Seventh Week (Life Drawing)

This week in Life Drawing we went on a field trip to the Walker Art Center and the Bell Museum of Natural History. It was a lot of fun to go on a field trip!

At the Walker, we were able to look around at what we wanted. The first piece that I saw that really interested me was Andromeda by Alfons Schilling, which is in the exhibition Event Horizon. The reason this interested me was the movement that it created by spinning and how that changed the positive and negative space of the piece.

The piece that struck me the most was Naked by Eiko and Koma which is also in the Event Horizon exhibition. My first impression of this piece was that it was going to be a large amount of feathers on the feathers and walls, but then I realized that you enter into a room. Then I saw a sign that said that the piece contained nudity, so I figured it would be a picture of nude people, but then when you enter the room you see two naked people, a male and female, laying in the feathers. At first, I thought they were fake, but then they moved, and that really surprised me. I am wondering if they are the artists or not.

Finally, the Yves Kline exhibition was quite impressive as well. The use of that royal blue color was overwhelming. And I was reading the words to an audio recording that was played and the quote, "In the end, responsibility is what commands the awareness that there's always something better; perfectionism. In the end I am a perfectionist, but that is bad because you're never happy. You always know there is better and that you can do better. There exists better, and there exists further. Never satisfied. And then, on the other hand being satisfied is mediocre. You're there. You're satisfied and you don't know what else to do and you do nothing because otherwise you are longer satisfied." really stuck out to me because being a perfectionist myself, I know exactly how it feels to never be satisfied, and thinking about the downside of the opposite was a really interesting way to think about it.

At the Bell Museum, we drew whatever we wanted. I chose to draw a moose because the antlers were so powerful looking, but it turns out that they were incredibly hard to draw a contour of.

Sixth Week (Life drawing)

We did more gesture drawings and long poses this week, as well as working more with our maniken. The gesture drawings and long poses seem to be getting a little redundant because we are doing so many of them, but the more you do them the better you become so repetition is necessary in order to master them. We had our first experience with a male model which was a very different experience from the female figure. It was very interesting and enlightening to have this experience. For the last long pose of the week, we just focused on the foot. I had never paid much attention to the foot before, but there is a lot to look at when examining it. Examining it so closely for such a long made me realize and see many new things about it.

We added the leg muscles to our manikens and the muscles on the foot as well. There are many, many tiny muscles on the foot which made it hard and tedious to work with, but I eventually was able to do it. The more I work with the manikens the easier they are, but they are still really difficult. We also started our second shell contour line drawing. The comments that the other students in my class made on it were that I used the wrong angle to draw the shell in the first place, so I need to fix that. And it was also said that I needed to work slower which I found to be very strange because I usually work incredibly slow, but for some reason with the shell drawing I am drawing very quickly, so I will try to draw slower when I re-do it the next time.

Midterm

I can not believe that the semester is halfway over already! It is crazy how fast it has gone!

I was not at sure what to expect coming in to this class, and I was really nervous for it. I had never done anything like this before, and I was not sure how to feel about it. It was a little weird at first, but after a while I got used to it. It was hard to learn exactly how I was supposed to do the gesture drawings, but I eventually learned. The gesture drawings were the most difficult for me because they are very quick and I usually like to take my time with my drawing, so the long poses were much easier for me. The hardest things for me, however, is the manikin. The first reason it is so hard for me is because it is 3 dimensional, and I typically like to work in 2D. This makes it hard to visualize what exactly the manikin is supposed to look like. But seeing examples makes it a lot easier. Overall, this class is turning out to be really interesting and I am learning a lot from taking it. It is completely changing my way of looking at an object from seeing it's outline and trying to recreate those as accurately as possible, and instead looking at the inside of an object to understand how exactly it is made up and created, and then recreating it from the inside out. It gives you a much greater understanding of how to draw it.

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