Community Connections

Community Connection #5 5/8/2012

Artist: Heather Givans -http://crimsontate.com

Quilting Indianas

  • home made Indiana pillows
  • each with its own design and individual quilt pattern
  • many of the patterns include hearts and references to the state.

This series of work is of about twenty quilted Indianas. The artist, a quilter from Indiana, made them in wake of nasty state elections and turmoil with the state of the state. They were made as a sign of support but also as a way for the artist to say which direction she thinks Indiana should go in. I find political art really interesting and this series is even more so for me because it is not so obvious but more subtle.

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Community Connection #4  4/17/2012

Artist: Jennifer Mehigan

http://www.booooooom.com/2011/02/02/artist-jennifer-mehigan/

  • painting on photos
  • acrylic paint
  • “fire” on fire

I found Jennifer Mehigan’s series on burning buildings is really integrating. She took photographs of burning buildings and then painted over them with abstract acrylic paint. Her colors and structured brush stokes contrast nicely with the organic craziness of the photos’ topics. Overall, it is an nice idea and was executed very well. I’d go see this is it was an exhibition.

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Community Connection #3  Mar. 13

Artist: Hester Stinnett

http://www.hesterstinnett.com/works/lexicon/lexicon01.html

  • unknown scale
  • text as a design element
  • collage and photograph
  • it all looks scanned together

I really am confused by his work. They are interesting but I can’t say that I like them. But I do not really like them. The series I looked at, Lexicon, was a mix of text and what looks like photography. The hard thing about looking at art on the internet is that it is so hard to judge scale and size. What I can say about this artist is this: I understand where he is coming from but it is just not my cup of tea.

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Community Connection #2 Feb. 28

Van Gogh- Up Close At the Philadelphia Art Museum

  • exhibit on Van Gogh and how is love of nature influenced his work
  • it mainly dealt with his earlier and lesser-know work that set the foundation for his more famous pieces.
  • the exhibit ranged from huge landscapes to small detailed pieces of grain
I recently spent a weekend at the Philadelphia Art Museum. The featured exhibit was Van Gogh Up Close, so I had to check it out. The show chronicled Vincent’s life in southern France and in Holland. The pieces were more focused on the development of his distinctive style, showing pieces like his paintings of boots and field studies of grain and wheat. I enjoyed it and the art was top quality as you would expect. The only thing I had a problem with was that there were so many people cramped into the gallery, at times I thought I was at a amusement park and not an art exhibit.

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Community Connection #1 Feb. 14

Zaha Hadid- Form in Motion, Philadelphia Museum of Art

  • first North American exhibition of many of Zaha Hadid’s industrial design works
  • mind-bending shapes that stress both function and form
  • all of the furniture was inspired by both movement and geometry
  • engaging as furniture and art

This exhibit was showcasing Zaha Hadid’s work and her innovation as a designer. I have never been to a show like this before and at first I thought that they were all statues and not furniture. I was really temped to try to sit down on a sofa but the security guard was not amused. The sleek shapes and curves looks so natural and comfortable that I’m surprised that there isn’t more chairs and sofas like these. I would really want buy something similar to them for my own room.

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Community Connection #6 Jan. 10

Toba Khedoori (http://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/toba-khedoori/)

  • minimalist works
  • graphite on paper
  • varying compositions ranging from a single object in the middle of the page to abstract dots
  • plays on the idea of scale

I found this artist through the David Zwirner Gallery website page. To be honest I do not really care for this collection of works. The five pieces that are here do not really do anything for me intuitively. They have nice formal merit and all but they are not cohesive and they feel mixed mashed. Individually I really like the Black Fireplace piece. Toba’s use of composition is really powerful in this work and he is really good at controlling what the viewer sees.

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Community Connection #5 Dec. 13

Douglas Witmer ( http://douglaswitmer.com/work/fruitville/)

  • series of color fields on wooden blocks.
  • no wooden block is bigger than 8” in any direction
  • all wood is found wood
  • ongoing since 2000

I found this series to be really interesting. I liked the found wood aspect to it and the size restraint. Like my work, this has very specific restrictions but they are all very unique and individualized. I also liked how in the photographs my idea of size is distorted. The pieces look bigger than they actually are which adds an interesting aspect to the series. It would be interesting to see how they are shown in a gallery setting.

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Community Connection #4 Nov. 15

Hyummee Lee (http://lowegallery.com/artists/index-scrollbar.php?artist=hyunmee-lee)

  • Abstract oil paintings with mix media
  • extensive series exploring the same color scheme and collage methods
  • evidence of varying brush strokes and techniques

I really found this artist’s work really interesting. The simple pallet of yellow, white and black made for some really interesting combinations. A lot of the pieces tended to run together, and while they were not painted at the same time  they seam like it. Each painting is unique compositionzly but they really fit in to the set so well. I enjoyed looking at them, and also liked how they are in acrylic but they look like oil. They have a certain grade of professionalism that makes me happy.

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Community Connection #3 Oct. 25

Diane McGregor  (http://www.dianemcgregor.com/current/current.html )

  • 12 works exploring the New Mexican landscape via abstract grids
  • Each follows a very specific process but with varying densities and colors
  • Amazing textures

For this community connection, I head to the internet to find an artist that is doing something similar to what I am doing. Diane McGregor is an artist from New Mexico that is using oil painting and a set process to explore abstractions. I can really relate to it because of the set process you need to follow to do printing. But anyway, these are wonderful works of art. They are vast,  endless and have a sense of puntum to me that I really like. My favorite is either “Terrain III” or “Twilight”. I love the tones and the contrast; I also feel that the grid does so much to draw your eye from one part to another, which makes looking at them more pleasurable to me. I might just have to try some grids.

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Community Connection #2 Sep. 30

Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus Exhibit

  • Rembrandt’s ideas of Jesus through oil, prints and sketches.
  • He recreated several of his favorite Biblical stories.
  • In his traditional rembrandt style of realism
  • Very interesting history behind it
Last weekend, I went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with some friends. There was new exhibit on Rembrandt visiting so we of course went to see it. It was on Rembrandt’s idea of what Jesus should be. He wanted a more personal Jesus and less of a deity-like man. So he depicted Jesus through his paintings as an average man with extraordinary powers. I found it really interesting the intensity of his painting. He has the classic Dutch style but, at the same time the collection seamed different. He used Jewish models for his works and he captured the expressions excellently. It just gave the whole collection wonderful appeal and I always enjoy Rembrandt’s work.

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Community Connection #1 2011-2012 Sep. 14

Ian Williams

  • This connection is on the work of my past high school art teacher.
  • It is mainly gouache and watercolor on paper
  • A lot of them are monochromatic and very spacious.
  • in a word: abstract
For my last first community connection, I decided to do my past art teacher Ian Williams. I believe I may have wrote about him before, but regardless I don’t remember so I’ll just do it again. This body of work is all made from July 28th to August 1oth and they all have this semi-depressing feel to them. In total, they can are all color fields which I really enjoy. But the one that I responded the most to was called “task at hand” which is a simple gradient of black to blue. But I just has some punctum to it that I like. Another tiny detail that I really enjoy is that at the bottom of each piece he put the date, name of piece and his signature. While it seams minor, I feel that it is an important aspect to a group of artwork that many people forget about.  So all in all from his art, I can say that he had at least an interesting summer, which is more then I had.  

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Community Connection #6 May 31st

Art Show Review- Alysha Roberts

  • trendy vintage
  • aesthetic as a installation
  • skeleton piece
  • transfers
As the art show came and went, there were many patterns that arise as trends in the students of Wissahickon. This year, both vintage and transfers were very popular. One student, Alysha Roberts, executed both with excellently. Her panels were set up as a living room corner (another trend), complete with curtains, floral wallpaper and chairs. As a result, the view spent more time looking at the installation than the work itself. But one piece really struck me, the skeleton piece. At first glance, it appears that it is done on a pre-woven fabric, but a closer look shows that it is in fact all transfers that she did herself made to look like fabric. Overall, the piece and installation was stunning and a terrific contribution  to the art show. 

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Community Connection #5 May 1oth

Jack McLean’s Big Red Head Series

http://www.mcleanbronze.com

  • metalwork with paint
  • multiple remakes of the same piece
  • varying viewpoints and angles
  • all with a red overtone
So this is the first collection that I am connecting to that is all based on one subject. There are sixteen pieces that are all (presumably) on one woman. I really respond to the red paint on metal and the raised eyebrows and noses. They are all similar and connected but unique and different at the same time. It is evident that thought was put into the collection as a whole and not just each piece. 

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Community Connection #4 April 12

Performance Drawings by Tony Orrico

www.booooooom.com/2011/04/13/performance-drawings-by-artist-dancer-tony-orrico/

  • Giant Circle Drawings
  • Performance Pieces
  • He lays on the paper and makes circles with both arms
I never seen anything like this before. This artist/dancer Tony he lays on huge sheets of paper and makes these captivating spiral shapes. I never seen anything like it in my life. It is even cooler because there is video of it being made. They are natural tessellations and I respond strongly to those for some reason. So I differentially plan on checking out more of his stuff.

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Community Connect #3

Bird Photo Transcribed into Music

http://gimundo.com/videos/view/bird-photo-transcribed-into-music/

  • A photo of crows on a wire
  • Each crow is a note
  • when played on a piano makes a song

So this is a totally awesome idea. The artist, Jarbas Agnelli, took a photo of about twenty crows on a wire. And gave each one a note. Then when it is played, it makes a song. By combining two polar medias, he made one awesome piece better then both of them separate. I would have never thought to do that and that why it is so innovating and fresh. Maybe I could do something like that soon…

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Community Connection #2

Lawrence Weiner – As Far As the Eye Can See

http://whitney.org/www/weiner/work.html

  • Lawrence’s exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art
  • All text
  • Huge walls with writing on them
  • no pictures
  • very interesting use of space

This website is profiling Lawrence Weiner’s exhibition. It is unlike any exhibition I have seen before because there are no defined pictures just walls. The walls are the canvases. There is also only text nothing else. So it is a very interesting take on a traditional concept. I feel that Lawrence was more conveying his emotion more then art. Even though that is what all art is for, Lawrence does it in a very effective and blunt way.

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Community Connection #1

Mark Fredrickson

thedesigninspiration.com/articles/30-awesome-character-illustrations-by-mark-fredrickson/

  • Cartoonist
  • Does computer generated cartoons of famous pop culture icons
  • also pokes fun at big corporations.
  • most have a political meaning

I really enjoyed this article. It has 30 of Mark Fredrickson’s best work. Mark is a illustrator based in Tucson, Arizona with art degrees from Tennesseee Temple College and University of Arizona. He is now works in freelance illustration. I think his work is very well executed and humorous. One of my favorite pieces is of Obama knocking out Hillary in a boxing ring, but I also like the childish Newton as well. His work is simple caricatures that are effective and amusing at the same time.

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Community Connection #6

German Post Card

  • German Post Cards all containing old movie posters
  • back when posters were art
  • interesting use of text and dramatization.

For this community connection, i found a bunch of old postcards in my room. They are from Germany (no clue why they are in my room…) and have different famous classical movie posters on them. They show not only some of the greatest movies, but some of the greatest art for movies. The posters were made before computers so they have artistic touches to them. It is interesting to see the fads in art that happened at different times. You can clearly see a drift to abstraction as the years went on.

Community Connection #5

Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline.

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1882089_1850973,00.html

  • Photos of old buildings
  • decaying hotels and abandoned train stations
  • Very interesting perspectives
  • Mainly Art Deco and Baroque style buildings

This article is about two French photographers, that focus on decay, and their trip to Detroit. They were shocked at the magnitude of the neglect that was done. The article is photos with captions explaining the buildings. There is a sort of bitter-sweet feeling about it. Its a real shame that these majestic buildings are left to die, but they come even more beautiful in shambles. Part of me wants to go to Detroit and restore all of them, and the other part of me wants to go and explore them all. Whatever happens hopefully the buildings won’t go away any time soon.

Community Connection #4

Mr. Williams’ Exhibit

Nov. 19

  • Exhibit
  • Mr. Williams
  • very abstract
  • many different gradients and brush techniques

So for this community connection, I went to my former art teacher Mr. Williams’ art exhibit in Ambler. I found it extremely interesting because I never before then saw the style of him before. It’s weird to see the style of the man that taught me art for a period of time. It was not what I expected at all. For whatever reason I did not view him as someone that would do abstracts. It was also nice to note that I saw little to no text. Which is interesting considering text is a big part of Wissahickon’s art program. But I was in fact pleasantly surprised with that whole exhibit. It was very visionally  pleasing and almost relaxing. Free food helps a lot too.

Community Connection #3

Renaissance Fair

  • Costumes
  • Random Acting in the street
  • Acts and Jousting

For this community Connection I went to the PA Renaissance fair. I really enjoyed for it was my first time there. I was overwhelmed by the scale of it all. There was a whole village made for the fair and hired actors to run the shops, talk to people, do deminstrations and just have fun. I really found it to be an amazing experiance because of welcoming nature of the whole thing. There were a lot of vendors that and I really liked browsing through the shops. The costume shops were perticually interesting. To think that you can choose anything from your class, job, and life just from how you dress! Mind blown.

Community Connect #2

Artist: Nasa Sattalites

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2HEXm5/abduzeedo.com/exceptional-nasa-pictures

Concept: Wicked Epic pictures of Earth from Space

  • All HD pictures of the earth
  • Natural landmasses
  • Pictures of Cities
  • varrying points of veiw and perspectives

I found this collection of pictures while on Stubleupon.com, a website that takes you to other random websites based on you intrests. And this was just awe inspiring. The pictures were taken from the hubble teleiscope and just were out of this world (pun intended). My favorites were the one were “Cresent Moon”  and “Sun Over Earth”. In both they show a unique view on a everyday occurance.  The angle of the shots were also interesting to not because of their slanted nature. They are in no way traditionally photographed which make them even more radder.

Community Connection #1 OF THE NEWW YEAR!?!?!?!?!

Lady Gaga

9/14/10

Bullet Points

  • costumes!
  • choreography
  • overall performance
  • general awesomeness

Paragraph

So for this Community Connection I did something amazingly amazing. I went to a Lady GAGA concert! But Patrick, how does that relate to art? Well Lady Gaga is the definition of a performance artist. The Monster Ball is not Lady Gaga singing it is her making art. From the over the top sets, to the 8+ costume changes to the keyboard inside of a car motor. It was intense. It just didn’t stop.

When you thought she could not get any crazier, she bring out some backup dancers and preforms semi-pornographic acts or goes on a five minute long electric harp solo or fights a 20 foot angler fish. She kept everyone entertained and begging for more. As a side note, she also had short abstract films in between major sense changes that made you go whhhaaa???? It was pure music to my ears and eyes and almost every other sense. It even smelt artistic.

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2009 -2010 School Year

Community Connection #4

5/10/10

Artist: Alexander Calder

Website: http://www.artnet.com/artist/3485/alexander-calder.html

Alexander Calder is an American Painter and Sculptor, best know for inventing the mobile. But this website is just of his paintings. Most of which are on sale. I decided to look at the ones for sale to see what they are like. I saw one that drew my eye and I like the most right away: Puppet Man. I think what I like so much about it is how confused he looks and how I can relate to that now with the art show so close and all.

I really like to do my community connections on people from Philly. So it is great that I found Alexander. I think that he is a great example of what growing up in an artist environment can do for a person.

Community Connection #3

4/25/10

Artist: Maggie Taylor

www.maggietaylor.com/

Using the oh-so-loved stumbleapon, I found another great artist: Maggie Taylor. She has a degree in Philosophy and Photography from Yale and University of Florida respectively. Lately she has been doing artwork using photoshop and her photographs. Many of her work deal with the splicing of human and animals. Also, she has many different themes encluding an Alice in Wonderland theme.

My favorite piece is It all seamed quite natural in the Almost Alice tab. It has a rabbit-human thing dressed up in a suit thing and looking all royal and stuff. Do you know what I mean? I hope so because I cannot really describe it well.  It also has a nice background. But it is amazing to see what they can do with Photoshop. I really need to jump on that bandwagon.

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Community Connection #2

www.booooooom.com/2009/07/07/claire-morgan-installations/

Artist Claire Morgan

So I found this artist on this amazing website called Stumbleupon.com. It brings you to random artist’s websites.  Claire Morgan is an artist that uses real food and dead stuffed animals to make amazing pieces. He hangs the fruit in different patterns with nearly invisible wire. Then makes the animals appear as if they are walking into the shape or near it. She also uses awesome organic materials like sticks or leaves. She even can make words out of floating fruit!

I think that she is awesome and I want to do work like this. I would love to go see this live or in a museum. I don’t know, it’s just something about these pieces that I LOVE. I strongly recommend looking at her art and will try to find more of her work.

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Community Connection #1

Artist: Ben Volta

Website: http://www.benvolta.com/projects.html

I really really really loved the Tap floor video. I thought it was amazing. I always like the media of tap and I was really surprised and happy to see the video. It was so cool to see the proses and the ending result was mind-blowing. Another piece (or group) of works I really enjoyed where that elettrostatica works. They seamed to be a mix between photoshop and a painting. I thought they were wicked. The slide show is nice and the theme is very apparent.

Over all, I really like Ben’s work. It has many themes of patterns and repetition. They seamed fun and simple, but while still being detailed. I’m excited to see more of Ben Volta’s work in the future and its so good to read about a local artist.

Second Marking Period

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Community Connection #4 – Gorky

Date visited 1/3/10

For this community connection I went to the Philadelphia Art Museum again.  This time I went with my sister to the Gorky Exhibit.  Arshile Gorky (1902-1948) was an artist that was a key figure in the abstraction movement in America. A product of the Armenian Genocide, he knows first hand the hardships of war. He moved to New York in the mid 1920′s and started perusing his love for art. He had a very surrealist and distinct way of painting. What I found really interesting about his paintings, mainly his portraits is the fact that he would finished the faces and bodies of people but leave the arms, hands and background seaming unfinished. I think that this is his way of drawing the viewers attention to the face rather than the other parts of the body.

Or maybe this is because he feels like a lot of himself and his childhood was taken away from him by the Genocide that he lived through.  Another piece that I really loved was his Aerial Map. It shows a distorted United states with a very cubist background. In the United States it has little dots that look like where cities would be and lines connecting them. They dots seem to be mainly New York (where he lived) and Virginia (where he would spend his summers and the place where he experimented heavily with surrealism).  I don’t know what it is about this painting, but I just get it. It seams just to make sense. That what I really like about Gorky, is the fact that his art is so out there that I just get it.

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Community Connection #3 – Islamic Art

For this community connection, i went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  I always love going to the museum, and this time was no exception. The exhibition I went to was on Islamic calligraphy. I thought it was interesting to see this art that focuses on words, when we are doing a text piece in school. The way they mixed text and pictures was amazing and so unique. It made me realize that while I might think that I’m doing something cool and new, chances are that someone already done it.  I think that Arabic is such a beautiful language when it is written; it just has a royal look about it. Now  I wish I know Arabic so I know what the pictures are saying. But I also think that because I don’t know the language that its just that more exciting and interesting.

It also blows my mind that these pieces of art have survived this long! Most documents are distorted from wear and tear after a few decades, but these have last centuries! I wonder if the artist have use a special way to perverse the art. Well, anyway my trip to the museum gave me more questions than answers and hopefully, I can learn from these text masters and apply it to my own art.

Community connection #2 – Chestnut Hill Art Show

For my second community connection, I went to Chestnut Hill art show with my favorite seconded family in the world, Johanne and Claire Uhle. We walked Main Street looking at all of the street performers and little stalls of nick-knacks and had a great time. It was great to see what art local people from Philly were making. We also had a great time collecting the free food and samples that everyone was giving out. We also spent a good hour in one of our new favorite stores, Ten Thousand Villages. This store is one of the coolest places I ever been. It’s a store centered on free trade. What they do, is they employ artisan in third world countries and pay them like American citizens.

They pay them reasonable prices for their goods and artwork. They have everything from wooden puzzles to hand made jewelry, from soap to backpacks and plates made entirely out of paper. All profits go to help the artisans in their home countries. I think that it is a great idea to have a store like this. Not only do they help third world countries, the store also sells ideas that people in Philly could not get on a regular basis and opens people up to the many cultures of the world.

Community Connection #1 – the Louve?

Date visited: 6/30/09

Date: 9/22/09

For my community connection, I went to the Louve in Paris. Now you may be thinking, “How could he have done that?” Well, over the summer, I went on an exchange trip to Europe. I spent three days in Paris, one of which I went to the Louve. Looking back on the experience, I have gained one thing from it, how far humans would go to make art. I saw grand paintings of kings and queens and I saw the famous Mona Lisa, but what stuck out to me were the statutes in the Egyptian exhibit. People would spend their whole lives working on a statue no bigger then my arm, only to be put in a dead man’s grave. That stuck a cord with me because it made me realize that it’s not about how big or grand your picture of Napoleon is, but how much care and soul people can put into art. Not that that artist that painted the 50 foot painting didn’t put a lot of time, but they knew that that painting was going to be famous. You can’t paint a 50 foot painting of a king and not expect any fame at all.

But, the people who made those tiny statues did not know that it would end up in one of the most pristine museums in the world. They made it as high a quantity as they did because they wanted to and enjoyed it. And that is what art is about ENJOYMENT. If you don’t get enjoyment out of something, why waste countless hours working on it?