Creative Questions:

• 1. What is the first creative moment you remember?
• The most creative moment I could remember would have to be when I was around the age of four or five and I was sitting on the carpet inside my apartment drawing with crayons. There was a piece of masking tape on the paper to I peeled it off and folded the tape. I tried to bend it into a rectangle but the sides wouldn't stay together so I went looking for more tape to tape it down. I taped the side down and decided to make more rectangles and put them together. It eventually started looking like one of the tiny people from Legos so I made tiny figures out of tape. 
• 2. Was anyone there to witness or appreciate it?
• My mom was there and saw me folding tape so she didn't think much about it until I started taping paper together to make a house like the ones for my barbies. 
• 3. What is the best idea you’ve ever had?
• The best idea I ever had was to not listen to my sculpting teacher in my school and made figurines instead of vases because it lead to my interest in art and thinking outside the box. 
• 4. What made it great in your mind?
• What made it great was that even though someone tells you to do something you always have a choice to not listen and think with your own mind. People can't control the way you think, you can chose to think that way or chose to build off that way. 
• 5. What is the dumbest idea?
• The dumbest idea I ever had was to listen to my cousin about making homemade perfume by putting conditioner and water in a spray bottle.
• 6. What made it stupid?
• What made it stupid was that I accidentally sprayed a kid in the face and got into a lot of trouble, but the kid was a jerk to begin with. 
• 7. Can you connect the dots that led you to this idea?
• I had first thought about metal slides that use to be in my old elementary school and on a hot day it was the dumbest idea to go down a burning slide but then I thought about my old school and then how I got in trouble with spraying a kid. Whoops. 

S.T.A.C. Year: Number Three

Even though it is hard to believe that I am a junior it is even harder to believe that this is my third year in Stac.  I look at my old blog posts ,even though I admit I'm not the best person to kept up with it, and it is crazy how much Stac has changed me.
I read my first post from freshmen year and it is honestly embarrassing to read since my grammar was, and still is, absolutely horrid. The bad part is that I remember writing it and remember how crazy everything in Stac seemed to me. "When I first walked into the room everyone knew each other and there was so much stuff going on. As I looked around I saw everyone was so different but they all had this one thing that flowed trough all of them and that would be the talent. I guess thats what STAC is all different people that come together to learn from each other."  Stac to me as a freshmen was a chance to prove myself and little did I know that it became not only that but it changed the way I viewed everything. I had went in for an interview with a mentor and the topic ended up talking about this show that I had watched in Stac. My mentor and art teacher had never expected me to understand and know what Myths by Joseph Campbell was and were impressed. That was when I realized how much Stac has changed the way I thought since Stac teaches what is used in reality not what needs to be used in high school. Some thing that Luke had brought up again this year was how interesting it was to see the oldies instantly know what to do while the newbies are a bit more hesitate. This had happened last year to and this was what I had said about it: "He said that the oldies seemed to breeze through the activity then the newbies and it has got me thinking about what has changed from thinking like a newbie to thinking like a stacie. Or about how my mind set has changed because of S.T.A.C. it seems like a light switch has been turned in your head. After a year being in stac , you learn how to think like a stacie. You just learn the expectations." 
Something that I have regretted last year is the fact that I was not as productive as I was the year before. I had grow to comfortable and lost a sense of self motivation. This is something that I am most definitely working on this year. Junior year is said to be the hardest year but I won't let the regret of last year affect this year. Maybe this year I'll reach out of my comfort zone and try other things besides art. There is always something new to try in Stac........

Scattered

I am going to admit that I have been avoiding my final project. Maybe it is the fear of messing up but also I have no idea what I want to do in the background. I have my community that I turn to when I get stuck but recently I just haven't been going to many people for inspiration or I just haven't found inspiration for my project. The most recent person I have turned to for advice would be Emily and I don't really talk to her much but I do respect her point of view because she seems to be a person full of ideas. Also because I trust her to say what she thinks. What she viewed from my painting was a sense of transcending and Danny got a sense of melting away.  Something that really caught my attention was how Emily talked about the sense of transcending. I have been seeing this painting not as something that mean more but just forcing something in the back to finish it. The message that I wanted my painting to have was the sense of being free and Emily had the exact word to sum up everything I wanted my painting to be. The definition of transcending is to go beyond the limits or range and that is exactly what I want to achieve but it seems to be impossible since I still have no clue to what I might want the back to be. How do I present a feeling of washing away the past in a painting? Is is possible to even show leaving the past or maybe there is something else. I notice that I keep on talking about what "I was" going to do throughout my posts but the real question to myself would probably be what am I doing now. What I going to be doing In the background? What I'm going to be doing tomorrow? How am I going to finish this when I don't feel any motivation to actually accomplish this painting? How can I paint something that I have a meaning for but no image to match it? Everything recently has been in such a haze that this doesn't apply to just the painting but how I am seeing everything else. I don't know what I want to do in the next couple of years, I don't know what my goal is, I don't even know what I am working for anymore. I guess you can say that I am all over the place and because of this I found my side salad, well if it even counts as a side salad. Which i figured I'll talk about in my next post after I get it approved.

Project for Hope

It has been really hard to settle on a final project and I am not sure of what is keeping me from just making something work. When I bought this 24 x 36 canvas I was excited to get something on it but trying to fill up a huge white canvas does have its pressures. So to avoid painting on the canvas I look through a photography book and found this image of a boy. He was wrapped in rags standing in front of  the water and buildings that had a certain quality about it that I couldn't stop looking at. It was difficult to try to draw this image with charcoal on a index card but it came out to be an okay sketch. but what I like that most was when it had faded out on another paper that I lay on top to prevent it from smudging.  Somehow I like the way that the image had faded and the reflection of this piece. I had wanted to incorporate it into the large canvas painting I had on top but what would be the message? Would it be PHOT?
My original plan for that canvas was to have overlaying faces that were washed out. Each overlaying face on top of another would show different layers of personalities that people have. It shows how sometimes people are confused about how they are or who they want to be. Also it would be a opportunity to just practice painting faces. I don't think I can explain how many times I have gotten frustrated and just pored a whole cup of water on the painting to wash it away.Then I came across a picture of a woman with her head thrown back and it seemed as if she was free. Without any limitations and with every flaw having a beauty to it, even the curve of her neck seemed beautiful according to the photographer. So that was how I developed a meaning to start with. I wanted to paint anything on the canvas that may seem free or without limitations. anything that may bring joy but also just show hope. It seemed throughout this whole process I had been so hopeless in trying to find a project but that sense of hopelessness and frustration had turn into my project itself.

Cross-Hatcheting

Since I haven't bought a canvas and extra paint yet, today I decided to try to learn how to cross hatchet. I remember hearing the term when I was younger but never knew how to do the technique of cross hatching. Mr. Ganes was working on a piece one day that was a self-portrait he drew using cross hatcheting (I think that is how you refer to it). In his work the cross hatcheting was neat lines and never seemed out of place. It seemed to be a sort of print with how straight the lines were, unless he used a ruler and I didn't know. So today I tried to experiment with cross hatcheting. I started drawing windows that were outside the dance studio and trying to get shadows is harder then it looks. With pen lines don't always turn out clear and with cross hatcheting the shades may look to similar. When I had tried getting a shadow it would merge with the object itself and every line that was put in would just have the shadow remain the same shade. Cross hatcheting is a skill I most definitely need some work on.

Does a meaning exist?

To be honest, every idea that crossed my mind I had doubts about and thought it was a waste of time. When I started to think about why I would do a project or  what was the meaning of it I just never came up with a reason. At first I had wanted to do an installation but what purpose would it serve? It would lie on the border line of being there just because it was just interesting or it would be FOT. People devote so much time into something like and installation when it may not serve a meaning at all. This also applies to why do people live life? They work so hard on trying to be successful and stay alive, devoting all efforts to being the best when in the end death reaches all of us. The basic question that crosses my mind is if all of this effort is worth it? A artist that I use to mentor had a Buddhist idea for a project I was helping  on. She had spent around a year making collages on a huge roll of paper demonstrating how girls have expectations to be like models in magazines. It took so much work to cut glue then arrange on this roll of paper that was longer then the room. One week when I walked into the studio I heard a paper shredder and walked into the room seeing the huge roll of paper being shredded up. The point of the project was to show how art can be amazing and everyone admires it but instantly when it became shredded, it lost the value it meant in people. If someone where to see it they would instantly think it was trash even though it was the same art work if it was whole. but her practice was to put so much effort into something but having the ability to make all that effort worthless in a sense was what she had wanted to do.
Therefore for my individual project i had thought of doing a painting each day on a large canvas. That feeling when you have so many little insignificant scenes that you want to paint but their value doesn't extend to becoming a full on painting. On this large canvas I would paint small paintings that I feel like painting that day and make it into one large artwork. then maybe I would practice the Buddhist practice and find a way to shred all of the effort and learn that not everything has to have a meaning. This might be a fear I have now that i realize it. The fear of making something without a meaning or sense of worth. This fear is what I hope to overcome this quater through my individual project.

Individual Writing

Something that occurs often when drawing a still life or face is the fact that it may not look like the image at all. Then you realize that all of measurements are all wrong and you have to redraw everything to get the measurements right. But what happens when it still doesn’t look like a face or bottle? You drew all the measurements right, so what else is wrong? Something that people don’t realize is the fact that all of these lines and measurements must be in a relation with each other. They must work and be proportional to each other for you to get the image right. As an artist, this is something I often forget. I forget that you always have to take to account the relationships between those lines. That was the skill that I had to work on.

            During the workshops we had to learn relationships. Relations between lines, color, and features are essential to understanding how to paint or draws as well as learning how to work with flatten pencils. With flatten pencils it had helped me see relations in the face better. For example, I was drawing an image of Grace Kelly.  Her jaw line had certain sharpness to it and her cheek bones stood out. When using a flatten pencils to draw these features you must make sure that each line is proportional because the whole point of drawing these faces were to be quick and as precise as you can get it. As quick as these 30 second drawings may be you begin to see how the eyes align with ears and how the darkest shadows tend to be under the chin.  One of the hardest things for me to draw or get right during this portion of the workshop was to get the side profile of a face.  Relations between features vary since the eyes may be at a different angle and getting that angle seems to be the hardest part for me to get right.

            Relations between colors seem to include more basic color theories. I have never learned color theory before so learning this topic was all new to me. I have always been use to mixing colors and never took to account on how putting an opposite color can make a perfect gray. If you were to make a shadow for a red cup you wouldn’t make the shadow red. You would have to add in to opposite color which is green. The green would be a contrast from the red cup, showing that the green tint is part of the shadow.  It doesn’t really sound likely that the green tint and red cup would go together but it makes a shadow more distinct. I had tried putting this technique to use while first using oil color and I can’t really say I was as successful as I wished. I had gotten so use to using watercolor and having the paint apply on the paper so easily, that using oil felt so foreign. Oil felt so thick on the paper and it was hard to find a balance between not making it watery and not having the paint run out. Mixing the paint also make it quite complicated since the paints contained a lot of pigment the littlest drop of color could turn out darker then you would imagine. The main conflict is to find a perfect balance between the paints and oil.

            The skills in this workshop that we have learned to develop have helped me learn to see what was never there before. When I now see faces I instantly look at the relationships between all the features on their faces. Same as when I look at the color of a wall. I instantly think about what the color was based off of and what would be complementary to it. This workshop has been applied to a lot of the daily things I do and has most definitely help with a lot of art projects. I have learned to see things differently and I think that contributes to what I think the definition of art is. Art to me is to train the eye to see what may not be there at first glance.