13:05:09
You know I finally figured out what this part 3 of our course is all about. The whole shape and form thing...I just didn't get it. It is why I have not made many blog postings: I honestly did not know what to write about. I did not understand what was happening and could not explain what we had done or what our homework was.
Anyway, I realize that we had a 3D part for learning about 3d aspects of art. Then we had a 2D part for learning skills and being exposed to many different styles, techniques, types of 2d, etc. This part here is about literally exploring shape and texture and rhythm and colour. She doesn't want anything she can recognize, it's not the point. The point of part 3 is to improve our techniques with developing texture, combining colour, and using non-distinguishable shapes. The goal is to learn to combine these so that we can solicit emotion, that is why we were asked to do word association exercises and then making artwork that is representative of the words. And that is also what she means by cliche.
In the end it is a misunderstanding, she is not really using the word cliche right. When she says cliche she actually is meaning the pre-determined visual associations we have. So, painting blue with white to represent the sky is a cliche in her words because it is an association that already exists. Instead she would want us to pick out characteristics of the sky and use shape, colour, texture, rhythm, etc to translate those characteristics onto paper (or sculpture or whatever). I look at the sky right now and it is bright blue with little clouds everywhere so how do I translate that? Sure it's blue, but it's beautiful too and godlike. Maybe I paint yellow because to me yellow is happy and add white stripes to draw the eye the same way the clouds do.. Then to represent the rhythym of those clouds, which by the way look playful and are dancing around the sky, maybe I take a bunch of colourful childrens buttons and glue them all over the place with a rhythmic but not repetitious pattern.
The reason we are doing this is so that we can learn how to be creative in a way we didn't know how before and bring more maturity to our art-making processes. It's not about the thing I always joke about "this is representative of the struggles of....blah blah". It is not about making artwork using weird colours or materials that represent something. Instead it is about learning how to find inspiration to create our own artwork without taking the inspiration we are using literally. So maybe the sky was my inspiration for that piece of art but in the end it does not represent the sky, it is a brand new piece of art which started because I looked at the sky. Part 3 of our course is about freeing ourselves from associations we have and about seeing the world through the eyes of a child's make believe where nothing is set in stone and nothing means anything because we are making up the game as we go.
I realized all this when I showed her an apple painting that I did in response to a word association exercise using Eden. She made a comment about cupping my hands on the painting, making a tiny square and maybe that is all that is needed: Just a splash of green and a red. She was showing me one technique to free myself from that "cliche" of an apple representing Eden and instead to say maybe this extra shiny bumpy patch of bright red with a smooth white square (the shiny part) is a way of translating that inspiration (Eden) into your own art -- your own totally new art.
The exercise last week was misunderstood a bit I think by almost everyone. I will be making a post detailing the last 3 weeks now that I understand what went on but essentially we were told to make a picture. Then we attached another picture to it and did it over and over again until we had a large piece of artwork. Most people just put their papers together and treated it like one big painting. Rather than adding piece to piece they just used a bigger canvas in total. I actually misunderstood in the opposite way as I made one painting and then progressed through a series of 6 paintings into the painting at the end of the series. Mine were related in progression but did not make up a large image when placed together.
But what we were supposed to learn from that was how to compartmentalize to make things which hold their own and also which are so related to one another that they become a large picture when moved together. I think the reason they tried to teach that to us was to try to hone our exploration skills while remaining within a very tight frame of reference. Anyone can make a big painting and anyone can change their shapes into recognizable things like faces but you need great interpretation and analytical skill to make a big picture which is make up of individual parts and does not cheat by using the ability of the human psyche to recognize things we know (like faces, or animal shapes) made up from those parts inside that big picture.
Anyway, this is what I have figured out and now everything makes a lot more sense to me and I wish I could go back to the first day and redo it! (or that I had time to redo it all at home).
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