Menil Answers

I would have put the questions too but I lost the paper. sorry

1.     1.  I don’t know the name of it but the most enjoyable this which I saw at the Menil was the pendulum outside the entrance of the main building.  The clean lines and perfect proportions of the piece embody mastery of a chosen medium.  The knowledge of the works weight is a wonderful contrast to the seemingly effortless way in which it sways in the breeze.

2.     2.  I’m not sure if there was anything that I would have described as disturbing.  I might say the works of Picasso might fit this description best.  However, my knowledge and distaste for the artist and his chosen style may be the true reason behind me saying this.

3.     3.  Once again I would have to say the pendulum.  This piece is very much my taste and style, in fact the moment I saw it I instantly began thinking of what it would take to make something similar and where I could possible hang such a large piece.

4.  4.     This may be outside of the parameters of the question but the thing which most interested me was the museum itself.   I love free museums they afford one the opportunity to slow down and study works, also the idea behind the neighborhood portion of the museum is wonderful.

5.   5.    I think the main building was near perfect.  This is mainly to do the ceiling and how it was designed to allow natural light in to show the works as best as possible.

A sick realization, and unanswered question

This has little to do with school, well; I guess that’s not entirely true.  It has to do with me and how I am living my life at this moment and that is heavily influenced by school so, I guess maybe it does. 

I just started a new job, I hate it.  It’s a menial position in a mail room…. I’m not kidding.  It pays well enough I guess, way more the position is worth, but I can’t stand it.  I’m about to head in to work right now and it will be my fourth day.  It is literally taking everything I have to make myself go.  That’s not like me I have had jobs since I was 15 I believe in working hard and try to do so, so this is new.  I have come to realize it’s this classes fault.  While I have never liked working for other people and in fact started a company so that I would never have to do so again, I now feel a new disgust with the whole afar.  I’m working on being a junior so it’s not like this is my first art class, but it is the first one where I have started to feel like an artist… somewhat.  With that said, I don’t know what to do.  I feel can’t go back, not to something like I am doing now.  I know what I want to do and working for a corporation has nothing to do with it and never will.  I am lost. 

How do you make money as an artist, especially before you have even gotten out of school?

Accordion Book

My accordion book is not how I hoped it would turn out to be.  I first made the book by spray mounting my textures onto mate board and the spray mounted those to a large strip of black cloth.  It didn’t work.  The board pulled right off and the only one that held at all ended up pulling the back off of the board when I removed it, which of course meant I got to make a new texture and remount it.  I chose then to simply use some black cloth tape, but I have not been able to find any and the only black tape I have found is duct tape which is shiny, not at all what I wanted but… so it’s done, for now.  If I can find time in the near future I have every intention of redoing it.  

We will see.

3D Dots

I chose to use this pattern of dots as I believed it had the greatest range of possibilities.  Also, I just like this arrangement.  I personally think that it looks like a skull and so I decided to play off of that.  I lined a box with newspaper and overlaid the newspaper with hand written love notes and sonnets from Shakespeare.  I cut a frame for the piece out of a piece of wood and placed it midway down the box to give another dimension of depth.  For the dots I used two piston head which I found in the dumpster behind the Agricultural building across the parking lot and the ends of two 7mm rifle rounds.  I particularly like the rifle rounds for this piece and if there were any such thing as an obtainable bullet the size of a piston I would have used that.  I used eye hooks and wire screwed into the back of the frame to mount the piece.

The base of the work

Using a calligraphy pen to write out the letters 

The pistons and bullets (kind of looking like a frog at this point)

This was my first attempt using only white paper. 

The final work (not the best camera, thus not that great of a picture)

Human dots

In

For the Human Dot project we used multiple sizes of dots with a variety of heights for perspective.  For our white background we used the sky on a partially cloudy day, this was the clouds provided a white backdrop while the breaks in clouds provided a contrast of color and texture. 

The Exquisite Corpse Two

The rambunctious ball dancing, a bounding tangerine.

This sentence is so bizarre that I had a hard time finding something to relate in any way to it.  The other problem I faces is that while odd the concepts presented in my sentence are so familiar that everyone has an instant idea of what it would look like for a ball to dance with a tangerine.  This is why my first literal translation if the idea seems so straightforward and cartoon like.  Here I took a completely different approach.  Nothing was jumping out to me about this so I walked around taking random picture and nothing turned out.  So I started taking pictures around the house and took this image of a clock with a spinning ball pendulum.  I liked the way the balls moved and it reminded me of the sentence.  I chose to shoot the image in black and white to highlight the contrast and details of the clock meconium.  To show the connection between the clock movement and dancing I slowed the cameras F-stop and spun the pendulum, this way when I shot the image I captured the motion blur and tide in.

Newspaper Tower

I just saw that I had never written about the newspaper project we had on the first day.

This was a pretty straight forward project, the goal here was to make as tall of a structure as possible that would support a cinderblock using only newspaper and masking tape.  I didn’t have any catastrophic learning opportunities here, thankfully.   I chose to use time tested principles and they ended up working well.  I based my design on the cylinder and the triangle which are two of the strongest shapes in engineering.  I counted out each sheet of full sized newspaper and divided them evenly into six stacks; I used an additional stack, plus the extras, to for the core of the structure.  I rolled all seven stacks tight cylindrical shapes and used the masking tape and tightly raped the whole tube. I then took the half sheets of newspaper and folded them into thick straps.  I placed two cylinders at three corners and one larger cylinder in the center.  I attached the tubes together using the newspaper straps and masking tape and there ya have it, one newspaper tower.