arts. My good friend Betsy is both an incredible artist and a french horn player. I also play french horn and pursue excellence in the visual arts. I ran across three art-related people at Biola, also, who either play or played french horn in their past. Is there any correlation? Is french horn a more creative, moving instrument that somehow bridges the gap between visual and auditory creativity?

A New Discovery

I was inspired today by the thought of creating paintings without the canvas, or sculptures out of paint. Thick paint, when dry, is just like having a plastic sheet to work with, though perhaps a bit heavier and thus more liable to break. I thought it would be fantastic to make a dress or a pair of shoes or an umbrella out of... paint!

Searching online for artists with similar ideas, I ran across the Australian artist Huseyin Sami. He has made several sculptures out of paint, including a few vests!
His vest rack:



Another piece that particularly caught my eye was this:



To see more of his stuff, click here.

live art?

one of my friends on facebook posted this video... and the concept made me smile:

70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.

color me green

In his "Notes on Colour," Paul Gauguin speaks about color as being the music and the soul of painting. It is through color that a piece speaks.

On line and writing v. color and music:
"Delacroix thought he was fighting...in favour of colour, whereas, on the contrary, he was helping drawing to dominate. His poetic fervour, inspired by Shakespeare, and his impassioned soul could find expression only in drawing. His lithographs and the photographs of his paintings reveal his entire vocabulary. And when I look at his paintings I experience the same feelings as after reading something; on the other hand, if I go to a concert to hear a Beethoven quartet, I leave the hall with coloured images that vibrate in the depths of my being."

A piece of his writing that seems like it must be directly from my own mind:
"But you have a technique, people will say to me. No, I do not. Or rather, yes I do have one, but it is very vagabond, very elastic, it depends on the mood in which I wake up in the morning; it's a technique I apply as I like in order to express my thinking, without paying any heed to nature's truth, which is only externally apparent."

The truth in color:
"Truth is in front of our eyes, nature vouches for it. Would nature be deceiving you by any chance? Is truth really naked, or disguised? Though your eyes cannot reason, have they the necessary perfection to discover truth?
"Let's look and see, the sceptical worker would say. The sky is blue, the sea is blue, the trees are green, their trunks are grey, the ground on which they grow is slightly indefinable. All of this, as everybody knows, is called local colour, but the light comes and changes the look of every colour at will. And the sea that we know to be blue, which is the pure truth, becomes yellow and somehow seems to take on a fabulous hue that you can find only at the clothes-dyers'. The shadows on the ground become purple or other colours that are complementary to the tones closest to them. And everyone peers through his opera glasses at the right colour and dexterously applies to the canvas, in squares prepared in advance, the true colour, the genuine colour which for a few seconds is there before his eyes."

What this essay reminded me of so deeply was my painting 1 class last fall with Jonathan Puls. Through that class I was taught not only to perceive line and linear forms and shapes, but to correctly see colour. It was challenging at times to look beyond presumptions and assumptions and to just see. Painting is all about seeing. Shadows are not black or grey-scale but are reflections of what is around them. They are violet, blue, and sometimes even vibrant oranges, reds and deep greens. Black is rarely the accurate color to describe a portion of an object that turns away from the light. Black is absolute and sunken and takes no note of the surrounding objects. What color is beneath the shadow? What colors have light bouncing off them onto the shadow? All this must be taken into account. Since being in an environment for several months where I was required to take time to accurately see color, I find that my whole world is more vibrant. When I look I now see the vibrancy of color in everything more clearly, and I have found the world to be a beautifully created place.

something old, something new

I have had a blog for awhile now, but it seems that the time has come to redirect its purpose from purpose-less to awesome, hence ars gratia artis, "art for arts sake." As an artist I feel that it is very important to not just create art, but to dialogue with it. That will be this new blog, this new arm of me.

Jen