it finally seems like i've hit a sort of stride or something in terms of my schoolwork -- i' m really like...inspired and excited about a lot of the projects i'm going to be working on over the coming weeks, and they are as follows.
the first is for my puppetry class -- it's a horse skeleton marionette which i'm mostly going to be carving out of wood, and i think i'm going to paint it a sort of off-white and do some fun, intricate designs on it. my goals for its motion is to be able to have it trot, rear, bow with one foot forward, and maybe shake its head and buck. puppets are funny because there are like...three phases to making them. you have to make the parts, then you have to make sure that the parts articulate the way that you want them to (which may require modifying them in ways that make them not look the way you want them to in the end), and then stringing, which is an art in and of itself and i will need at least a week or two to figure out. my goal is to try to have a fairly complete skeleton by two weeks from now, when we'll be bringing the projects into class for the teacher to help with.
then there's printmaking -- latest project is a reduction woodblock. i'm really falling for woodcarving, there's something really great and tactile about it that i'm kinda growing obsessed with. except for the fact that it's messy and now there are wood shavings like everywhere in my room which is not a good thing. but hey. so, a reduction woodblock basically consists of taking a block, cutting a design into it, printing that design a lot of times, then cutting away more and using another color of ink and printing that on top of what you've already printed. this can make some really excellent effects, but part of the problem with it is that you can only print the full image for one run. if you make twenty prints of the thing, that's all you get, because in order to get to the final image, you have to carve away at the actual block. i'm on a horse skeleton kick for whatever reason, i think they're pretty interesting and dynamic forms, so this is a horse skull that i think might have people in it or something. we'll see!
and for my sequenced narrative class -- we're making artist's books. they're not like...a book of paintings that someone else has compiled. they're a 'book' in some form or another, as a piece of art. the massart library actually has a really awesome collection of them. there were three i particularly liked -- the first was called 'touchstone', and it was a book that had been ground down to the same size and shape as a river-washed stone, so you could just hold it in the palm of your hand. it was really interesting that the artist was able to give something made of paper the qualities of rock -- you could still flip through the ground-down pages, but even the surface felt smooth. i forget the title of the second one, but a female artist had taken various items of clothing people wear throughout the course of their lives (diapers, a ballerina costume, army fatigues, jeans and a t shirt,, a wedding dress, even a prison jumpsuit!) and ground them down into fibers, making them into paper. the book then progressed from paper made of "100% Diaper" to old people pajamas. it was pretty fantastic to see all of these items of clothing that are so integral, and really significant to a lot of people, all contained in one little book. also led to a discussion about how if she were a male artist buying children's underwear and ballerina costumes off of ebay, it would totally come off as all kinds of creepy, but it was easier to accept because she was female.
and then the final book, which i was able to find and buy online, was one of the most singularly moving pieces of minimalist art that i have ever seen. it's a white block of a book, maybe five inches thick, and the cover and pages might be 4x5. the pages are all this weighty cardstock, and the book itself (according to the internet) weighs about a pound, so it's really dense. on the cover, there are cutout block letters with the word 'ABSENCE' in all caps. the first page of the book has a single dot punched out slightly left of center of the page. this dot continues down for maybe ten pages or so, and then, there are two square cutouts, maybe about a centimeter square each, positioned so that their corners were nearly touching, like squares on a checkerboard. these cutouts continue down for 110-ish pages, i think, until the final page, which is a cutout of a street layout.
for me, it was about midway through the pages when it dawned on me that these were meant to represent the twin towers. once that realization hit, it was so strangely powerful to flip through those pages, each one representing a floor and all of the people who were there. i've never, ever liked minimalist art, but this was such an eloquent, powerful piece that it absolutely blew me away.
i don't quite know what i'm going to do for my book, but i know i want to use a lot of woodcuts, maybe some leather -- i've got two weeks for it and am definitely still in the planning stages.
and finally, my drawing class -- the theme for our second project is 'the figure in practice'. the teacher's very loose about her definitions of what she wants for the projects, so as long as you can argue it effectively, she'll take pretty much anything. that being said, i'm continuing on my skeleton kick. it's going to be a big piece, at least six feet long, probably four-five feet tall. i'm still figuring out the exact composition, but i know i want to use ink. it's going to be a horse and rider as skeletons, approaching some form of an obstacle in the middle of the page, and as they take off to the jump, a paint-splatter of muscle and skin starts attatching to them, until as they're perfectly over the jump, they're totally normal looking, and then all that stuff starts peeling away as they descend towards the ground again, until they're skeletons again, and i might have the horse trip and fall and end it with them crumpled up on the ground, but who knows. this is more a logistical problem than anything, because huge sheets of paper like this are epic impractical to work on, however, using smaller sheets or boards will invariably create this segmented effect that i know i don't want. all the tragedies.
tl;dr: i go to art school.
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