The assignment was to make a still life with a theme: memento mori, knowledge, or food. I immediately chose knowledge, but I have this awesome hourglass and I really love skulls. So, I did a walrus skull, and you know what, I know it is confusing to put in an hourglass but I tried to make it look like the urgent and exciting need to do an adventure, or something. So yeah, those are some sketch and notebooks, a book of conversion rates and formulas from 1904, an hourglass, a walrus skull, and my moon globe. I got called out when we reviewed our projects. My professor said when you do a sphere you are almost challenging everyone to judge it. I pointed out that it is a lunar globe, hence the brightness, but they are right, it is not as perfect as I could have made it. The photo looks really good, but actually my brights are not bright enough in real life, especially on the skull.
This is what I worked on today. It is a studio practice for our next homework. It is supposed to be an enlargement of an existing digital (?) image onto a collaged "ground" made up of black and white text and graphics, no photographic sources allowed.* It can either relate, or not relate, to the ground. And our final version, due thurs, is supposed to draw from our mentor and/or use grid enlargement/distortion techniques. (People are visual, or people are verbal, and nothing in the world can make a right brained artist describe what she is visualizing in a way that 25 students can create it. We were all so confused.)
So, for this, I used an extremely enlarged enlargement of a tiny (<1"x1") portion of a Salvador Dali postcard I have. He is not my real mentor, Bosch is, but really Bosch was Dali's mentor also. I was planning to do a Bosch-non-flaming-Garden-of-Earthly-Delights-giraffe on the right, but I felt it would be too "busy" looking, so I just copied the Dali and stretched it out a little. I think giraffes might be my favorite animal, because I have always really liked them. You can tell, by the way I spent an hour drawing one on fire.
I am probably secretly a sociopath. But in the original Dali the giraffe is on fire also. And Dali, of course, was totally well adjusted and everything.
I really liked looking through my old scrap papers and notes for this, the ones that I have kept through move after move, for no real reason. I think that using them as the ground for various collages is an interesting way to let go of/utilize** them, like when people use old clothing in quilts.
*Here is what I used for the ground:
> card catalogue index cards that I liberated from the library
> a small envelope
>worst case scenario survival postcard
>little printed out powerpoint slideshow from some bio class I took in hs
>red and yellow and black scrapbooking paper
>diagrams of indigenous american stone carvings from a flyer
**some people really hate the word utilize, because they think the word use can be used just as well in nearly all cases. I think there is the same complaint made about mobilize in place of move. But you know, they are totally wrong. Shades of meaning are valuable for precision of thought and expression.
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