Fruits and Folds

The painting class I have been taking has kept me especially busy lately. This piece is about 3' x 5' and took about 20 hours. It is a still life done from observation with oil paints on lenox paper with a yellow ochre bistre.

The original inspiration for this piece was meant to be Cezanne, but as my painting developed his inspiration became harder and harder to read until it almost disappeared entirely. I added Cezanne's classic purple outline to a few of the fruits to add emphasis, but that is basically the only area that his influence still exists. I fell out of touch with the Cezanne inspiration and into my own style of painting.

Cityscape

My sister recently got back from a semester abroad in London. Not having her around for that long was a big change for me since we are so close. I decided to distract myself by making a painting for her that emulated her time in London. Earlier in the semester she had taken this picture while my parents were visiting:

I decided to recreate this picture in a painting and created this piece:

After creating the piece for my sister I decided to further explore what I had created in a new piece. From my experimentation I came up with this:

In this piece I decided to use a red sharpie to further accentuate the feeling of the piece. I still haven't decided if I like the first one more or the second but either way they were definitely fun to make.

Cirque

This past summer the camp I was working at held a show of "Cirque de la Symphonie". One of the acts was a performer spinning a huge cube made of steel rods. (Seen below in a picture I took myself)

This semester, in class I was presented with the challenge of creating a piece of metalwork that had moving parts. Remembering the show from the summer I decided to create a metal cube with the ability to spin on its axis. Unfortunately, my unfamiliarity with soldering made this goal especially difficult. Several tries and  burnt fingers later this is the piece that came out:

My plan was to make it so that it is able to move, which it now does. If you push the cube in the center it spins just like in the Cirque Show.

Sentimental Sketchbook Doodles

I was listening to a music mix that dredged a lot of memories this week that caused me to take my emotion out in my sketchbook. The quotes are mostly there just to cite which song I was listening to when I created each drawing.

When I listen to music I think in imagery. The feeling of the song along with the lyrics create a scene in my head, many of which I doodle in a sketchbook or other such places. I have lately been wondering whether or not this happens to other people?
Maybe its common or maybe it is just me, I don't really know.

The project that I just wrapped is inspired by a doodle I made on a piece of lined paper. All it was really was me following the lines of the paper to create stairs. Through the doodle this cardboard sculpture was created. 

The way that I see it, it is kind of along the lines of MC Escher's Relativity in which he creates a room full of converging and diverging staircases with people walking around in every direction. His drawing is tapping into a dream like state of impossibility; something that I hope to master as he has.

More than Listening

Have you ever had a song come on that carried so many memories with it you thought your heart would rise out of your chest?
It may sound like an insane idea, but there are some songs out there that carry so much meaning for me that I am automatically transported to a certain place and time whenever they come on. This is especially true for songs sung at campfires where I work in the summer. The counselors of the camp spend all year searching for meaningful songs to be used over a 3 month period in the summer when we are all together.
The song that first got me thinking about this idea is "Swing Life Away" by Rise Against, which my friends and I sang at summer camp this past year.
This idea, along with a prompt for a school project is how this next piece came to be.

This piece was created using colored pencils on normal sketchbook paper and was inspired by the song "Push to Freeze" by Sorcerer. The song has no lyrics, but the music itself was enough to inspire this.

The way in which it was created, was the most fun for me personally. While listening to the song on my Ipod, I started absentmindedly drumming on the paper with my colored pencils. Eventually I realized that what I was doing could be an interesting way to create art, which is how my play evolved into art.

Straying from Reality

      I have always wondered how peoples minds differed from each other. Obviously I will never know for sure, because i can't get into someone elses head, and people are inherent liars.
Below is a small doorway into my imagination, courtesy of my sketchbook.

      I think the closest to truly being able to understand a person comes from seeing their drawings as a child, before they either lose their interest in art, or are too embarassed to go with their gut feeling. In my mind this is also why some really great art is child-like. Good artists can remake a picture with impecable accuracy, great artists aren't afraid to go back to basics. Great artists aren't chained to the restraints of the material world, they make art that lives within its own.

      Take for example the art of Christo and Jeanne Claude (http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/index.shtml). Christo is known for draping enormous monuments in spools of decadent fabrics. From all angles his pieces are seen from, they offer a feel of impossibility and fantasy. Many of his pieces have been controversial but with his wife, Jeanne Claude by his side, he has faced every obstacle.

      Another example of this fantasy art that I appreciate is that of Shel Silverstein (Official Silverstein Site). The children's author and lyricist illustrates all his own books with fantastic creatures seemingly straight out of  a dream. He is completely unafraid to put the creatures in his head onto paper; a quality that I genuinely admire. 

      I know that both of these artists have their faults. Since the recent death of his wife, Christo has begun planning a new piece, draping many miles of a river in cloth, potentially damaging the surrounding ecosystem permanently. Obviously he has had trouble drumming up support for such a dangerous task, and is still working on the permits. Shel Silverstein has been accused of having a very disturbing criminal past. Even with their problems, both of these men are critically thinking, imaginative geniuses and in my opinion, some of the best artistic minds of our time.