Back to School Update: One Month Under My Belt!

Well, it has been exactly one month since first day of class - what a fabulous experience it has been. Everyone has been very welcoming and great to work with - definitely caused me to meet and get to know different folks than would normally cross my path, which has been very good. I forget the generation gap most of the time although not sure how easy it is for everyone else. One day, while working with nib pen drawings, the instructor commented that I must have had some experience with them. I went on to tell her that when I was a child, we had to use nib fountain pens until grade 5 to make sure we developed good penmanship. As I watched her and another student's response, I recognized the same look on my face when my father-in-law told me that he took a horse and buggy to school - started to feel pretty old, but only lasted for a moment.

I've been working on lots of stuff since my last post. In ceramics we experimented with different ways to build cups and then had to design a set of cups based on a theme. Here is my version of cups as Mountain landscape. They are not fired yet - hopefully the colours will change and they will stay in one piece during that process. Will post the final product.

In fibre class, we finished off our cardboard furniture piece - here he is - just over 6 ft tall. My instructor suggested that I build some cardboard figures to illustrate the purpose of the piece (she wouldn't go for using the felt creatures that it is intended for) so I ended up making cardboard gnomes too.

Drawing class was a very interesting challenge in working with grey-scale. This self portrait is 40X55 inches made up of 94 squares of different marks to achieve the tone needed. It is based on a bottom lit black and white picture (scary - have not done the bottom lit thing since telling ghost stories under a blanket as a kid). To top it off, it had to be drawn upside down. I can tell you that multi-focals and old joints are a whole different challenge when working on a piece this tall.

Painting was another interesting challenge - doing a still life to work on colour theory and blending of paints. We were limited to one warm and cool hue in each of red, green, and blue and had to block in colours - no glazing which is my natural tendency. I have never experimented so much with colour mixing and learned huge amounts although still feel shaky. I managed to make a perfect black - something I have never achieved before and may never again.

Our painting home work this week was to make an abstract about a cultural or personal interest and choose a title and sound bite to accompany it. I came up with "See Sea" which will be accompanied by Whale song. I was so excited about the colour blending thing that I wanted to experiment with mixing blues and greens as well as testing out the impact of complementary colours.

Next week promises to be even more fun!

Back to School Update - Week Two

Another week of classes under my belt and still having way too much fun. I got to try the potter's wheel in ceramics and came away with a very healthy respect for how difficult it is to do. I haven't given up yet but by the end of the day, "throwing" pots was starting to sound like a very apt description of what I wanted to do with them. However, I did manage to make a few cylindrical pots without them careening off the wheel like the proverbial drunken sailor on a merry-go-round. Fibre Arts was great and I am almost finished my Tree house. 

Drawing class was fun with several hours of drawing a still-life tangle of chairs, mannequin parts and paper ribbons - very humbling exercise. Our homework was to draw a knotted  mess of something, staying true to what we saw, and then adding other details from our imagination inspired by the drawing. What was I thinking ??? - I chose a tangled mess of wool rovings and yarn. It looked like a root to me which led me to create "Root Ball" - this is a large piece about 40 inches tall.

Then came painting and another task that is definitely outside the box for me. We each quickly painted 10 large sheets of black to white gradients using different techniques and textures. We pooled all of these and cut them into pieces to create a collage based on a black and white photo. Another big piece on board that is 48 inches tall. This was a very interesting exercise and I learned a lot about how to deal with contrast - mainly what I would do differently next time, but there are some things that I really like about this piece including the impact of the tiny church even though it is dominated by the tower.

Notice the recurring theme that everything in painting, drawing, and fibre is BIG? This relates to another general observation about art school that I hadn't thought about - it is very physically challenging for us more than mature students. Between hauling massive supplies up and down stair cases and fighting with clay, I am feeling like I have had quite the work out this last week. I am very thankful I did not opt for sculpture - I can only imagine how heavy that stuff must be. On one trek up the stairs, I commented to another student that there would be a market for art Sherpas - I felt pretty bad because he insisted on carrying my portfolio to class. On top of that, each studio class is 6 hours long and usually involves standing on a cement floor or contorting yourself to make things - and then there is another 3-6 hours of homework. I am pleased to say that I feel stronger, more flexible, and no back pain - very pleasant surprise!

Time to go pack up my supplies for next week!

Back to School Update

Phewwww, made it through the first week of classes! The classes have been amazing while the administrative side has been a nightmare - but, oh well - don't get me started.
As usual I'm doing things a bit differently. I have four studio courses (ceramics, drawing, fibre arts, and painting) rather that the typical three plus Art History and a Humanities. It is fabulous being in studios all the time. We have already jumped into projects in most of the classes and have lots of homework. Very busy - but kind of like Kindergarten on steroids. I mean this in the best possible way. Not that it is easy, but it is about creativity and getting up to your neck in stuff and making something out of it. Fun, fun, fun.

First came ceramics - I've always wanted to try working with clay. These pieces are not fired yet. We were experimenting with different techniques like wax and paper resists and laminating. I am excited to see what they turn out like.










3D Fibre Arts is going to be great. Our first project is making a life-size piece of furniture out of card-board. I decided to try making a "Tree-house" display shelf for the felt creatures. This is the small scale model - poor Hobbes is skeptical.














Then there is Drawing with an assignment to draw two scenes with lots of objects and starting with the closest objects. What was I thinking? By the time I was finished with trying to nail the perspective, I just wanted to crash in the chair with my cooler.
Homework is done for this week and I am all packed up and ready for tomorrow - yahoo!