Friday, February 25, 2011

Window Mat for Photography

Finished my second print and my first window mat for photography. It was somewhat stressful, cutting the mat only a few hours before class started, but I got the job done pretty nicely.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Beef Cow Sculpture and Artist Statement

For my transformation project, I was inspired by Tom Friedman, an artist who made a sculpture of himself completely out of sugar cubes. I was inspired by the simplicity of the cubes, and the obsession that went into it's creation. I've created a small sculpture of a cow, out of beef bouillon cubes.

I think the sculpture makes a statement to American crippling food industry. A beef cube is composed almost entire of salt, with added beef "flavor". No beef is involved, so it's not surprising that no one associated them with beef, cow, or meat for that matter. Also, it's made from 189 cubes, if your curious.






RUNNING TOTAL: 189 cubes.

I had a slight accident with the head, which decided to fall off overnight. I had to apply much more glue to its neck line than I wanted, but it's staying. Not going to get much on craft because of that aspect I think. The cubes have started sucking in all the moisture in the air and are getting soft and crumbling. Therefore I'm applying heavy amounts of hot glue to keep it sturdy.

Words to describe it now would be:
  • ironic
  • brown
  • cubist
  • large
  • heavy
  • dense
  • smelly
  • SMELLY
  • SMEEELLLLYYY
  • gross
  • decaying
  • structure


Saturday, February 19, 2011

Cubist Cow Sketch

Here's a couple sketches of the cow I'm working on. Needs some work in the area of the udders, but pretty good proportions if I do say so myself.

Almost finished. Pics coming soon.



Friday, February 18, 2011

Focus on the Artist: Marcel Duchamp



Marcel Duchamp completely revolutionized the way we view, question, and create art. By placing a urinal on a pedestal and calling it a fountain, he began this idea of conceptualization that had never been seen before. People began to question art, "What is art?""Is there rules for art" "Is art so because it is created by an artist?" "Who determines who an artist is?"



All these are amazing questions that stemmed from this one piece, which began a revolution in the conceptual art genre.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

One Winco trip later and...

I'm ready to start getting serious with this cow sculpture...


Beef bouillon cubes serve a purpose for cooking, to add flavor. What are they adding exactly though? Well, I found its actually tons and TONS of salt.

  • brown
  • cube
  • salty
  • flavor
  • small
  • packed
  • individual
  • wrapped

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

These Things Smell

B. A. D.



Seriously, they smell disgusting. Like beef and salt. I had to start wearing gloves. I cover my nose with my shirt too. Since I'm working in my kitchen, the entire apartment now smells.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Late Night Darkroom Scramble

So I finally got my print for the first photo assignment due tomorrow. It's of a lovely ventilation shaft connected to the green house on the BSU campus.


I wasn't planning on printing this picture at all until Missy suggested it. I took her to the darkroom tonight to watch how all the magic happens, and she spotted this picture out of my contact sheet. I thought it was cool when I took it, but didn't much care for its negative/contact sheet counterpart. Printed, however, this picture looks great.

The metal texture came out awesome and I was able to expose it long enough to get the clouds in the background to show up. It was a bit technical though, which I tried to avoid. The branches on the right and bottom of the picture were showing up very dark, which meant that the exposure time to get detail on them wasn't enough to bring out the rest of the picture.

So what I did was expose the picture for 10 seconds, then dodged the bottom and right side of the picture so that they wouldn't get overexposed and appear dark. The result was a great success!


The entire picture is nicely focused, framed, and I felt better getter everything in crisp detail. Much different than just choosing the "dodge" or "burn" brush in Aperture 3. I love this hands on experience I'm gaining in this class.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Focus on the Artist: Tom Friedman

Tom Friedman is an amazing conceptual artist that has done some very intricate sculptures. His work borders on obsession that will completely blow your mind. I'm just boggled with some of his work. Here he carved his self portrait out of an aspirin!


Conceptual art is something that can normally really make you think, for the sake of calling it art. But Friedman's art is something much more. You find yourself in thought about it because it has all the intrinsic qualities that can call it art, but also has this dimension of obsession that you instantly think of when you see it.



Here's a piece called "Untitled" that contains over 30,000 toothpicks. How amazing is this?! Who has the time to place 30,000 toothpicks together to form this beautiful, complex sculpture.

I couldn't find any pictures of his self portrait made from sugar cubes, but I can say I was immediately blown away. It's a life-size sculpture, in simple cubism, made entirely from sugar cubes. I think this is one of the things that inspired me the most to do the sculpture I'm working on now.

By the way, I did start the beef cube sculpture of the the cow. So far, so good. I've used almost 70 cubes and I've done hardly anything, so I will be need many, many more.

Note to Self: Unplug the Hot Glue Gun

Go ahead and try to tell me that this post isn't related to art!

Today I grabbed my hot glue gun and unplugged it from the wall. Apparently they do not have auto shut off functions -- at least mine does not.

So here I am grabbing my materials for art class, and, thinking the glue gun is cool, clutch it in my hands.

Well now I have a nice burn between my fingers to show for it. Lesson learned.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Transformation Art Project Brainstorm List

For our next project in art, we are to transform an every day object into something else. Laurie showed us lots of awesome examples and I compiled a list of objects I could possibly use.

  1. chop sticks
  2. sugar cubes
  3. beef bouillon cubes?!
  4. chocolate chip cookiesw
  5. toothpicks
  6. cutlery
  7. ipad
  8. film
  9. light bulbs
  10. toilet paper rolls
  11. matches
  12. cell phones
  13. baby doll
  14. pink flamingo
  15. clothes
  16. money
  17. wallet
  18. reward cards (from albertsons, best buy, fred meyer, etc)
  19. gum balls
After asking some of my peers questions about these objects, I found something interesting about the beef bouillon cubes. People associated them with flavor, soup, broth, but never... COW.

Since beef is a cow, it made me think of how fake they actually are. They have nothing to do with cows, because its all just fake flavoring. I think doing some kind of cow sculpture out of them would be an interesting narrative about the food industry, what we consider "food", and how we as consumers choose food to buy.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

My First Print

Here it is, after many test strips to get the exposure right and the picture in focus, I'm successfully printed my first photograph.

It's of my beautiful wife, if you're curious. I find myself lucky that I have such a beautiful model right in front of me to photograph. Not sure if this is the print I'm going to choose for the intro assignment due on monday, because it would require much burning to get more detail in her face and hands.


Either way, she's beautiful, but the composition is off. I cut off her hand in the bottom right and the top of her head. Just the issue of having to deal with a manual SLR. Shooting people is hard because they have to stay still and you have to choose the right settings. It may not look like it, but Missy was sitting like that for probably a good 45 seconds. She's so patient. :D

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Wire Sculpture Artist Statement

My wire armature sculpture was inspired mainly by student examples that were shown in class lecture. I saw skin that was tight and stretched, cream colored that reminded me of old-fashioned aerial machines. Elegance and simplicity were both things I wanted to embody with this piece.

The sculpture contains two types of design: line and plane. The line is curved, with flat bottoms, juxtaposed cylindrical to the other lines. The planes are wing-shaped, the bottom ones slightly bigger than the other and positioned upward along the line. I chose copper wire, over a much thinner silver wire because of its dexterity and sturdiness. With it, I was able to stretch the cream colored nylon over the pieces without compromising their shape.

Wire Sculpture Done!

Alright guys, here it is. The final piece, all put together and shined up and ready for critique.


The whole thing.


The top, a ball of nylon holding it all together.


Wings.


The wingtips made this awesome rippled pattern as they were pulled which cast some awesome shadows.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

My First Contact Sheets

In the darkroom today, using the same technique to make photograms, I used my negatives to create contact sheets. These enable me to make a conscious decision about which negative to make into a print.



Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Photograms

Who knew that you could actually make a photograph without using a camera. Photograms are just that. You place objects on light sensitive paper, then expose them to light (longer under the light, blacker the blacks). The objects cast shadows on the paper and leave their white counterparts. After about 5 hours of working in the dark room, I ended up making 6 of them.

Here's a list of the objects I used:
  1. sun glasses
  2. ipod cords
  3. headphones adapter
  4. headphones
  5. my iPhone
  6. rubber ducks
  7. flash drives
  8. scissors
  9. a woman's blouse
  10. plastic gun
  11. felt heart
  12. bag of m&ms
  13. root beer bottle
And here are the finished pieces: