Week Seven

Inspiration


from Captain Long Ears by Diana Thung


from The Gigantic Robot by Tom Gauld


from Billy Hazelnuts by Tony Millionaire

Work


My own logo!!!!!

Reading Response: Intro to "Scoping an Audience"

The beginning of the reading compares art to a charged battery, being complete within itself but only half fulfilled until received by (or I suppose in the battery metaphor, inserted into) the viewer. I take a bit of issue with this notion, because I think one of the conventions of the 20th/21st century art world is the idea of just doing it for yourself, in a sort of therapy. Given, yes, most people who want to be a full time artist need to focus on selling their work, and those who want credentials amongst their peers or bring about awareness or change need to think about genres and topics, but that's just not everyone.

Art should be done foremost for yourself, that's the only way it will be genuine. That's why Thomas Kinkade works, because yes he's a marketing genius, but his work represents his personal world-view. He was probably doing those paintings before he was famous and will probably keep going after he sells his last cheesy porcelain plate collection.

The final paragraph starts off with the decisions one has to make as an artist, "whom to affect, how to affect, and where this affecting transpires... "

For me this was both a long and short process. I always knew I wanted to do cartoons, I just didn't always know it. Part of me just kept saying it wasn't a "real" option. That I needed to learn how to do "real" (fine) art. And yet, my skills were always better applied when I was trying to make my peers laugh than compete with them with paintings or sculptures. I think a big part of sourcing your audience and knowing yourself is knowing how to leverage the dichotomy between what you want to do and what you can do.

There is always an audience, as the reading notes, in this globalized community in which we all create. The question is, can you look inside yourself and accept that your skills are not necessarily what you intellectually want to be able to say they are? I think the speed with which you accept your role and improve THOSE skills, the faster you'll realize your audience was always there, begging you for more crappy cartoons about sad little animals.

Week Six

Inspiration


By Edward Gorey


By Don Kenn


By Ralph Steadman

Work: Complete book!



Transcript of Story:
01011010 01100101 01110010 01101111 00101110

01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101101 01110000 01110101 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100011 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01110011 01110100 01101111 01110000 00100000 01110111 01110010 01101001 01110100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00101110

01000010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01101110 00100000 01110011 01110101 01100100 01100100 01100101 01101110 01101100 01111001 00010100 01100001 00100000 01101101 01101001 01110010 01100001 01100011 01101100 01100101 00101110

01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110100 01101111 01110010 01111001 00100000 01110111 01100001 01110011 00100000 01101111 01110110 01100101 01110010 00101110

Reading Response: Creating Time For Busy People

I love math. I know that's a bit taboo to say in the art world, but I do. There's something comforting in rote memorization of processes and absolutely correct or incorrect answers. And math art is the same way. It's linear and smooth and complex but not in a way that makes it incomprehensible. Even infinite bell curves have a start and (generalized) end point. You can follow it. It's self explanatory. It's modern art without the confusion of literary allusion.

So with that in mind, I really like Victoria's time project both intellectually and visually. I'm not going to say that it's like looking at a Picasso, but I think there's something interesting in being presented with raw data and being forced to come up with a unique way of visualizing it. I'm not necessarily sure I agree with her sentiment about time, because hypothetically the digital self interacting with other digital selves functions on a very generalized set of dynamics, and would presumably veer off, sort of like that Pandora station that starts with Radiohead and ends with Bach, in a pretty short amount of time. Also, unless we become the Borg and can assimilate data instantaneously, one would have to look at the information as it grows to keep the organic data host (person) in sync with the virtual one, or the point is moot because you've just created a second entity that only vaguely resembled the original at it's inception.

Really fun to think about though.

Week Five

Inspiration Images

By Egon Schiele

By Blaine Fontana

By Frazer Irving

Work: Classmate assignment, Make a Book!

Reading Response: Introduction to "Choosing a Mission"
After seeing the 1565 show last semester and enduring a long stint studying modern art, I came to a conclusion about artists. It seems they take jobs, perfectly legitimate jobs, and just choose to do them for a short time. Harrell Fletcher just woke up one day and decided to become a historian about Native American culture and our relation to it as post-1565 inhabitants of St. Augustine. Ignoring the fact that this town is historic, and that basically every other building is already a history lesson, Fletcher essentially went around to various places and basically presented in the museum a collection of... collections, from various other places. And a video of himself.

When asked what made his work "art" he replied that he just "did what he wanted."

Essentially this reading just summarized that thought. "All these options are available because artists practice art without needing credentials..." That really gets it. The reading goes on to mention how artists can comment on scientific findings without being "constrained." By what? Education? Basic understanding of the fundemental principles that facilitate a deeper understanding of scientific fact?

Harrell Fletcher set out to say something about how we as civilians of St. Augustine don't know much about its indigenous peoples. He didn't do so much of that. Mostly he just collected exhibits from other locations around town. Does that make him a historian? No. At best it provides a commentary (weak at best in this case) and at worst it stands to devalue the work of ACTUAL historians because artists have no credentials and of course are blameless if they misrepresent facts, unlike REAL people whose REAL job it is.

Of course this only applies to "modern artists" ie those who enjoy pretending to perform an occupation they are unqualified for. This sort of nonsense infuriates me. Accoutability should be MOST important in an artistic response to a topic, not least.

Week 4

Inspiration: All images by Melissa Rathbone

Work

Reading Response: Introduction to "Crafting an Artistic Self"

A lot of this article re-affirmed one of my longstanding issues with art, especially modern art, where the knowledge of the artist is almost an absolute necessity to understanding the piece.

Being a lover of music, I have certainly done my homework into the lives of my favorite singers/musicians, but have never had a CD that made absolutey no sense without some sort of background on the artist. That's why they form bands, to exploit a certain persona that they can change for other projects.

Same with writers. Background is nice, but not necessary. It seems to me that visual artists are like runners-up in the artistic race. They can't make something that explains itself without context, so they get a pat on the back and "well it's okay you're a visual artist."

What I did like was the notion that an understanding of personal motivations is necessary for an artist. I don't think that Stan Lee needs to explain what he "meant" when he wrote Spider Man. That work is self explanatory. But I think he did need to look inside himself to be able to say what Spider Man would do, and what sorts of situations would occur in that specific world. I'm much more interested in forming a character and saying, "Now how would they do this?" And that requires an intimate knowledge of how YOU as the creator would do that, and WHY you chose that to begin with, so you work can avoid the pitfall of redundancy or tritness that, say, a band's 5th album, can fall into.