The Dining Room

Yesterday Kelsea and I got quite productive and started hanging up pictures on the wall behind our dinner table. We put up all the paintings I've done that include people, and we were going for an old-fashioned wall full of family photos, but paintings instead. As I paint more I'll hang them up and soon this wall will be too stuffed to fit any more. But here is what it looks like now.

I got to say, it really pulls the room together. :)

Also, I added some photos of the newer paintings and their over in the "Artwork" section of this blog.

On a personal note, things are always interesting. Classes are going really well! I'm taking Life Painting (with my favorite professor, Sandra Reed), Computer Arts Class, and Art History II. Today we covered the 15th century and I'm quite excited for next class when we well be talking about Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael.

The spring heat is slowly eating away at the cold here, its a beautiful day, and I'm quite excited for the weekend. I have lots of fun to do this weekend. The awesome part about my fun is that at the end of the weekend it all gets graded! Whodathunkit! 

Art Art Art

This weekend was Open Studio at Alexander Hall. Alexander Hall was at one time an old supermarket that SCAD converted into classrooms for the undergraduates on the first floor and twenty-five or so 10x10 studio rooms for the graduate students on the second floor. On Saturday night all the doors were open and the art was on the walls and there were fancy refreshments going around and everyone got a good look at some really fantastic art. You weren't allowed to take photos but I snapped a few. I actually took allot of photos (shhh...) But I'm only going to post a very very very few select on here. The studios were lots of fun to see, almost as fun as the art itself. The terms are you can do whatever you like to your 10x10 cube as long as at the end you return it to white walls and account for all the outlets. Needless to say there some pretty interesting set ups and it was informative to see what tools they were using, and how they were managing the space. Allot of the studios mirrored the art that was displayed on their outside walls. The same color schemes from a painting could be found splattered on the wall or smeared on a palette.


I'm currently working on two pieces again. One for Painting, the other for Drawing III. I'm posting some photos of some of the recent pieces I have finished while they were still in progress. I photographed them finished in the studio yesterday but I have yet to put them up here.

Hope everyone to be well, and have fun preparing for Thanksgiving. I've been looking up different dishes to make for this Thanksgiving dinner and I think it's going to be pretty spectacular.

You may like to visit this website. He's a graduate student named Will Penny who does some really interesting, abstract, and aesthetically logical pieces. The marlin I photographed was done by him.

Bye!

"The Origin of Love"

For Drawing III our last projects agenda was to tell a story. It didn't take me too long to decide to tell the story of the origin of love, as told (or sung) by Hedwig from the fantastic musical, Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I have had quite the history with this play, it has been in and out of my life for years now and I just can't seem to leave it alone. Or maybe it can't leave me alone, I'm not yet sure. The lyrics can be found here.
     Summed up, the story of the origin of love goes like this. Long ago, when the earth was still flat there were three types of people. They looked like two people glued up back to back and some of them were two men (children of the sun), two women (children of the earth), and one woman and one man (children of the moon). These beings roamed the earth and gained knowledge and were very strong and extremely sentient. The gods became scared of how able these beings were becoming so Zeus decided to split them in half with his lightning bolts. One fateful afternoon he did so. We were torn apart, straight down the middle. Another god started a storm and swept us all away all over the ends of the earth, alone and stranded. The loneliness we associate with love is really the pain of the wound that split our hearts in half. The search for love is the search for the other half, and once we have found that other half, making love is the closest we can come to becoming one being again.
     My piece is in response to that. It is painted in Acrylic on canvas on two separate pieces so that you can switch their positions. They can be either together or apart. There is lots of thought put into what is behind each of the heads. On one side you have a closed eyed contemplative faced young man with the earth and a galaxy behind him. On the other you have an open eyed man with a brain, and the sun behind him. I believe that the sun and the brain are similar celestial objects whereas the earth and the galaxy are also similar celestial objects. The sun and brain emit energy, the earth and the galaxies are places where energy has pacified, it is not as turbulent and on the surface (or inside) of these tranquil environments more complex materials can be found, those such as the human brain.
     There is an interesting pattern that arises if you think about this in a evolutionary manner and look at the levels where material has reached some sort of stable form. Atoms, galaxies, suns, planets, humans. They all reach a maximum complexity at which point more complex entities emerge, almost like condensation, and begin their own journey towards maximum complexity. I talked about this last year when I wrote an essay on material evolution.
     This piece is also meant to show the tension that comes from love. Love is not possible without separation, just as these two beings can only see each others faces when they are separated. As one, they are ignorant of the pain. Are they better off this way?

The pictures below are of the work underneath the paint and also a sneak peek of my oil painting project that I'm working on in class, which is in half an hour. And my egg painting got on the wall! So that's good.