Happy Holidays, and Happy Break! Finally!

Thank you DMF 201 for a wonderful digital art intro.

Happy Holidays!

For my last blog...

I would like to discuss how disgusted I am with this photograph. Compositional it is absolutely terrible. Law of 2/3? Not adhered to... Too much back light? Yes a bit... Lack of interesting subjects? Definitely, except for the lovely background ocean maybe... There's some odd A-symmetry going on here, and definitely this looks like its taken right before any possible decisive moment. So what happened you may ask??

What's amazing is the fact that I could take this photo this morning, with my computer, may I add, as I was getting coffee at Lava Java. And to think that yesterday I was in a sunny, but 14 degree Seattle boarding a plane.

Disgusting I know.

:)

You have no idea how happy I am to be home...

Mele Kalikimaka no hau'oli makahiki hou!

Don't worry, this makes people feel better when I tell them I'm in Hawaii...

http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/hazards/maps.html

A small town music revival: Ashland

I started working on a documentary last year about the music scene in Ashland. It was a blast going around and filming street musicians, the open mic nights at Alex's, Stillwater, and a little at Northwest Pizza, and the school's music concerts.

However, my group got lazy and we never really finished it. It was a huge undertaking and we ended with a 10 minute project out of 6-8 hours of footage.

So I had a dream the other night involving this old project and Beyonce's "All the Single Ladies" and my first thoughts upon waking were that I needed to finish this project once and for all. Now I feel like I know what I need to do to make it better and it might involve Beyonce's music video somehow.

But what I really wanted to do after I woke up the other morning was do it as an ethnographic study. I might have been delirious from studying for 6 hours straight the day before for my Anthropology final, but that's what I decided. I talked with my friend, who's an anthropology major later that day and she started to get excited about it, too.

So then I mentioned it to my Anthropology professor, Dr. Anne Chambers and what she thought of it as an ethnographic study of the community of musicians within Ashland and she thought it was totally cool too. So that got me even more excited, and THEN on top of all that, my friend who I was talking with, Melissa, already proposed it as her ethnographic study...

So now it's beginning to have this snowball effect, that I'm totally digging. Just in time for winter term I guess... (I know bad pun...)

So I'm going to upload some of the footage I have on my computer at the moment from the Guitar Ensemble concert that I went to last spring. Please forgive the choppy audio and the rough cut (I'm uploading from imovie...). I'm not going to talk technical, because it's terrible but I really like this segment of interview, because I was really impressed with how candid these guys were with me. I had never met them before, but I went to the concert with my friend Kacey and made her hold the boom mic for me... Afterwards we did a couple of interviews with students and this was some of the footage I ended up with.

:)

Post-post modern maybe...

I was talking with my sister about different art styles because she is starting to put together her portfolio for art school submissions. She's working on varying her styles, and trying out things from different movements and I told her she should do something in the style of dadaism. Dada was way more punk rock and anarchist, void of meaning but really trying to piss people off than surrealist. Check this out:

And she wants to do more surrealist?

"This is not a pipe"

Well then: what is a pipe? The image and the words are both symbols for the object that exists. It is within our own world view that we see a "pipe" as it is. But what does it really mean?? What do all of these words and symbols really mean?? Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Actually I can't even remember if this is a dadaist piece or not, but it cracks me up. Hah. crack pipe. Ok not funny. These two pieces are my favorite modernist works, the first one by Marcel DuChamp, "The Fountain". I can understand why some people might hate the movement. (Especially if you live near the Tate Modern in London) But come on! It's like a good joke. Albeit an inside joke. Sometimes like those ones that are so inside that everyone is kind of looking around at each other waiting for the first person to laugh so they can pretend that they get it too...

So basically, I told her she needs to do something that makes me laugh.

Tattoo Art

DON ED HARDY.

Yes that's right. It seems as if you either know of this guy, and think he's a legend, or you don't. And if you don't then you're like the girl I saw in the bathroom the other day on campus wearing his art on her sweater, that didn't know who I was talking about. Yeah, that was a little awkward.

But apparently I'm not the only one who thinks this. (not that that was awkward, but that Don Ed Hardy has an interesting reputation)

A documentary came through the doors at the festival, and I got real excited. I was like, YES. And he wants to come to Ashland?? Uh... I very much hope so. It would be Very Cool. If he comes as a guest speaker, I feel like there needs to be an art show...I'm just going to throw that out there, and hope... who knows?

I loved the doc. It was a perfect portrait of the artist. I don't know if I should give this much away in the blog...

But anyway, it was interesting for me because, I love tattoos. I don't have any, but I think that seeing the kinds of tattoos people get is one way of learning more about them. That whole saying, "wearing your heart on your sleeve" gets taken to a whole new level...

And tattooing as an art! It's incredible. It's moving art. There are so many variables working with people, on skin ( and its imperfections), the fact that it's not a flat surface, and the pressure on the artists that the artwork has to be done perfectly the first time.

Seeing the kind of massive body work that people have done is incredible. Seeing it after 30+ years is pretty incredible too, but for other reasons.

The other thing about Hardy that I find interesting is how his popularity has shifted over the years. Back in the day he was famous on the underground for his tattoo work, but specifically his incredible colors that he worked with as well as the huge designs he would do. He was the only guy to go to Japan at the time and study their traditional methods and bring them back to the states.

And NOW, he's more famous for the tattoo art that was commercially bought by Christian Audigier... and yet people still don't know... yes that bag?

Check out some of this commercialization:

http://edhardyshop.com/

And yet for some reason, because as a tattoo artist you get paid on a regular basis so to speak... I mean, it's not like how an artist does a painting and lets it sit for a while maybe before it sells... You do a tattoo on someone, and they pay you. If you don't, they could potentially spell something wrong, or just mess it up some how and yeah, you're stuck with it on you for a looong time.

I think that's why I don't feel like he sold out so to speak. It's good, whether people know who did it or not.

Book: Page 1

I want to explain a little about the book and how it came about.

I had been listening to some music by Interpol, and decided that I really wanted to do a book of Haikus. Partially because it wouldn't be a whole lot of text, and partly because I want to be like Jack Kerouac. But secretly of course.

And I really like collaging... So here the story goes:

After my grandmother died, my sister and I inherited her left over art supplies so to speak. I know, an odd thing to get, but we're a crafty family. Sarah got her oils, and acrylics and I got some of her watercolors and sketch pads. What we didn't know at the time was that there was still a lot of her art work still in the sketch pads. Mostly unfinished sketches of boats, nautical things, buildings, landscapes, bird houses. Some really random, but interesting stuff. Boats were her thing, however.

So quite a few of the sketches were hers. The boat in this drawing I just outlined roughly and colored in one of her pieces, as well as pages 2, the corner piece was hers, pages 3 and 4, the landscape was her outline, and the last page was her sketch of the "end of the trail".

What I did as a homage to her, was use these pieces in my book with watercolor backgrounds I did, or color things in. It was a neat project to work on though.

Book: pages 2-7

Book: page 8