Another Lecture

This weeks lecture was given by Eileen Neff. She is a photographer who challenges perspective and space by installing huge prints that give you a sense of being inside while the image happens outside. This lecture left me livid, her work is so simple and elementary but yet she is a recognized artist who makes a living off her work. I feel that she is taking advantage of one good discovery she made. The work she did collaging the still tree over the blurred background is great but the piece "Horizon" is less than mediocre. I don't see how she can get away with a snapshot of woods and then put a strip of blue and green next to it and then get it in a gallery. What makes that different than my ten year old brother doing the same thing? What if I did it and had the same thought behind it, could I quit school and make a living of work like that?

NYC and the Met

This Saturday my art history class took a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. We spent a good bit of the day in the museum but I had some free time to go walk around the city. I got a few pictures of the art in the museum and some of people out in the city. Here's a link to my picasa slideshow http://picasaweb.google.com/DaveFauvell/NYC#slideshow/5397654799660274002

Lecture number seven

This weeks speaker was Sharon Louden, she dabbles in drawing, painting, film and installation but just considers herself just an artist. All of her work except the installations are very simple and bland. Throughout every piece of hers there is an elongated curve that she says is a figure or representation of a person. Her installation work is very awesome, she incorporates fiber optics and glow in the dark paint in most of her work. Her pieces are so popular that people actually buy parts of them after they run their course in the gallery. One family bought part of a piece and installed it in their living room. She was commissioned to make a chandelier and the finished work was very good. Her newest conquest is in the realm of film and animation and she is failing. The piece she showed, "The Bridge" the picture above is a still from the movie, was meant to make you feel as if you were in a drawing, I felt like I was watching a cheap bowling alley animation. Trying to stay true to her minimal style she avoids the bells and whistles and the eye catching effects. She needs to embrace all aspects of technology to advance her animations because right now they come across as poorly thought out and cheaply made.

3-D class

So this week the lecture was just an advising meeting so I decided to write on my 3-D class. As of now 3-D is my favorite class because its new and I have never done sculpture work before. I like the freedom to make pretty much anything and just really explore sculpture. My most recent project is a treat to work on. It is made of 2X4's and cardboard and is as tall as me, 6'5", and has multiple moving parts. The lecture last week reminded me a lot of my sculpture, art and engineering fused into one, granted my piece isn't as advanced as Brad Litwin's but the underlying idea is similar. A reason I really like this project is because I was and still am a tinkerer, I enjoy taking apart and putting back together things that are too complex for me to understand. My favorite thing to dismantle are remote controlled cars and from that I got a rudimentary idea of how you can get linear and circular motion from one rotating source.My sculpture is basically a stick figure with moving arms and a spinning head that are all powered from one crank near the base. So far my creation is coming along and should be finished by crit time but is nowhere near finished, when it is I'll have another post about the finished piece and how the crit went and i'll include a few pictures.

The Sixth Lecture

The speaker this week was Brad Litwin, a kinetic sculptor for 30 years and was "tickled to be here". This was the best lecture so far, Brad grew up alongside technology and watched it develop so he had a full view of technology. He had many jobs involving technology, he was a computer beta tester, a program designer, graphic designer, an artist, and an engineer. He started off as a kinetic sculptor 30 years ago and took a break for a while to raise a family, but he is now back creating wicked awesome machines. It was really interesting to get a quick, full history of computers from the eyes of an artist. Mr Litwin now uses computers to do blueprints for all of his creations but thirty years ago when he started off he didn't bother with blueprints and just built. He made one machine that way and realized how insane that is. The next machine had full blueprints and schematics hand drawn up and he continued to hand draw until computers could handle the complex ideas he weaved into his art. I liked how he fused art, computers and physics all into one great kinetic sculpture.