Final Project - Progress

I made a sculpture using wood, hotwheels, glue and fire. I filled an aluminum container with lighter fluid, threw a bunch of hotwheels into it, and set it on fire. Then i hot glued them onto some firewood, and i put a branch in the middle of the carnage.

It is inspired by the movie we watched about progress, in that it comments on our environmental status as a planet.

PROJECT - Matchbox

I made my matchbox into a coffin for a dead couple, i burnt the thing to shit, gave it a viking funeral in a bowl and took a video. i am quite pleased with myself.

Math Rock Math Dump - Music

I've been on a real math-rock kick lately, and have been finding a bunch of good bands (via bandcamp of course)

here's my current list


Town Portal has a new cd out called Chronopoly . Town Portal is a fairly well known band for math rock enthusiasts (mathies? mathheads? ...calculators?).

Suffer Like G Did has some great tunes as well, and their album covers are just so pleasing.

Maps & Atlases is another pretty well known math band, i don't think they've put an album out in a while, at least not on their bandcamp, but their You Me and the Mountain EP is pretty great.

Ghost Cat is fairly harsh for math-rock, more of a mathcore i guess if you wanna get all technical about it. The singers voice reminds me of La Dispute's singer, if their music was more mathy and less horrifyingly sad (i.e. I See Everything off of their new cd Wildlife)

Dios Trio is a really low-key math band, really good for relaxing, especially their cd High On Bikes.

Enemies is one of my favorite mathrock bands, they are another great relaxing band, i'm a huge fan of We've Been Talking

Lecture - Jean Shin

I enjoyed Jean Shin's work, most of it, and i like hearing about the creative process behind her art. I learned a lot about being a professional artist from her, like the fact that she has interns. It never really occurred to me that an artist would have multiple assistants to help with their projects, but it makes a lot of sense. I liked Jean Shin's pill bottle chandeliers the best i think, and i really didn't care for the trophies or the clothing walls.

Also i felt like she got off topic a lot during the q&a, not that i didn't like hearing about her craft, but i mean, the woman can talk...

Play the Leaf

MTV and BOOOOOOOM! were having a contest, for people to play music with instruments made of things that weren't instruments. This submission is my favorite, i just can't figure out how to embed videos in blogger so i guess i'll just put the link in?

I wish i was a video

Ryan Andrews - Illustration

Sarah and the Seed

I have had this comic saved in my bookmarks for awhile, i love the art style, and the whole story. The artist has other works as well, i enjoy all of them, Bloodstained roof has some great images in it.


Other Comics

Alex Roulette - Artist

I also found Alex Roulette the other day. I really enjoy his eerie nature paintings, his choice of colors makes all his paintings seem sinister.

Mark Nystrom - Artist

I found Mark Nystrom last week while i was looking through art websites. I really like his Wind Drawings collection. To create his pieces
" I cut some plastic bottles into different shapes and tied each one to a stick in the snow. Left all day to blow in the wind, the plastic cut into the snow making a record of the day’s wind conditions. 

Wanting a more permanent record, I constructed an apparatus to suspend a pen outfitted with sails over paper. Each drawing here is a record of one day's wind conditions."

ARTIST RESEARCH - Vojislav Jakic - Works on Paper

I couldn't find much info on Vojislav Jakic, just that he is Serbian and created large, large drawings. He drew from his life, and obsession with death and that he mixes abstraction into his works, and used ballpoint pens.

I envy people that can create large-scale works with ordinary writing tools like ball-point pens or sharpies, micron pens even. Jakic's work reminds me of the first artist i posted on my blog Don Kenn. If Kenn's works were more, patterned or layered they would be a very close style.

ARTIST RESEARCH - Andy Goldsworthy - Sculpture/Mixed Media/Installation

Andy Goldsworthy is an installation/mixed media artist who focuses in nature. He uses pieces of nature to sculpt large-scale monuments, often within nature itself. He is considered the father of Rock Balancing, which  i'm sure you've seen on beaches. His work is very spherical, or at least rounded, and he tends not to edit his materials. He works with what he finds, which i'm sure must become tedious, looking for that one perfectly cut leaf in a forest.

Goldsworthy could also be considered a photography artist, due to the important role the photographing of his works plays in their mood. The way the piece is placed, in the foreground, the background, off to the side, determines a lot of how it will be perceived.

Doing this artist actually reminded me that when i was in probably the 7th grade, my mom made us go down to this tiny theatre in Seattle and watch this documentary about a man who painted with rocks on other rocks in streams, and balanced rocks on one another, i didn't realize it til now that it was Andy Goldsworthy!

Untitled
Reconstructed Icicles
Red Leaf Patch

ARTIST RESEARCH - Yves Klein - Performance

Yves Klein is a very interesting artist. He had a series of painting works, called the Monochromes, as well as a Blue Epoch. It seems blue was his favorite thing to paint with, he was hired to paint murals in a German opera house, using only blue. He also once held a gallery called "The Void" where he removed everything from his room, placed a single cabinet, painted white, in the corner of the room and stated "My paintings are now invisible and I would like to show them in a clear and positive manner." 

He then began working on Performance art, most notably his piece Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void). It depicts him leaping from atop a wall, onto the pavement below. It is an iconic piece, and the first thing i think of when i hear Performance Art.

  Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void)

 Great Blue Cannibalism


Yves Klein is obviously an influential artist to the movements of Abstraction and Performance art. He has one of the most iconic pieces of Performance art, and his style of painting only in blue (for a period) is something typical of great artists (picasso's blue period)

ARTIST RESEARCH - Wynn Bullock - Photography

Wynn Bullock is a 20th century photographer, born 1902 and living until the mid 70's. He worked mainly with black and white photographs, doing one collection in color called Color Light Abstractions. His work is based mostly in nature, there are very organic shapes in his pieces. Few have people in them, and when they do the person is often not the focus of the piece.

Erosion 1959

Woman and Dog in Forest 1953

 Child in Forest 1951


i really enjoy Bullock's work. I think his pieces are refreshing, so many nature photographs focus on some sort of message about preserving the rainforest, or recycling, which might just be related to the time period we live in. But in Bullock's work he uses nature as a canvas, or as a painter would use a color, it's more of just another tool he can use than a message.

ARTIST RESEARCH - Robert Rauschenberg - Painting/Drawing

Robert Rauschenberg is a painter who focuses on the abstract in everyday life. He "rejects the angst of the abstract expressionism" and focuses more on an almost installation style, using non-artistic objects to create his paintings.

He also had a series of works done in the Pop-art period done with magazine clippings, used to screen print. He would overlap the prints with paint to give the illusion of abstraction from far away.


Signs 1970
 Express (1990 ^)

these two pieces demonstrate his pop-art influences and his focus on abstract expression
Signs, shows important historical events of the 60's (moon landing, martin luther king jr's death, vetnam war etc.) and Express shows above all else, movement.


I enjoy Rauschenberg's works, i think that they are extremely well crafted, and it amazes me that he has stayed relevant for someone with such a long career. I believe he was making art up until his death in 2008.

Classwork - Clay Models

For our first project i decided to create a sea anemone. I made it along with a crab, and a sea-star. All of the sea creatures are smoking, because sea creatures get bored just like you and me. Ignoring the realism of being able to smoke underwater, or being able to smoke with gills for that matter, I enjoy the idea of animals with human attributes. Not so much personality traits, like "oh this giraffe is really jealous." No, it's not. It's a giraffe. But i like animals that do human things, like smoke.

I am not very good at sculpting. The sea anemones turned out okay, better than I expected, but the crab. The crab was just awful. He's got fat legs, he barely has a face, and his cigar so so big to begin with that it made him fall over. Luckily i went with the sea anemone for the paper maché portion of the project. Which admittedly has not turned out as well as i would have liked. But colored paint should be able to fix that.

ARTIST RESEARCH - Benji Whalen - Fiber/Craft

Benji Whalen is a craft artist who uses different mediums to create strange human works of art. He has a series of pieces that are recreations of human arms, made of fabric and stitched together, then covered in tattoos.

He also has series' that are constructions of a pile of different people, made of clay. The piles give off a horrible mass grave feeling, but the faces seem pretty happy, which actually just makes the mass grave thing even weirder.




- Ride the Tiger

  - A Thousand Blunders II

I don't particularly love these pieces, but they are interesting. The clay pieces seem a little childish, they remind me of an old computer game i had that was claymation (it was called Who Stole Hannukah? and it was awesome.)

I like the arms, the hands are a little sloppy looking, but the main focus of the pieces is the tattoos. The tattoos are done very well, and i'm sure the arms look a lot better when they're mounted on a wall in an exhibit.

Benji Whalen

Class Mixtape Contribution

This song (Fork and Knife) by Brand New is my choice for the class mixtape.
It's a b-side from their album The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me, which is my favorite album of all time. I know people say that a lot, but i'm serious, if there were some sort of technology failure, or weird musically-oriented dictatorship and i could only listen to one album for the rest of my life, it would be that album. It's perfect. I even have a tattoo from it. Before the album came out the demos that the band had been working on got leaked onto the internet in a makeshift album called the Fight Off Your Demons Demos (written as fghtffyrdmns). There we nine tracks, that were rough versions of what the album was supposed to be. Every demo had a number, and a working title (i.e. Demo #2 (Morrissey) or Demo #6 (Mamas)). The band was upset, as anyone would be, no one likes their work to be distributed before it's complete. A lot of songs on the demo got scrapped, but some got reworked, lyrics completely changed, and turned into amazing songs on the real album. (Fork and Knife) is on the album as Demo #7. It's unusual in reference to other Brand New songs because the main instrument is piano, which i've never heard them use before. The song was released a couple months after the CD came out (2006) as an iTunes single. The album art is also peculiar, all it shows is a completely blue canvas.

- The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me

 
- (Fork and Knife)

Download (Fork and Knife) 

Jon Mess - Artist

Jon Mess is a vocalist for the Hardcore/Experimental band Dance Gavin Dance. I absolutely love this band, and i just found out that as well as being an awesome lyricist/vocalist Jon Mess also paints. He recently opened a store on (shudder) etsy, where he has put all of his paintings. They are abstract for sure, and i really enjoy the use of colors, and the textured look each one has.
- Unknown, Jon Mess
  - Horse, Jon Mess

I would love to own one of these, if i had $900 dollars just lying around. Maybe i can take out one of those $2000 dollar loans the school is offering?


Jon Mess Paintings

ARTIST RESEARCH - Rudy Autio -- Ceramics

Rudy Autio is a multi-media artist, he sculpts, paints, and draws. Looking at his sculptures i noticed how unique they are. They are an amalgam of classic technique and modern imagery. Most of the sculpted shapes are simple and geometric, but when he paints over them they become more detailed looking, almost as if he had sculpted them in a different way.

The piece "Vortex" (right) is a good example of his style of work. A simple, symmetrical shape, covered in a complicated painting.






 



The piece "Curiosa" (left) is another good example of his style. A similar shape to "Vortex" both paintings feature a person and a horse. This piece is much less chaotic, but has a sense of movement to it that i like a lot.











Autio has a website that features all his works, not just ceramics, that i would recommend taking a look at if you are interested in seeing what his other pieces look like.


Rudy Autio

Coheed & Cambria - Music

Coheed and Cambria have a new album coming out this fall, and another in the spring (double album). They just released this video for their new single, which is eight minutes long. I'm all for long songs, and I know coheed has long songs, but i feel like most people aren't going to want to sit there and watch  an 8 minute music video. Although i'm thinking of watching it on TV, and no one does that anymore, i can't remember the last time i saw a music video on television. Anyway, i am very excited for their new album, especially because their last album was absolutely terrible.

TV on the Radio - Music

TV on the Radio is an amazing jazz-alt-rock-hiphop-experimental band. I saw them live when i was in junior high, they played with Franz Ferdinand. Their sound is a great mix of interchanging melodies from their two vocalists and spacey-deep sounds. Their live persona is completely different from the recorded versions of songs, but they are both amazing efforts. Their first record Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, aside from having an awesome title, is as solid a record as i can imagine. From the abrupt opening of Wrong Way to the spine-tingling emptiness of You Could Be Love, the album is non-stop quality.

I Kill Giants - Music

I Kill Giants - WCLINESP



I cannot stop listening to this album. The songs are short, almost entirely under a minute, and they're rough in parts, but i can't get enough. I'm a sucker for math-rock, and I'm also a sucker for this band. their first album (Let It Out) was my summer obsession, every road-trip, every five minute drive to a Safeway, every playlist i made had it. They released this album a few months ago, and then released a video for each song on the record every week for as many weeks as there are tracks. I also love the album art, and the best part is the album (and everything else they make) is free! Bandcamp is the best platform for new artists, even well known artists, every band should use it.

Stop Motion

I could watch this for days. Stop motion is one of my favorite art forms, especially things like this, where normal objects are used as something else. I also really like the Fleet Foxes video for "White Winter Hymnal". I'm not a huge fan of their music, but the song is catchy, and the music video has some great animation.
 

Don Kenn - Artist

Don Kenn is an amazing pen and ink artist, i absolutely love his line work and shading. His creatures are all immensely imaginative, i also love his paper choice, the parchment-like color and texture of the paper he draws on adds character to his work. I've put a couple of examples below, as well as his website which i recommend taking a look at.

John Kenn