Project No. 2

My process tends to be whatever I feel like. Some days I just want to do nothing but create create create! These were my exact feelings while I worked on this second project incorporating greyscale and two colors. I must have gone through three quarters of a notepad, just painting and sketching. Some of it nonsensical, others with form, and still others just plain ugly. This is my room while I was working, pieces of paper with ink and paint, all strewn about haphazardly. Welcome to my world.

Three pieces stood out a little bit from the pile that were all occupying my bedroom floor, so I picked them up and took them to class. The first couple were more calculated, but the last one was just a breeze and so fun to do. The brushstrokes took a lot of concentration but the satisfaction of making such great, smooth strokes just felt amazing. Just ink, a brush and some paper. I could go wild. I did actually and I ended up making this obscure image of a fallen trapeze artist. I didn't turn this one in but I have fun looking at it. There is some sort of flame breathing beast waiting at the bottom for her.

Project No. 1

Having started this class a day late, I had to jump right in and do two assignments in one go. The result was alright in the end. I haven't done anything art/design related for the entire summer and so it has been a little hard for me to get into the mindset. During my first, sort of "warm up" attempts. I ended up wasting a lot of paper and eventually just went back to drawing small thumbnail sketches.

Normally I do a lot of my work on a computer so for this project I decided to do it all by hand. I wanted to free myself from the cold, hard, constrains of computer aided design. This is what I came up with.

The first one feels tired to me. Luke said the word "forced." I agree. It was the first I worked on and I wasn't sure what to do, so it was definitely a bit forced.

This one was more a thought about two objects interacting in a space. It reminds me of Nike for some reason.

This piece is my favourite out of the three, it is more free and has a nice sort of variation. The strokes feel unruly, like pieces of shorn hair on the floor of a barber shop.

Black Mountain College

Black Mountain college, a progressive liberal arts college, was founded in 1933 by Theodore Dreier, John Andrew Rice, and other faculty from Rollins College. The school was small and privately run near Asheville, North Carolina. The teaching style differed in that rather than be constructed of book learning, students were to learn through interaction in real life with other students. This learning style stemmed from the progressive education movement.

The college's unique learning atmosphere housed and nurtured many designers, musicians, writers, helping to further the avant garde movement in America and the explosion of experimental art. Students and professors lived and worked together, sharing all tasks and learning in real life situations.

Instructors at Black Mountain College included Josef and Anni Albers (Joseph was the first art teacher at BMC), Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, and many other influential poets, musicians and designers. The school closed in 1957, but it has lived on through the many artists that came there after the post-war era. It has served as a model for other creative alternative schools such as Evergreen State College, Goddard College, University of California and others. There is a museum project dedicated to showing process and products from the Black Mountain College, and also an online archive project with more in depth information.