5 Things I Heard Last Night...

1. The portraits and the fragment photographs may be/are reading as related, as the same time or place, or tied in some other way. There is a natural inclination to associate and to try to create context and narrative.
2. The optical style of the portrait photographs does not go unnoticed and needs some kind of explanation. Am I trying to create a portrait that makes the camera's presence so known?
3. Information is someone playing a guitar. Their fingers come over the strings and the sings send reverberations into the air and back into the fingers and then the body. Information is the thing you let your eyes go over to reverberate you.
4. Should there be a shift from information to sensation?
   
5. I need to address the portrait work and if it is more than an emulation of Avedon, and if it is something unique to me and my artistic vision and what I'm trying to achieve. I then need to consider how, if and should those issues tie into the already resolved issues of the non-portrait works.
   

RICHARD EMERY NICHOLSON RESPONSES

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POST SECOND DRAFT OF ARTIST STATEMENTS HERE

YA HADDY NJIE: Punch List for MID-TERM CRIT

EMILY NORRIS: Punch List for MID-TERM CRIT

ANNE ROWAN: Punch List for MID-TERM CRIT

SARAH KRAMER: Punch List for MID-TERM CRIT

BONNIE VEBLEN: Punch List for MID-TERM CRIT

MIKE BENJAMIN: Punch List for MID-TERM CRIT

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ART NOW_NYTIMES ARTICLE

Check This from the NYTIMES

how to build a point- mike's blog

This is a link to a blog I just started for the group of people involved in the project I am undertaking. hopefully you will find it helpful, please feel free to contribute.
http://howtobuildapoint.blogspot.com

PLEASE POST YOUR POST-PANEL RESPONSES OF THE "PLACING COLOR" SHOW HERE

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SECOND - First Presentation RECAPS

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PLACING COLOR - INITIAL RESPONSES

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SMP II - FIRST: POSTS

SMP II
Spring 2009
FIRST

3-Point Assessment

When we return from Break, I’d like for each person to write a 3-point assessment of himself or herself to present to class on Wednesday, January 21.

Here are the 3-points:

1. What do I do well? (Strength)
2. What can I improve upon? (Weakness)
3. What’s next? (Future)

You must write more than a paragraph per point, and no more than a page per point.

You will post these on our class BLOG (address forthcoming by 5pm FRIDAY) by Monday 5pm.
BETWEEN Monday and Wednesday class time, everyone should read peers' posts, and be ready to question, challenge and/or encourage during class presentations.

Everyone will read theirs aloud in class on Wednesday.

Be as HONEST as you can. I have given you a Month to reflect and revaluate.

Weakness, Strength and Improvement

Weaknesses

Well one of my greatest weaknesses is expressing myself in a different language. English being my third language, I find it difficult to explain and convey my thoughts in the most simple and meaningful way. Speaking English is not my weakness, trying to express my feelings with it is. There is a difference between knowing and understanding a language and speaking it. However, this weakness is more of a motivation and a challenge than a discouragement even though sometimes it feels so. I have come to accept this weakness not as a struggle but as challenge and as one of my greatest achievements thus far.

This is part of what my SMP is about: the ability to be able to adapt to a new culture, and be challenged.

I self-analyze my artworks while creating them as if I had critics right in my head while creating works of art and this has affected my final works tremendously. My artistic process is always planned; I cannot make art everyday or draw everyday, but only when the picture I see wants to be drawn.

Strength

My strengths come from my ability to set goals for myself. Once I set my mind to something, I do it no matter how long it takes. I know sometimes this could be a bad thing but I am more interested in the journey of the race rather than the time it takes me to finish it.

The best race I ever ran is the one I haven’t run yet

Another strength is my willingness to redo and scrap off and start all over again from the same point or the beginning but with a brand new pen. Endless revision takes the worse out of me and brings the joy.


Future

This semester I want to allow myself to turn off my Editing Mind and follow the pen wherever it wants to go. This can be very challenging for me personally, having been raised by parents who believed in emotional and spiritual privacy, in never revealing too much of the self. I still intend to keep this not revealing aspect as my artwork are exposing but not to my viewers. It is almost as if I am walking naked into a room full of people who do not see my nakedness.

I also want to be able to reveal more of me and be fluid with the way I express myself in my artworks. I want to be able to let sequences of my images evoke their own implicit narrative, without following an explicit scenario but starting with it.

If I can get you, the viewer, to experience in your own mind what I have experienced in self, then that to me is a successful work of art

3-Point Assessment

1. Strength

  I am able to create artwork with images that are both captivating and thought provoking. I have an inventive eye that is able to turn a seemingly basic source into complex imagery. I notice coincidental details and occurrences that may pass by the average person. Process wise, I can improvise and make smart decisions along the way.

When I start something, I finish it. I do not like to make excuses or find an easy way out. Criticism does not bother me and I am able to use it constructively. I listen to feedback and discussion intently. Additionally, I am good at researching and finding similarities between artists and discussing their work in relation to my own. 

2. Weakness

  I can improve upon the quantity of my work. Producing more work is how I got to my most successful and rewarding experience towards the end of last semester. My initial motivation to begin a project is never as great as my motivation and excitement during the beginning or final stages of creating art. I need to pay attention to myself and the moments where I am most captivated – and recreate these or dive deeper into why or where they came from. I need to look towards myself for more answers. I frequently question my thoughts so much that they never make it out into the world or my art. I need to take more risks and produce more work. At the same time, I cannot work with blinders on. I need to work on stepping back from a body of work especially and pay attention to what exactly is successful or not. 

3. Future

  The plan is to make more. I need to remind myself that my art makes me happy – and the more work I make, the more work I will like. I will be more aware and active during my process, and follow a more disciplined schedule. I will allot times to work and stick to them. I will not second-guess myself until it keeps me from creating. I will take more risks and be more active. I will also document my ideas and thoughts more frequently, so they leave my head and enter my art.

I want to investigate the Eastern influences that I naturally gravitate towards, including Japanese architectural principles and philosophies. I want to be more specific in what it is that I am trying to do in my work, so my explanations are able to match both the visuals and experience of the work.   

1. What do I do well? (Strength)

I feel that, while I have not done it as often as I should, one of my strengths is my ability to draw from observation. I enjoy using charcoal and drawing pencils because I have developed a familiarity with the marks that can be made with them and how exactly to manipulate these materials. The nature of the materials I prefer makes it easy for me to work both large and small, which I find very fortunate and useful. I have found that through a combination of both using materials I manipulate successfully and drawing from observation I keep myself from becoming generic in my mark-making while also yielding what I consider to be intriguing and beautiful work.

Now that I have finished fighting myself and trying to make art making more difficult than it needs to be I find I am also very good at getting myself into my “zone.” I make art with more passion now. I use a sort of automatic art making process. It is not entirely automatic, but my art is about the moment rather than enacting steps to reach a particular destination. I make spontaneous marks and smudges in conjunction with moments of careful editing or guidance of my work in a particular direction. The work never really comes out being something you can truly see and understand, but it is full of intensity and feeling. So I guess you could say I am good at making art which reflects intense feeling, and which tends to be confusing and even uncomfortable.

2. What can I improve upon? (Weakness)

I need to try making works which speak with one another rather than competing for attention. Right now I feel that while they want to read together in their similar style and appearance, they all hold an equal weight. It bothers me that I don’t really know what to do with them. It’s arguable that that might be a good thing, but it does not feel intentional enough. I want them to read together, not as a narrative, but as a body of work in which every work is complemented by the other works. They should have their own identity so to speak, which is emphasized and augmented by being viewed alongside another of my works.

I think I could do this by having more intention behind my work in general. I need to think more about my incorporation of color. If I choose to continue using color at all, it needs to feel more intentional and critical to the work. I need to think more about my incorporation of images. Why these images? The same is true of size and shape. Why this size? What does it do for the work? Does it feel right? I need to be aware of my composition as well. It needs to be interesting and keep the viewer’s eye moving throughout the work, but there needs also to be variation. Variation perhaps is the most important issue I am having with my work. There needs to be more variation within my work. The trick is doing this without altering my whole style and the feel of my work. The work should read together as a whole, but the mood of each piece and the pace at which the work is viewed should be different for each piece.

3. What’s next? (Future)

First and foremost, I need to keep this idea of variation in my mind this semester. I think it is the key to resolving many of my issues. If there is variation particularly in mood and how quickly the works are read, I feel an implicit sense of the mind and subconscious experience will begin to develop in my audience. To really emphasize this idea, though, I also want to consider repetition more this semester. I have already been repeating certain motifs such as hands and eyes, but I want to start repeating particular hands or eyes or situations so that a sense of memory develops. These repeating images may even begin to develop a set of personal symbols.

I also want to work on creating more depth within my work. I do not know that I want them to feel like places, and I certainly do not want them to be complete illusions, but I do want them to give the audience a sense of being engulfed. I want to be more conscious of what role the surface plays in my work, and consider the illusion vs. the mark.

And finally, I need to explore color this semester or at least warm and cool tones. I realized over break that black and white feels dead to me. Just the addition of a warm gray here and there really brings a lot of feeling to the work.

Self-Assessment (bonnie)

Increasingly, I am finding that my greatest strengths are also my greatest weaknesses, so it is hard for me to separate these two things. The following two strengths//weaknesses are important ones that have largely driven my life—how I am and how I act—though for a long time I did not realize them so clearly, and don’t fully understand them still.

Strength: Ritual//Spontaneity//Reflection

I have a tendency to be forgetful, spacey, and caught up in whatever I’m doing at the moment. To counter this, I have learned to plan, to use routine as a way to structure my life. When I plan and I stick to that plan I can get a lot done, and I can be responsible to myself and to others. However, I have learned to plan “so well” that more often than not, I over-plan. I get stuck in a rut of what I “must” do. I sometimes have trouble letting go enough to see what it is that I am doing and how I could be going about things differently.

I have found that I need to create reflective space in my life so that I’m not hemmed in to one sort of thinking or making and can consider what I’m doing. With reflective space, I can clearly see the paintings I’m painting, the writings I’m writing, and imagine other possibilities that I’ve not considered. With reflective space I can open my process back up when it is too closed or ritualized or close it off when it has become to open and spontaneous.

Weakness: Expectations//Trust//Patience//Frustration//Forgiving//Unforgiving

I am very patient and enduring person. I can stand a lot of hurt or annoyance or disappointment. From others I expect little more than respect, kindness, and engagement or a willingness to try. I trust people very easily and only when it’s clear that kindness is lacking do I flip over, unable to be patient anymore, and get frustrated and sometimes hurt. Usually, though this fades pretty quickly, as I can usually see the other person’s point of view and as I forgive others easily.

My weakness is that I have less patience for myself than for other people, by far. While it usually takes me a long time to get frustrated with or hurt by others, I get frustrated with myself quickly and easily. In short, I expect too much of myself—that I’ll get things faster than I do, that I’ll do more than I possibly can, and so on. I have trouble finding acceptance for myself; I am hard and unforgiving towards myself. I look at my work in this way, too, because I see it as part of myself, a reflection of who I am. This means that when I see something that I don’t like associated with myself in my work, I run from that and try to make it go away. I notice that I do this when I am bothered, afraid, scared, worried, or concerned about something. This practice of running away makes it very difficult to continue making work with much continuity. Recently I realized that I can let go of all the “goods” and “bads” to which I hold myself, and perhaps more importantly, I came to an effective way of doing it, but I am not very well practiced at this yet.

Future:

What’s next for me right now is painting more. Because I don’t have a lot of experience painting, I need to play, to do some constructive experiments where I try different painting techniques just to see what happens. Right now, I want to experiment with layering colors and I want to try painting larger. I am interested in color fields, in landscape painting (more or less), and in gestural mark-making, and I need to paint more to see where I want to take my work next.

Specifically this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’m painting as well as how I’m getting there. I have been interested in air, atmosphere, and in-between spaces, where things meet. I still feel overwhelmed at not knowing what to paint because there are so many places where things meet—earth and sky at the horizon, water and earth at the riverside, tree against sky above the horizon, and so on.

How I want to paint is something that I have been questioning for a while, but especially since our last critique. My first watercolor drawings were abstractions derived from my experiences, but not drawn while looking at anything. My paintings on wood were the exact opposite of that—they are images that I held down, first by a camera, then carefully translated into paintings to so that the paintings are near replicas of those photographs. At the end of the semester I didn’t want to continue doing either one of those processes as I had been doing them before. I didn’t want to be only drawing from my head because I enjoy the engagement of looking as I draw. I also didn’t want to be painting only from photographs because they are so much about holding onto a passed experience and I am interested in a presentness of experience, a sensed and lived now. Reading about phenomenology only strengthened that interest. So how do I choose to paint my paintings? Do I paint from life? From my head? From both? Right now I have decided to try both options, to paint from life and abstractions, and perhaps forget these categories altogether. I will see what comes of it in time. The essential thing is to paint.

What do I do well? (strength)
I am very goal oriented. Once I figure out what I need to do, I am very efficient at determining what needs to be done to accomplish the task and allotting time, resources, and energy to accomplish the goal. This often helps me to produce work when I feel like I am loosing steam. It also keeps me from getting disorganized and flustered.
While for the most part being goal oriented and motivated is positive and a helpful strength to have, it also serves as a hindrance. I find that I often become so set in my path of completion that I become closed to outside ideas, suggestions, and energy. I also become closed to my own new ideas. This can obviously be detrimental to the work and frustrating for me (and those around me, no doubt). However, acknowledging this steadfastness and its sometimes negative effects is the first step to becoming more fluid and accepting that fluidity into my life and work.

What can I improve upon? (weakness)
I can improve upon my assumptions of meaning. Often when I am working on a piece I think that certain aspects of the work, be they symbols, figures, treatment of subject matter, etc. carry meaning that I intend. I think that people will understand these messages. However, I often have trouble stepping outside of myself and seeing that certain meanings might not be accurately assigned or understood the way I want them to be. This issue comes from many sources: being over confident with my grasp of visual rhetoric, overlooking the context that every person brings to their individual reading of my work, and insufficient reading of art theoretical sources.
This weakness not only affects my production of work but it negatively affects how I talk about my work. When speaking about my work, I often think that I am getting a clear message across but in reality I am not really conveying what I want.
In order to work on this weakness I have a few things planned. I need to read more art theoretical sources including but not limited to Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings. I also plan on spending more time in the library browsing and reading contemporary art publications. This will help me clarify my language. I will also continue to pinpoint words that specifically clarify or cloud my grasp and discussion of meaning. I will then research, reflect upon and define these words for myself. A general area that I need to improve upon is my breadth and depth of reading. I think that if I really work on expanding and carefully choosing what I read, I will have more knowledge and information about meaning and therefore will be able to make more educated decisions about word choice.

What’s next? (future)
This semester I really want to concentrate on developing fluidity and confidence in my work. As I mentioned before, I often get very set on a specific idea or path and am unable to accept other ideas or directions that I may try. I truly think that fluidity is the perfect term for what I want to accomplish in this regard. I want to be able to act like water, to flow forth and explore every crack and crevice, but recede again if necessary, to divide myself and my energy in order to explore different ideas or embodiments of ideas, etc. This semester (and beyond) I want to focus on allowing myself to become more fluid.
In addition, I want to graduate in May knowing that I am a skilled photographer that can approach my ideas calmly without fear that my lack of skill or technical difficulties will serve as insurmountable obstacles.

SMPII Assignment 1 Self Eval

1. 1.What do I do well? (Strength)

2. What can I improve upon? (Weakness)

3. What’s next? (Future)

I know why I am producing and more importantly what I am producing is not limited to this SMP or defined by the art discipline. My work started years ago and will be continued unavoidably. I have found artistic license to be a medium itself as I pursue my goals. The resolutions I made last semester to work not only for but with the interest of the community has solidified. I am also starting to get a grip on who exactly this community I speak of is, and what my role in the community may be. De-commercialized land-art still resonates deeply with my motivations and future intentions. More importantly, I am most confident with my cross disciplinary approach to both research and production, an attempt to speak a universal didactic language that has been divided between the academic disciplines.

Because I choose to sample from a pool of varying perspectives and approaches, I can often improve my specificity. I consistently lack artistic reference because I do not come from an art background, so I often find artists working similarly later than I would like. I also have denied relevance to the work I do outside of SMP to the work that I was doing last semester, something I have started changing and am finding very consuming. Along the same lines I rarely speak with my peers outside of the art discipline about my work, which needs to change for my “universal didactic language” to be realized. Lastly I need to get my hands dirty and reengage with my writing, something I lost last semester while spread too thin.

As far as what’s next, I have been working for over a year with President O’Brien to develop a wilderness ethics course to be taught through St. Mary’s. An extension of the Leave No Trace trips that have taken place in Patagonia and Easter Island, we are working to find a way to combine the advantages of outdoor education with disciplinary academia. Here I see place-space learning and site-specific art bridging a gap of objectivity. The keystone for this gap I believe will be the apparatus for which place-space learning is perceived, the literal living environments that will define the relationship between the internal us and the external other. More simply, the architecture and insulation that classically removes the inhabitant from the habitat must be reevaluated.