Block prints seem a lot easier to work with than paper and pencil. Pressure from using the cutting tools kept my hands from shaking, letting me create clear precise shapes and add a greater amount of detail than normal. I should focus on drawing more dynamic curvilinear lines. Another student also assumed that all three pigeon illustrations from my print represented different pigeons, so I did a bad job portraying the same pidgeon in different increments of time.
Final Altered Book Proposal November 14, 2008
My book is a 29-essay pamphlet assembled by my Freshman Inquiry professor Jamie Ross. Jamie named the pamphlet with our class name, UNST 192/193G- The Work of Art. As this was never an official title, I will refer to the book as “Jamie’s Pamphlet” instead. The essays from Jamie’s Pamphlet examine the external issues surrounding art, like censorship, racism, and conformity. Each one has a different topic and contains enough information to function as a stand-alone document. Most examine the external issues surrounding a specific art medium. It is impossible to condense these essays into a single concept without neglecting important details from each one. Therefore, I will only evaluate a narrow selection of essays concerning censorship.
I find censorship particularly compelling because I strongly object to its use. Yet I also want to explore why societies find it necessary to censor art. Both communities and governments have restricted artistic content in the past, and may continue to do so in the future. Even if the artwork is controversial, banning or restricting it is a blatant violation of freedom of expression. Limiting information available to the public or punishing artists that preach an unpopular opinion can be just as harmful. Society should develop a greater tolerance to content they find offensive or objectionable.
I will address one censorship-related concept per essay by illustrating the concept through iconography, and supporting my illustrations by highlighting selections from the text. If possible, I want to make the iconography ironic and slightly humorous. There is also a slight chance that I might revise the motifs of a few essays before I begin illustrating the book.
I will analyze and illustrate five of the 29 essays. I will start the book by evaluating the ideas George Moss has presented throughout his essay, Beauty without Sensuality. I will particularly focus on Moss’s insightful theory that societies often regard immoral artworks as a direct attack on their moral values and harmonious lifestyle. On the first page, I will paint a nude man emerging from a large picture frame while cocking a rifle. A 1950’s-esque group of young women in front of the picture frame will gasp in shock at the sight. The interaction between the man and the group of women illustrates the perceived assault that immoral artwork is making on society.
Using the next essay, Culture Shock: Hollywood censored, I will illustrate how morality-based organizations censor objectionable artwork to prevent it from negatively influencing society. They do everything necessary to keep “harmful” artwork out of the public sphere, unable to accept art that blatantly violates their moral values. I will illustrate this chapter with a modified version of the three wise monkeys. The blind and deaf monkeys will remain unchanged, but the third monkey will “repel evil” instead of “speaking no evil” or “doing no evil.” It creates a crucifix with its index fingers to repel the perceived evil, imitating the church’s desire to restrict offensive art. Additionally, while they believe these artworks will have a negative impact, there are no official statistics proving it. I will expand these ideas through Jeff Chang’s essay, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop.
Dudziak’s essay about Josephine Baker’s musical career and Piotr Gwiazda’s essay about Amiri Baraka’s controversial poetry reveal that governments can “censor” artists by silencing them. Artists that promote unpopular, controversial, or unpatriotic views risk being silenced. American artists are no exception, despite their supposed “protection” under the constitution. Worse yet, both Amiri Baraka and Josephine Baker were American artists. I want to emphasize that silencing ANY American (including American artists) is unconstitutional, which I achieve through an illustration of the constitution getting consumed by flames, revealing the word “forbidden” and a chained silhouette behind it.
I will paint all of my illustrations with gouache. The pamphlet’s paper is too thin and fragile to hold water-based paint, so I will create a sturdier canvas by gluing unneeded sections of pages together. Once I finish creating the altered book, the reader will be able to browse through it like a picture book. I will also need to design a new cover, if possible. Jamie’s pamphlet is presently stored in a three ring binder, which is both ugly and impossible to modify.
Before I start the project, I will read the censorship-related essays a final time to ensure perfect comprehension. Then I will revise and expand my approach with external research, because I made several assumptions during the design stage to match the concepts in my text. For what reasons will people censor artwork? How do these reasons change from incident to incident? Who decides to censor an art piece, and does the censor also change? Are there common themes among censored or banned art? How often do censors punish artists because of the opinions they have expressed through their work? Are situations like Josephine Baker’s and Amiri Baraka’s common? Depending on the answers I find, I may need to revise the details of my altered book.
Tesselate blog reflection November 4, 2008
I had a really hard time picking a motif for this tesselate. Making a scheme with two different shapes fit together AND clearly represent a real-life object is needlessly complicated. I went through several themes, both simple and complicated, before I finally decided on the fish/turtle theme. Defining the balance between positive and negative space was challenging and a good learning experience. I painted a lot steadier and slower than usual. Yet it’s still messy, not for lack of trying. My hands are really shaky. I can’t draw a straight line without turning it into a fine squiggle. Drawing precise contours with either a paintbrush or a pencil is beyond my ability until I can make the shaking stop. The tesselate is actually the closest I have ever reached to drawing a GOOD contor, especially compared to the projects I’ve made prior to this class.
The fish’s light blue fins were meant to evoke a peaceful temperment, as if the picture were bathed in water. But the shade ended up too dark. I’m really unsatisfied with the darker blues, because they take away from the picture’s contrast and draw too much attention away from the turtle.
I REALLY REALLY need to work on keeping my work clean. I know that. I just … forget where my hand is sometimes. And I often forget that I’m holding a brush in that hand, and that brush will make unwanted marks if I get too close to the paper. Hence the paint outside of the inner boundary. I really, REALLY don’t want to start over once I make a mistake, so I try to blot it out. I also need more practice with using opaque goache. I started using more effectively with the fins (Thanks to Vanessa), but I had already painted most of the project by then.
Altered Book Proposal #3 November 4, 2008
My book is a 29-essay pamphlet created by my Freshman Inquiry professor Jamie Ross. It has no title aside from the class name, UNST 192/193G- The Work of Art. The essays cover a variety of artistic disciplines, including photojournalism, photography, movies, music, tattooing, traditional paint-based artwork, billboard design, and poetry. However, it does not teach the reader how to create art with different artistic mediums. It discusses art’s influence on culture, society, and politics, and vice versa. Racism, personal worldviews, cultural morality, and bias will affect artistic expression. A few essays, such as Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixlan, explain this mentality directly instead of analyzing a specific medium. However, I have only presented a generalized description of the pamphlet. I have summarized it to match the overarching theme of my Freshman Inquiry class only so I could describe it in one sentence. These essays would have nothing in common if I did not link them to my class philosophy. I believe it is appropriate to treat each essay as a stand-alone document. It makes the subject matter easier to analyze, and I don’t need to bother cramming a large amount of information into one project. If I were to summarize the entire pamphlet and condense it into a single idea, I would need to write an essay longer than this proposal.
I chose to alter this pamphlet simply because I don’t need it. Since I don’t want to regret altering a book I could possibly read again, I picked the book I was least likely to re-use. I haven’t read it since Jamie’s class ended, and I will definitely not re-read it again. It consumes shelf-space and collects dust. The pamphlet has an additional advantage of multiple books in one; I can generate a greater variety of altered book ideas by responding to a few essays about a certain subject, or analyzing the pamphlet as a whole. I can also remove unwanted material easily.
I intend to convey my personal reaction to individual essay from the pamphlet. I will examine how I felt after reading each essay, and communicate that feeling through design elements I have learned in class. Since the subject matter changes with the essay, my personal reaction will change accordingly. Sometimes my reaction is raw emotion, such as apathy, surprise, disgust, anger, or confusion. At other times, I may want to express a more complex idea, such as pity, acknowledgement, agreement, or disagreement. I will not analyze the subject of any essay beyond my personal feelings.
Since my altered book relies on expressing emotion, designing a piece that visually expresses these reactions will be my biggest challenge. I will use the inherent moods of various hues as a base for developing each design. Dark gray would represent boredom, while light gray would represent apathy. A red color would indicate I responded to the essay with either anger or discomfort. A full black shade symbolizes depression. However, I will use multiple colors for most of my reactions, which are often more complex than red “anger” or black “depression.” This is where my piece becomes complicated, because there are no universally accepted color harmony schemes to represent complex emotions like pity or admiration. Visualizations of a complex emotion require careful consideration of both the individual colors and the overall color composition. The overall scheme needs to convey the emotion successfully. In order to do this, I must successfully manipulate the distribution and proportional amount of color, interactions between color, and color balance. The individual colors are a key part of that; I must purposely decide the intensity, value, and inherent mood. While I could initially decide to express “admiration” with pink, orange, and a small amount of gray, I would need to arrange these colors in a composition that actually conveys this feeling. These compositions should also incorporate line and shape into the design. I could turn the gray sections into a line, but how I choose to draw that line will affect the entire mood of the piece. Should the line be rectilinear or curvilinear? Thick or thin? Composed of a single paintbrush stroke, or several? I must make many of these design decisions before I start creating my final project, while making sure each decision leads to a satisfactory result. This project will be a test of how well I can convey emotion using various elements of design.
As I plan my book, I will also need to practice designing with color and working with the color design techniques introduced in class. I can always review class texts to improve in this area, study my previous art projects to improve mistakes, research color-theory tips and tricks on the web, and analyze color schemes from other art pieces as examples of possible techniques I could use. I can also approach my research by studying the emotional impact of different techniques used in non-representational art pieces. These pieces make the best study materials; I can easily analyze how the elements of line, shape, value, and color work together to create emotional impact. ArtStor, an online artwork database, has an expansive supply of art pieces I can analyze.
