Final Project

My piece is something I found personally to be a creative take on Degas' work.  I thought of the main concepts that Degas typically uses in his paintings: vantage point, asymmetrical, and motion.  As a dancer myself I decided to paint using my feet to give the impression of all these concepts.  I used red paint to show the metaphorical blood, sweat, and tears ballerinas go through, yet it realistically happens sometimes that their feet can bleed.  The eye path of the piece is structured by guided lines throughout the motion of the feet.  There is no true focal point to the piece, however you find yourself looking at the shoes to begin your journey throughout the piece.  What I tried to create is a story, similar to Degas.  I used a song to choreograph I tried to show on paper to allow the audience to create a story in their head and make up their own dance.  The deeper meaning behind this piece is the hard work a dancer puts in, but also the creativity and imagination you can have when you dance. Dance, itself is a free flowing type of art and anyone can create it.  There was two things I loved about doing this piece was to give that unusual vantage point where the audience has to illustrate an image in their minds of a dance being performed and how the foot prints have whole movement throughout.  The other thing I loved about this piece was being able to document something I'm passionate about.  As a dancer, you see your performances and your entire body moving, you never exactly know what the imprint of your feet are like or where they exactly travel.  So, for me, I found this to be a really unique experience to document that.
I think the one thing I can take away from this class is color and the impression it leaves on people Over the semester I have been able to see how color evokes different emotion in me and my peers.  I never realized before how much of an impact colors alone or with other colors can make a person feel a certain way.
Some things could be better are the time allotted for projects, maybe having less projects that are a little more time consuming.  I think being able to completely develop an idea and having the time to document that progress is important.  With that being said I believe it would be beneficial to write out our ideology behind our artwork to hand in (something brief not to long) explaining our thought process.  I could find this helpful because I found with me sometimes I had an idea in mind and really wanted to be able to artistically depict it, but just couldn't.  I think if you could see where the idea was going and that the struggle wasn't being creative, yet just a little artistically challenged (like myself) it could help students greatly.

Postmodernism Project

In general the piece is supposed to depict jealousy.  What emotions are brought upon by jealousy.  As the artist I used a clear picture in the center to show this emotion and then other pictures around the border to show correlating emotions that comes along with jealousy.  For example, annoyed, angry, and a little bit of curiosity to invoke the overall emotion of jealousy we feel.  The colors in the background are primary and secondary color landscape.  Because the center point of this piece is so busy I kept the the colors simple to keep the center point as the central focus.

The idea behind this piece was to be able to see what being jealous looks like.  That if someone says something mean or backhanded to you it is usually arising from some type of jealousy.   The words written in ink in background are the things that will most likely bring on jealousy.  The colors are to show rage with red, the mellow yellow you see when it settles a little, and then blue as the sadness that comes afterwards when you are jealous.  The distorted shape that the piece is put on is constructed in this way to show aggression and that "pulling your hair out" feeling you would get from being jealous.

The Shape of Time

When you think about talent you don't ever necessarily think about the time in which it arises.  The western mind thinks that if someone is talented and has the ability they will rise to the top no matter when they are performing their skill.  Yet depending on the time period the skill not be needed or appreciated.  Timing and opportunity comes into play even when it comes to talent.  We can easily identify painters such as DiVinci and Michaelangelo because they are extremely talented and their skills fit their time period.  We may not know about less significant artists, yet they can be very talented but their work didn't rise to the top because of the time period they were in.  I found this article to be a thought provoking point on talent and how it can come to be.  It doesn't just hold true for art but for other areas as well.

Post Modernism

What I have gathered from Post Modernism:

• That it is a collective type of art
• Bringing all different cultures and realms together
• Everyone has their own dialect
• Things aren't supposed to be together somehow work together
• This idea of making everything imaginary to make everything else seem real (Disneyland)
• Capitalism has brought different groups together (Coca-cola)

Data Visualization

The thing that I found most fascinating about this video was how data and visuals relate.  When you look at data you don't typically think about art as a component however it is very important part to how we as human beings digest information.  When compiling information it can be difficult just giving a person a piece of paper with words and numbers on it.  This can make it hard for the person to understand and have a deeper understanding of what all this information means.  The tool that visualization gives us is a better comprehension of the data that is placed in front of us.

The last line of video really stuck with me when the last man said along the lines that visualization shouldn't serve as confirmation, yet as a picture.  So what I took away from this is that we should still question visualization, not always allowing it to be the end all be all.

Whitespaces

In the first arrangement it is noticeable that the larger sheet of paper is more of a blue, cool tone versus the white piece of paper on top that has a touch of rosiness to it.  When I changed the lighting I noticed that the two pieces almost adopted the previous color of the other paper.  The larger paper had a yellow, red tint while the smaller paper had a gray, bool color to it.


Photo 1                                                              Photo 2

Phase 2