Field Trip! Reflection.

This week our class took a trip to Minneapolis, Minnesota to see the Walker Art Center and the Bell Museum of Natural History (at the University of Minnesota). This day was a lot of fun. First we walked around the Walker, which I have been to previously but I got to see a lot of new artwork this time. My favorite pieces were probably Naked, by Eiko and Koma and the Yves Klein exhibit, specifically his Untitled Fire Painting. The first one was very interesting. At first I thought the piece was the large wall of feathers and I didn't see that there was something inside, until someone walked out and I realized you were supposed to enter! I also saw the pictures of the people in the pamphlet and thought they were sculptures of some sort. Then upon entering the piece I finally realized that they were breathing, moving, real people. I watched for about ten or fifteen minutes, seeing them shift and sleep. It was very calming but at the same time curious. I got a sense of the importance of time, and survival, and birth or death. The Yves Klein exhibit was fascinating, and more so because we talked about his work in my sculpture class. The room of his pure blue works was overwhelming! I loved his pieces using women's bodies to make imprints in paint on canvas. He also had some works, like my favorite "fire painting" that used the form of the bodies but with warmer, fiery colors. There was something about them that fascinated me. The quality was very unique and the canvas was manipulated in an interesting way.

The second half of the trip we went over to the Bell Museum, which was a smaller museum containing stuffed animals from the midwest. I saw birds, moose, wolves, etc. but I wasn't quite sure what to draw so I went to the room with all the bones and live animals. I ended up drawing an antler that had an intricate piece of bone attached. This I enjoyed doing a lot, and I even got to learn about some of the bones later and see an elephant skull, which was cool.

Week Six Reflection-Shell #2

This last week we did some more drawing in class, some gestures and also a long pose. This was challenging and draining, but going slow and measuring out angles and proportion paid off; the drawings turned out well. Gestures are becoming a lot more natural, and it's getting easier to see how the body is moving and bending when we sketch it. For our homework we did a second drawing of our shell. I was a little more rushed on this one, so I didn't fully explore the positioning and I was still confused on how to correctly show the shell. I tried to get an angle but my drawing turned out too horizontal again. Other than that, it went alright, and I pushed lights, darks, and expression a little further. Still, when I finished, I noticed that the proportion could have been more accurate, which I could've pushed by spending more time drawing. Overall the week went well, and the muscles are getting easier to build although they still are quite time consuming. I hope for my next shell drawing to spend a lot more time and attention to how I lay it out on the paper.

Midterm Portfolio-Reflection

These last few weeks of life drawing class have flown by in a blur, yet I can see clearly looking through my work the progress that has been made and the result of all the hours in class. There have been many challenges to this course and many things that I have enjoyed about it. First of all, throughout the first half of this semester, we have been pushed outside our comfort zone. I have gone away from the neat, careful, calculated still-life style of drawing and been pushed to let go a little and really focus on capturing the natural movement and feel of the figure. It was very hard at first not to only draw heavy outlines of the subject. I am used to drawing what I see, in the easiest way, and the first few days of gestures were pretty tough. Through watching Amy draw and learning what areas to focus on, along with how to highlight the most important parts of the body, my gestures became a little more natural. A lot of practice in class made a huge difference. Throughout the next few weeks of class, we continued to learn about different inner structures of the body, like the spinal column, the rib cage, the hips. Learning about these things and seeing the way the skeletal system is structured helped my drawing immensely. Once you have an understanding of where everything in the body is, it is much easier to draw gestures and pick out points on the body where you can see certain points to reference the structure beneath. I know that building the muscles is also helping us to see the body and draw it with more understanding. I hope that when we finish building the muscles we will have solid and complete knowledge of human body structure, and be able to incorporate this knowledge into our artwork. I have enjoyed drawing from life very much. There is so much satisfaction for me in drawing natural form and energy and movement. What hasn't been so fun (at least in the beginning) is building the muscles out of clay. It has been hard to translate the images from the book into a three-dimensional clay form, and especially to make them look nice and fit together. This has been a little frustrating but my hope is that it becomes easier and easier with every set of muscles we make. I am looking forward to the rest of the semester and how much more our work will improve by then!

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