Wk 3: Meeting the Artists!

Schedule

• See the schedule on Trello

You are responsible for the information on this page

As you know, this is a Hybrid course. We use our small amount of F2F time each week to focus on Activities. Now in Week 3 we’ll be spending this Wednesday and most Wednesdays at the SOA Galleries. The main official communication with you is online. Be sure to read materials like this post, and follow requests like the ones below for Post Naming, Classmate Links, and so on.

Artist Conversations

This week we begin our Artist Conversations and as I’ve tried to make clear, I’m asking you to really up your writing game. All the details are in the syllabus:

• Syllabus / Sample Artist Conversation

As you know, we’re at the SOA Galleries this week. And most weeks from now on. Class is at the regular time, but we’ll meet in the gallery courtyard between FA2 & FA3. Bring your 4×6 ID Cards (yes, you can do them there)

Points on BeachBored

All points through Week 2 are now up on BeachBored. Be sure to check your points and know where you stand!

Post Naming!

Please use this format:

Wk2 – Art Experience – Plaster Casting
Wk2 – Artist Conversation – Brianna Allen
Wk2 – Classmate Conversation – Geri Weckstein

Classmate Conversations

• Be sure to state your classmates First and last Names.
• Be sure to include a (live!) link to their website.
• We don’t have a Classmate Question OTW yet, why don’t you write one: glenn.zucman.com/i2va/fall16-qotw/

Organize your website

Now that you’re gaining a little bit of familiarity with WordPress, you might go back and clean up your website. You might like to choose a different theme, or just organize your current theme. A lot of you have “Site Title” as your site title. It should be something else! 😀 Like:

• Glenn Zucman Art110
• Art Adventures
• Glenn’s World
• Sailor Kelly

Or just about anything other than “Site Title”! 😛

Theme Content

Many of you chose “Portfolio” themes that came with samples of your work on the home page. In the short, Art110 context these layouts might not be that helpful. But in the longer career context, these might be great. Whether you’re in Fashion Merchandising, Nursing, Aerospace Engineering, Business Marketing, or any other field, you can use areas on your website like these to feature some of your work. Just like writing your 1st resume, don’t worry too much about starting out with the awesomest content, just put up what you’ve done. Over time you can replace that with new and stronger work.

Also many of your themes came with “Demo Content” things like “Sample Post” that let you see how the theme will look even before you’ve posted much or any content. Now that you’ve got some content, you could go back and delete those demo posts.

Featured Images

When you’re making a post you can add images. I think you’ve all got this! 😀 You can also specify one image as your “Featured Image.” This image is the one that many themes will use on your home page. You’ll see on some of your websites that the demo posts show images on the home page and your new posts don’t. If you spedify a Featured Image that will fix this.

Points so Far

Weeks #1 & #2 are up on BeachBored now. So far we’ve had 102 points possible. Here’s how many points you should have to be on track for each grade level, and how many peeps in 1p / 2:30 are currently at each grade level:

A = 92 points – 52 / 46
B = 82 points – 9 / 6
C = 71 points – 0 / 4
D = 61 points – 1 / 0
F = 60 points – 3 / 6

As you can see we have a lot of peeps on A pace so far. Awesomesauce! If you’re one of the few who isn’t, now is the time to get rolling! Blowing a couple of weeks and then doing great work from here should work out pretty well by the end. Blowing another couple of weeks will put you in a deep points hole that’s hard to dig out of. I encourage those of you with low or no points to either decide to get started today, or to drop already if that’s what you need. Don’t just flounder collecting few or no points each week.

If anyone has any questions or needs any help, please ask me. Sooner is better! My virtual OH is Monday 9-10am at glenn.zucman.com/i2va/chat. You can also ask questions there 24/7. You can also email me: glenn.zucman@csulb.edu. And my RL OH is Wednesday 11:30-12:30 at the Umbrella Tables outside Robek’s / Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf at the USU. I can also meet with you at other times by appointment.

Leaderboard

Top 5 @1pm:

1. Maritess Anne Inieto, 153
2. Stephanie Arciva, 145
3. Melissa Rios, 143
4. Carlos Villicana, 131
5. Selena Lara, Joy Elizabeth Uba, Brian Sath, 127

Top 5 @2:30:

1. Lydia Chang, 160
2. Jamie Van, 149
3. Adriana Maciel, 139
4. Samantha Gomez, 132
5. Jessica Obrique, 131

Discussion Posts

Most of you are doing great with post naming. A few of you still need to be sure to start your comment with your name, as “Amanda Martinez” does in this example:

• Please be sure to include your name, clearly spelled!
• Please be sure you post on the right page: 1p peeps on the 1p page / 2:30 on 2:30! 😀

Joseph DeLappe Discussion

I thought… Jospeh Delappe’s ‘dead-in-iraq’ was super interesting.

I’ve played plenty of war games and always just thought of them as games, not really reflecting about the reality of war. I remember sitting on the couch playing Call of Duty years ago and my mom would always say, “You don’t respawn in real life”, and I’d be like “Shut up mom you’re annoying” or something like that.

But I guess as you get older maybe you start to see war how it really is. Hell.

— Daniel Schmitz

Gesture Sketches

Looks like those of you who made it to the game had fun both at the game itself and also trying gesture sketching. Great job everyone! 🙂 It seems like many of you only drew a small handful of sketches. That’s great. But if any of you do want to draw better, I’d really encourage you to take an opportunity like that game to draw literally hundreds of 5 or 10 second sketches. Try to see how the body is articulated and make quick, sketches of volume in space, and spatial orientation. The more you do the faster you’ll get better. Not everyone “needs” to be able to draw, but if you’re interested, that’s how to make progress.

Landscapes with a Corpse

I decided to base this art project on a recurring dream that I had when I was in middle school, till this day I occasionally have the same exact dream. My dream is similar to the book The Giver by Lois Lowry and the short story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut. My dream takes place in the far future in a dystopian society and our government has implemented many laws and devices to control the population. The government’s intentions were to create policies that would allow everyone to be equal, but total equality resulted in censorship and restraint. Basically, in my dream my job was to deliver historical books to government officials, but books were prohibited to the general public because the government was afraid of people gaining knowledge. However, I would often break the law and make photocopies of the books and distribute them to the general public. The government discovered that I’ve been breaking the law and they hired ninja assassins to kill me to prevent me from starting a revolution. What was weird about the ninjas was that they were genetically manipulated so they would be small, their size would allow them to be more mobile and less visible. These ninjas killed me when I least expected it, and they framed me to make it seem like I had committed suicide.

— Alex Miramontes

So, crazy story, this actually happened:

One morning around 7:15am I was walking to school (which is across the street from my house) and I was hit by a car at this exact intersection. How strange right? Within the 5 minutes that it took for me to get from my house to the school, I was hit by a car. What are the chances?

That morning I woke up and thought it was going to be just like any other. And then suddenly I was hit by the unexpected, literally. We go about our days and never consider that it could be our last. But who does? No one wants to think about that. Unfortunately for me, I do. That day left an emotional scar but it also made me realize that everything can be taken from you within seconds. I have learned to enjoy every day that i am given, appreciate the people around me, not to waste time being angry and to live my life in a way that makes me happy. I almost lost my life and it was scary, but it was life changing.

This activity wasn’t dark in my opinion. I think it was actually a great opportunity for people to realize what I did without actually having to go through it. My pictures are a little more dramatic than how it actually happened but I thought I’d have some fun with it. I was worried it would give me anxiety trying to relive that event but I’m stronger now and I’ve accepted it.

— Briana Garcia

Beauty is pain, sometimes enough to kill you.

— Maritess Anne Inieto

I grew up in Compton, which many like to refer to as “The Hood.” There’s a statistic that says that, given the neighborhood I was born in, by the age of 16 I would be involved in a gang. It also says that by the age of 18 I would either be incarcerated or dead due to gang violence. A lot of the kids I grew up with always talked about how their biggest fear was to not make it past 18. To end up shot up dead in a corner. I wanted to project just that.

The image of me dead, shot up in a corner, is a representation of what I could’ve been but wasn’t. Watching me create this image was difficult for my parents. They told me I was crazy for even thinking of death or anything related. It was also kind of hard on me because it’s the way many of my childhood friends ended up.

— Selena Lara

My boyfriend of two years broke up with me about a month ago and it hurt me tremendously. He was my first true love and I couldn’t imagine my life without him because I thought he was the one. We had lived together and we had been through so much in those years we shared. The week after he broke up with me I felt like I was literally drowning with emotions and everything reminded me of him or memories we shared, etc. I had never felt a heartbreak like this and I didn’t think I would ever overcome the feelings and depression I was dealing with.

I feel like this is not a representation of what I was feeling when I was ‘drowning’ in my sorrows, but I feel like this represents how I am feeling now. I understand why it didn’t work out with Andrew and I got closure from him so I am feeling a lot better about the situation. I feel at peace. I did drown figuratively but now I am content with myself and I feel like I let that piece of me that was so attached and heartbroken drown but I kept myself as a person afloat.

— Adriana Maciel

Aside from the fact that I find over-glamorized celebrity overdoses interesting, I wouldn’t necessarily say that I have any sort of personal connection with drug-related topics. I have not met anybody or had anybody in my life who had a drug problem to the point where they overdosed, so I guess I’m pretty fortunate in that aspect. I honestly could not imagine how that must feel for people who have had to go through that with a loved one. However, this was definitely an interesting experience getting to step out of my comfort zone in order to get this story across. I think art is one of the best ways to tell controversial stories like this one and portray a certain message. Hopefully, I did that here.

— Emily Tomasello

When I imagine my departure, I consider heartbreak a possibility because I don’t think anything else hurts more–or kills more–than a broken heart. On creating this scene, I thought about incorporating a sense of Gothic style and romance. I can easily say that I am a hopeless romantic so I thought that creating a scene with a big mess would be fun to do because love is messy. Sometimes, we push away the ones we love. We come to become afraid of being vulnerable with another person and for someone to see the deep and dark parts of our soul because we are afraid of loving someone too strongly and then becoming disappointed. In romance, falling in love is a thrilling ride but falling out of love is the most heartbreaking and blue. Love is not always joyful but the meaningful moments and lessons we learn from being moved are something that I believe deserve a spotlight of their own.

When I thought of a tragic love scene, the first thing that popped into my mind was dead roses. With that in mind, I headed over to the nearest florist and asked for a dozen dead roses because why not? I’m sure the florist was surprised about my request but, in the end, I got the flowers that I wanted and then headed home to start working on the project. I ripped up a bunch of these roses and just scattered them all over the set. Just as love isn’t neat, I did not want a neat set. I also laid a fallen chair out on the floor because love has a way of knocking you down just as the chair had been knocked down. I paired the whole scene with a dark outfit to illustrate the dark demise of a broken heart when one may fall out of love, which is how I could imagine my departure and tragic end.

— Jamie Van

I have never had so much fun doing an art project. Personally, I’ve always been interested in dark subjects such as death and what not. So when I found out about this project, I knew I had to go big. I had a pint of extra fake blood from last Halloween and decided the bathtub was going to be the best clean up but also a very visual way of dying. I filled the bathtub and then mixed the fake blood in to become very deep red. Then I splattered it all over the bathroom walls which ended up being a perfect contrast on the white tiles. I entered the bathtub and poured more blood on my arms and chest to be even more gory. On the floor next to me I actually placed a little note to allude to a possible suicide.

Personally in my head I see my death as I was murdered but the culprit set it up as a suicide. Doing this project really made me open my mind to the possible ideas and appreciate the color contrast. I loved the look on the blood splatter on my tiles. The colors of the innocent white and the death red really spoke to me. It made me understand and appreciate just how powerful and meaningful colors are. I am actually quite terrified of death but this project made me think of an artistic interpretation of it. It is not something to be afraid of, but something to eventually embrace.

— Lizzy Stiller

With my mother’s help, I laid down in the driveway with the sun shining down hard on me and and traced an outline of my body so we could make more lines around me. Although I ended up a chalky mess, we had tons of fun bonding over this experience. Playing dead is a lot harder than you think when the sun is so bright and blinding. Even the cat wanted to make sure I was still alive and breathing as you can see in the picture above. The chalk outline is still on the driveway, so there might be a few more pictures uploaded as the rest of my family comes home and becomes a chalky mess.

— Laura Lockett

A lot of things ran through my head when my brother was taking the pictures. My throughts were mainly focused on what it would be like to pass away in your sleep. It has its pros and its cons. For starters, a person would have a peaceful death. One wouldn’t have to suffer through their death, which a lot of people now-a-days experience. A con to this experience would be that you wouldn’t get to say goodbye to your loved ones.

— Melissa Rios

This project really hit me inside. It made me think about appreciating ourselves more. It’s hard to look at a picture of yourself in a position like this where it could bring so much pain to the people you love.

— Esmeray Lopez

Art Talk OTW

1. 3 Million Years of Art History
2. Joseph DeLappe
3. Mahsa Soroudi
4. The Mind in the Cave

Nice discussion on Joseph DeLappe last week everyone. I want to get back to our “Art History Timeline,” and we will do that next week with The Mind in the Cave, about Cave Art from 10 to 40-thousand years ago. But this week I’d like to talk about one more living artist first. It’s only about 540 miles from us at CSULB to Joseph DeLappe at UNR. This week’s artist is both closer and further. Today she lives and works just down the road from us in Newport Beach, CA. But she was born and raised 7,500 miles from here in Tehran, Iran. This week’s Art Talk: Mahsa Soroudi:

Website:
Mahsa Soroudi.com

Nature’s Cadence:
mahsasoroudi.com/plant-show

7,500 Miles:
7500miles.org