Over the weekend the foundations students had a class field trip to New York City to visit art museums and take a trip down to the city. Over the weekend we had an art project for observational drawing to draw the interior of a building on campus so I decided to challenge myself and try to draw a spiral staircase. I was required to do a first draft sketch and a final piece in charcoal. I tried to use loose charcoal and a paintbrush to push the pigment across the paper which I thought was very useful for large scale drawings. I used a combination of loose charcoal, compressed charcoal and pencil charcoal. At the beginning of class we had a large critique of our pieces because instead of everyone having a single drawing to display we had two to show. My critique was that I decided to do a challenging spot but my lines were a bit odd and that they needed a bit of work. However overall it was a nice piece from me but there was still areas that I could improve on. The professors also enjoyed my first draft of my piece in pencil with better lifework and how it was more clean. Later in class we set up our easels in two large circles and there were a bunch of cardboard boxes in the middle and we had to use charcoal to draw them. We had to first make our newsprint a medium gray value. Then we had three minutes to shade in our most dark values and then use our eraser to lighten up spots in our composition. After six minutes of shading and erasing values we had another three minutes to pull the piece together using whatever we needed to complete the piece.
Day Two: Observational Drawing
Tuesday was mainly continuing our timed observational drawing and looking at anchor artists for reference. The professors changed the assignment by not having students shade the newsprint a medium gray so we can add in our values ourself. I think this was very interesting because it helped my confidence in my drawing skills and to use my eraser less when doing observational drawing. Our homework was to do another drawing on Stonehenge paper of the boxes and utilize what we have been learning the past week.
Day Three:
During the halfway mark of the week both foundation groups combine to hear combined announcements of the art department. In class we watched a series of videos about artists in New York and how/where they work. The artists presented in the videos all had different art styles and approaches to how they did art.
Day Four: Studio Research
Thursday foundations class was held outside and when I came up to the studios I saw a long table covered in brown paper. We were told by our professors that we were going to eat that day. We were part of a performance art piece that class and we were provided breakfast. We got to sit down wherever we wanted to and we set out our places with plates, bowls, spoons, etc. We had to trace where we placed all of our utensils and things at our place setting and we had to get up and were told that we may have some coffee and juice. When everyone was socializing we were individually called to sit down at an assigned place by the professors across from another student. We had our name written down at our place and it was not the seat that we were originally at. We were then able to get our food and after every five bites of food we had to stand up. After everyone was done eating we had a partner activity to do. The person across from us was to be our partner in our performance art piece and we had to give each other instruction on something that we are good at. For example, I told my partner the instructions on how to draw a tiger and she told me the instructions to make a cappuccino. After the sets of instructions were finished we had to use our leftover food and plates to make a sculpture. After we made our sculpture we had to redo it to a smaller scale. After our pieces were reduced to the size of a small plate we had to work with our partner to create a combined piece using the materials that we were given. Later we find out that we have to stabilize the form to be cast in glass the next week.
Day Five: Studio Research
Friday was the day that we had our four paintings/drawings the height of ourselves critiqued. The pieces were supposed to interpret our combined sculpture that we made the previous week. We also analyzed groups sculptures beforehand so everyone have have an understanding of each of the eight group's art pieces before critiquing them as a class. Some people took the abstract approach to their piece and some other people did more observational drawing work. Everyone was to do their assignment in either charcoal, graphite or ink. Since the students had a lot of flexibility through interpretation and through mediums the whole studio was full of a variety of art styles which I liked because it showed a different approach to a student's way to create art.
