Entries from June 2009
I am packing! I shall pack until the morning, then go take care of some stuff at school, leave to the airport by 3 pm, get on plane, fall asleep and wake up in Geneva!
Hopefully, I don’t fall asleep before 3pm. I have fallen asleep & missed a flight before, so I am kind of worried. I DID miss my final exam for my history class last Friday…(haha, passed the class without the final! sweeeet)
So maybe I should sleep afterall, but then I’ll never have enough time to pack everything & check everything. If only I had the ability to fall asleep and wake up before noon.
Anywaysss, expect pictures from Switzerland, Korea & Europe for the next two months, happy summer, oh joy you’re finally here.
Categories: Uncategorized
Today, I read something by David Smith regarding materials and eventually using them.
This is a direct quote from Theoris of Modern Art by H. B. Chipp:
“I cannot conceive a work and buy material for it. I can find or discover a part. To buy new material – I need a truckload before I can work on one. To look at it every day – to let it soften 0 to let it break up in segments, planes, lines, etc. – wrap itself in hazy shapes. Nothing is so impersonal, hard and cold as straight rolling-mill stock. If it is standing or kicking around, it becomes personal and fits into visionary use. With possession and acquaintance, a fluidity develops which was not there the day it was unloaded from Ryerson’s truck…” (David Smith)
I find this true. I have a habit of picking stuff up or buying materials that I don’t need. There are stuff in my closet that I don’t know why I have. Like that brass pipe I couldn’t resist buying at Home Depot or those nuts and screws I collected out of a broken printer. A bundle of strings that I never use for sewing purposes…fake styrofoam acorns…wires…wood blocks…all of it would horrify my mom. Although I only occasionally do this now, I used to pick through trash cans and keep whatever looks a bit odd or obscure. I kept them in places where my mom wouldn’t find them. Then, after awhile after obtaining such objects, you get familiar with it. Only then can you mold it around in your head and really use its potentials. It’s kind of similar with ideas or visual imageries when you paint. I take joy in discovering new objects and dissecting it visually, but I cannot manipulate such forms freely without having spent some time with it. When something, material or idea, becomes familiar to me, when I develop some acquaintance to it, I can then work with it, not just use it. This got me to thinking, maybe I shouldn’t clean up my room? Maybe I should have stuff lying around my room so I can make friends with them. I even got to thinking maybe I should cover my bed with canvas and sleep on it. This might give me some rashes though…Regardless, I now have another excuse I can give my mom about my room. I am personalizing these things, that’s all.
I stumped my toe a couple of hours ago and I rolled it up in toilet paper because it was bleeding alot. Now I’m afraid to unravel it and find a zombie toe…
Categories: Pondering
Tagged: art materials, collecting, david smith
finally! I got you eyebrow cat! Why must you frown at me all the timess??!!
Categories: Photography · Read/Seen/Heard
Tagged: eyebrow cat, sad cat
So…I had quite a few paintings I got rid of. I am all for getting rid of ugly paintings, but rule #1, keep the frames. It really saves money when you just buy canvas in yards and reuse the old frames. All you need on top of the canvas is a staple gun with staples and maybe a metal canvas pliers…if it’s a big frame. It also helps to have a helping hand when you stretch big ones.
I had six frames in total:
oh, I also use an iron when the canvas is store folded for a long time. I don’t think it’s necessary since you’re stretching it taught anyways, but it makes me feel better.:) Oh don’t cut the canvas too exact, give it some extra few inches. It’s so much easier to pull the canvas then trim.
Here’s a biggie. You lay down the canvas, then the frame. If the frame has a round edged side and a square edge side, put the round edged side faced down where it meets the fabric. First step, choose any side of the rectangle, fold the canvas on top of the backside of the frame and staple a few times in the MIDDLE. Don’t staple all the way. Then, you scurry off to the opposite side of the rectangle you just stapled and pull the canvas taught. It helps to use a metal pliers at this stage, because you can get a much better grip on the fabric. Then you staple the middle a few times like you did on the other side. You do the same on the other two facing sides. You want to get the middle parts stapled in this order before you staple off everything, so that the tension is distributed evenly.
After you do this, you can go ahead and pull/ staple a few more away from the center. You want to do it gradually, stapling one side and pulling the corresponding opposite spot. Make your way slowly to the corners…
tada~now you just have to neatly fold the edges (or not so neatly if you prefer…) like you do when you gift wrap something, staple the folds, and trim the excess canvas!
voila, one down. Five left.
After I stretched five of them, I had alot of trimmed strips of canvases…
mmm…spaghetti…
mmm..spaghetti canvas…
If you feel the canvas isn’t as tight as some other freshly manufactured canvases you can buy pre-stretched, don’t worry. Once you prime the canvas with gesso, it will get tighter. I find it cheapest to go to Pearl Paint during the before school sales and buy the gallon tub. I think it was ehhh..maybe 20 or 30 bucks for a gallon. If you want some choices upon your selection of canvas material, the Blick art store in SoHo has huge rolls of different textured canvases you can ask by yards.
Categories: Painting
Tagged: stretching canvas
throwing…on the wheel! is what I’m enjoying these days.
I am taking a ceramics summer course at Pratt. By the way, a summer class at Pratt is the way to go if you want a ceramics class. We have a great studio space, and during the summer session, there’s only one class that uses that space, so it’s really great. It’s so much better than last semester. There’s plenty of shelf space, wheels, and air/space in general. Plus, we have really nice big windows, so spending an afternoon in the ceramics studio with maybe one or two other people is just simply an awesome work environment. Shame it closes at 4, and doesn’t open on weekends…Anywho, I’ve gotten much better with the wheel already.
I can go pretty high now. My next plan is maybe wedging up a ridiculous amount of clay for a scale up, or putting pieces together after they’re leather-dry. Although…I think I might not be physically fit enough to wedge the amount of clay that I want. My arms will be BUFF after this summer.
Here’s what’s on my drying shelf right now. My favorite so far is the bottom right vase shape, but I kinda poked a hole in the bottom while trimming the bottom. I hate trimming.
This is the gist what Irv said in class that really stayed with me. A great piece of vessel is not something that is simply finished, wide or tall. A great vessel stretches the clay to its full potential. You have to bring it as far as you can, to that split moment before it starts to tumble and fall. A vessel is beautiful when it feels ‘pregnant.’
I’ve been thinking about that notion of giving life to a lump of clay and making it ‘breathe’ as I work. I’m slowly feeling the frequency of the wheel turn and how the centrifugal motion affects the clay. It feels great to learn something day after day. It’s something that frustrates me with painting right now. I feel the urge to progress and paint something really great, but wound up trashing most of my paintings from last semester.
For now, I’m really enjoying clay, so I’ll stick to it. Hopefully, I will paint again, when I get some ideas.
Categories: Sculpture
Tagged: ceramics, clay, potter's wheel, throwing on the wheel
