Artist of the Week – Marina Abramovic

This weeks artist was Marina Abramovic. Woah! She’s intense. What is interesting is that we are looking at her art, as a performance rather than a painting or a photograph.  I’m not sure if I liked or disliked her work.  I read that her art is about “confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body”.   In some of her pieces, self-harm and mutilation take place. For example, in her performance of Thomas Lips, Marina uses a razor blade to cut the shape of a star into her stomach.

I chose the 3 photos above because they caught my eye for multiple reasons. The first one I thought that it described the pressures of society and what a person, and art must be. And the blood represents how difficult it is to achieve society’s standards of what perfection is.

The second one I chose just because she had a goat. And goats are super cute.

The third, with a skeleton on top of her reminded me of death and how maybe as people we love with this constant fear of death. Like death weighing over you.

 

 

 

Week 5 – Instagraaaam!

This weeks activity required us to post on Instagram! Which I was totally okay with since my dog has an Instagram account (don’t ask, my dog is just cooler than I am). This was really fun! Except I don’t usually post a lot so it was interesting to have to post a few times a day.

My first post was of my dog… naturally. Who is always down to take a photo. Followed by my friends bouldering and my feet because who doesn’t take photos of their feet. My last post was a really neat table top at Urth Cafe, while I was studying for my other summer school class.

So not as many of us posted selfies like I thought we would. And it reminds me that we all have a different vision for out photos… some people like the subject to be themselves while others enjoy objects. My favorite photo…besides my dog of course, was photos of peoples dogs and photos of the outdoors. Really cool to see what our classmates are up to this summer.

 

 

 

Artist of the Week: Francesca Woodman

This weeks artist was Francesca Woodman. A photographer whose photographs were black and white. She typically used herself as her subject, and a quote by her was “It’s a matter of convenience—I’m always available.” So, I’m not sure if I’m making this a bigger deal than it is, but that quote was pretty cool to me. Like, you cant depend on anyone else, you gotta rely on yourself. I’m down with  that.

Anyway, she focuses a lot on herself and the female body. And her work is anything but tame. Personally, I think her work is a little depressing and her blurred shots are a little creepy. I’m not gonna lie, I was intrigued by this artist but not too crazy about her. I came to realize that I don’t give photographers en0ugh credit. Not sure why. But with that being said, I do like black and white photos.

Artist of the Week: Graffiti Artists!

This week, we watched “Bomb It” a documentary on graffiti. It was really interesting because I’ve never really paid attention to graffiti artists. Especially in anything outside of Los Angeles.

There were a lot of things from the documentary that stuck with me, particularly how graffiti is perceived as bad but advertising and other propaganda isn’t. Also, I would’ve never thought to put ancient cave paintings and graffiti in the same category but it somehow made sense and the more I thought about it the cooler I thought it was.

This whole documentary had me thinking “oh, I never thought about it that way” from the trains being “museums on wheels” to “graffiti makes areas look a lot nicer than advertisements of half naked chicks”

I decided to browse the web for different graff artists and pick out a few of my favorite pieces.

I just really liked this one

I’m always in DTLA so this reminds me of home

 

Graffiti Writting

took forever to get this right!

Outlining it was the worst

This was as far as I got

My friend beautified it for me and captured what I was thinking!

Okay so this was ridiculously fun and ridiculously difficult! I have so much more respect and admiration for graffiti artists. Using a spray can is sooooo hard!  I admit I asked for help and the end details are NOT my work. I could NEVER get those perfect outlines going.

Getting the block letters going on their own was such a task I erased like a million times. So I decided to get my friends involved. It was so hard. We decided to make a day out of this and we headed to another friends house who is way more talented than we are. So he guided me. We got the name going and then the outline started. THAT was even harder it looked so bad and not smooth at all. After he taught me how to hold a can right, it got better. So I had this sunset vision if you will of how I wanted it, little did I know that two colors weren’t going to be enough to do this! Once I got my two colors down all of us pitched in to color the rest of it and my friend helped with the outline.

I learned that this takes crazy skill! And creativity. Also, took forever, which means that those that are doing it at night and fast are ridiculously talented people. I was intimidated by this project at first… and kind of still am. Don’t think I’ll be hitting any walls soon. But I have tons of respect for these artists and see graffiti way differently.

 

 

Art Activity – Automatic Drawing

 

The Final Drawing 🙂

We had a hard time not laughing

This exercise was interesting. It was particularly hard to get someone to do this with! But my friend Alice was kind enough to do it and my friend Joyce was a great photographer. It was really hard to stop laughing at first since we’ve never had to be so up close to each other. At first, it was hard to get the pen going, but once it did it was interesting to see how it flowed across the page. We were actually really pleased with the end result and decided to keep it. This was really intimidating to do at first but it was super fun at the end.