Addie

=CONCENTRATE! =

Image 7: Getting Lost This painting really ended up being my most realistic piece, even more so than my first painting of the guy with the sunglasses. So, I wrestled with whether or not I wanted to take a similar, watery approach in terms of technique in keeping with the technique I used in the starry painting. While I thought about making it abstract like the others, I felt pretty strongly that the content of the painting itself and the dramatically cool colors of the scene accomplished my attempt at my concentration concept. The feeling I was trying to evoke here is when you find yourself participating in nature and feel completely overwhelmed by the detail and numbers of something so fine as grass or, in this case, flowers in a field. The colors I used are really very summery and bright, kind of overwhelming in a stragetic way. The person in the field is supposed to look kind of hazy, shadowy, and overwhelmed in focus by the daisies and light.
 * STATEMENTS: #3**

Image 8: Connecting When I began this piece, I sincerely anticipated crafting it in only a week. I was a little suprised to find myself really getting sucked into the creation of this one, but I feel that I had some success; like the roots piece and the starry night piece, I felt like once the initial idea hit, I had a plan, and I executed it, and my concept deepened in result. This is a piece about feeling connected to a spot or moment in nature, and I actually drew it from a self-portrait with that same memory in mind, so I think that prior understanding of the feeling helped me a lot in planning. While at first I worried that my choice to use pencil and colored pencil on the rough canvas board was a terrible one, I'm glad I didn't choose to use paper, as the painted background likely would have suffered a little in result. The solution of washing over certain graphite parts with a mixed purply-gray really helped that graphite-texture problem.

Image 9: Adventuring in Solitude This is an image I used to meet my deadline, yeah, basically. 7 and 8 took me so long that I really need something quick to move along with, and 9 just fits really well with my concentration, I feel. It's lucky that I had the same sort of feeling in mind when I did this last summer: my idea for the painting even then was one about feeling isolated from society (the little lights dotting the horizon at the bottom left) and feeling woefully but comfortably a comrade of nature itself. Loneliness is really the core sentiment of this one. The scene is fairly abstracted and painted in extreme, vibrant colors. I like this piece, so I don't really feel like it's a cop-out, no.

  


 * STATEMENTS: #2**

Image 4: Drowning at Sea My initial idea with this piece was to show the peaceful undercurrent of the sea while contrasting it with the human experience of a storm above. This ended up taking my concentration in a different direction without my meaning it to. In order to get myself back on track, I reoriented my subject matter and much of the painting to reunite with my evolving idea of human emotional experience of and with nature. So I ended up painting a drowning man admist a pinkish, frenzy of calm whose last experience with nature would be an unexpectedly positive one. The upper part of the painting depicting the tiny fishing boat would then contrast with the personal experience with the sea. I think for what it's worth I managed to get back on track with my concentration, and I'm at least pleased with the result.

Image 5: Forgetting How Big I love a good moonrise over the sea. Something about the moon rising from the horizon makes it seem much larger than we're used to seeing it. I took this favorite moment of mine and exaggerated it to draw attention to the way I, and others, might feel when they look at a moon rising. I did so by making the moon impossibly big and bright and golden, with sort of cornflower blue, shadowy "pock marks." The feel of the painting I was going for was dark, deep, and rich, while in the moon bright and shining.

Image 6: Hiking as the Ephemeral The clouds painting makes its reappearance... I went back and seriously revised this piece to show a big, dramatic cloud scene with loose and soft colors. The hikers are fading into the hill they hike over, which connects to the idea of clouds being ephemeral. But here the clouds seem almost permanent whereas the hikers are passing by. This is my attempt to evoke the feeling of looking at a looming sky and being so small against it. Being human is inevitably to be ephemeral, and that's the idea I've evolved into with this piece. = **STATEMENTS: #1** =

[[image:DSC04036.JPG width="300" height="225"]]
My first image is really, most definitely, a starting point. I was still working out my ideas when I started. I knew I wanted to involve abstraction of color in my concentration pieces, but I was not sure how to take what I could learn from artists like Elizabeth Peyton and their palettes and make it my own. Much less relate it to my concept effectively. The result is... well, I sort of like it, but I it's definitely a little different from my other two out of my first three pieces. And there are some minor details that are still bugging me about this painting: the eye feels too high all of the sudden, and the hand and water are blending. But for the most part I think this piece is pretty decent. It's all about reflection and warped vision. I used the warmer, purply tones in the glasses to bring out that warped feeling, while the "real" background is all watery blues... Trying to evoke the sort of summery heat/cool feel with this peace, what with the redness in the face and the blue/purple toned clothing/glasses/oar/"real" background.

Image 2: Galaxy-Gazing
Here is where I really started going with my idea. By swirling these impossible watery "galaxies" into the night sky of my second piece and pigmenting them with yellows/pinks/reds, I was trying my hand at the idea of using abstracted color as a means to provoke the sensation of being there, in that moment of admiring the nature scene. The human condition (or a facet of it, let's say) is to reflect on what we're given, so give us a night sky and we'll go wild. Giant explosions. Flowering stars. Black holes. Linked constellations. So, I tried to mimic that idea in my painting by doing what I did. By showing these crazy galaxy-like shapes, I'm trying to give a sense of what humans image or perceive by looking up that big, expansive sky that hangs over us so heavily. We can either rise to meet it, or we can be overwhelmed by its majesty... So yeah this one went a lot better for me.

Image 3: Blindly Imagining So in this drawing/painting, I was thinking about roots and the separation between what is above ground--what we see and know--and what is going on beneath us. The above portion is done strictly in pencil while the lower portion (of the tree roots) is pencil and watered down acrylic that has been dripped and manipulated in different directions. I dripped some paint across to represent the layers in earth, and because the roots on the left side were particularly sparse, I tried some "bouncing" lines to sort of show the rhythm of the soil underground. The point is: the below portion is supposed to be abstracted and vibrant with life while the above portion is pretty realistic and expected. I mimicked some of the curving in the roots in the figure's hair. I like where I went with this piece, because it's following along my developing idea of color jabbing at some sensation via nature's awesomeness. Not really sure if leaving the bottom so white is okay?? But I like it that way...

=BREADTH=

Digital Repeated Shape Collage What did you learn while working on this project that you may be able to use for your concentration? How did this technique or tool affect this piece and add to a possible interpretation? This project didn't really help me in the process of my concentration planning. I'm not sure about execution for my concentration, either. While it was an enjoyable project, I'm having trouble relating it to my concentration in terms of technique or concept. I guess one thing it could carry over into my concentration work would be the texture of the lenses in my glasses; I could try to use my materials/media to get authentic or interesting textures across.
 * [[image:addieglasses2.jpg width="221" height="396"]][[image:addieglasses3.jpg width="217" height="401"]][[image:stache.jpg width="218" height="317"]]

As for interpretation of the glasses pieces, I think the first one especially has a motion to it... like the glasses are falling from the top right corner. I accomplished that look by using transform tools, mainly. The repeated glasses in the second are bright in color, and the background has words in it if you look closely. The second one could definitely be interpreted as the joy of reading. The third one is just plain goofiness.

Embracing Chaos** == How did your understanding of the concept of this piece change throughout the process of working on it? Did you find a way to reconcile the different elements? How can this piece carry a message? What does it allow for art to be? for life?

As I added colors, the piece definitely became more of a game for me. I'm trying not only to balance the warm and cool colors, but to also create a complimentary relationship between them. When the piece was starting to look too flat, I added black pen to give even more punch to the colors. By adding the black, the bird is more prominent and comes forward more. To "tame" the newspaper craziness and focus the piece a little more, I've washed out blocks of sky blue. I also am unifying the piece by linking organic shapes of dark gray. I'm still working on this piece and trying to make it "play the game"...aka cooperate with me and itself, but I'm pretty hopeful that it will work out.

I think that... this piece is pretty energetic. It's also weirdly violent-but-not-violent. I don't know. I think that the viewer could mistake this piece for a violent one. That's not the way I intend it, though. To me, this piece means organized chaos. I purposefully collaged the newspaper to be orderly and square. The only part that is not cut precisely is the ripped "Essay" page. I actually read that page and liked the article, so it kind of influenced my thinking about the piece. Not content-wise, but just that one part would be organically shaped. So, again, I'm messing with the idea of the mind. That's what my piece is really about. The starkness of the skull being there is the reality--whereas the "mind" is a hugely abstract concept. The words from the newspaper clutter up the skull's brain-area. And the bird is like the thought.

I think that... or rather I would HOPE that it allows art to be psychologically or philosophically questioning. It might allow life to be a mixture of reality and abstraction.

**Ridiculous Object Still-Life**
To be honest, my favorite part of this project was that I got to start over. I guess I should have known from the start that working that small with a medium so loose would be a problem for me. Am I disappointed in that bit of me? Yeah, sort of, I am. I wish I could work small, but with charcoal, I really can't. Or, I can't yet. So, I was very grateful and relieved when I got the chance to start over on a much bigger scale. I guess my least favorite part of the project was the focus of the still-life. Still-lives tend to frustrate me, as I often believe they're more of... studies. For example, a still-life of apples and pears would be a good method of practicing shape, space, shading, and/or texture. The spirit of these studies, then, would be to quickly execute the exercise as opposed to devoting several weeks to it. I think the merit of the study is lost if you don't do it in a burst - you know, a burst forces you to put life into the still-life, right? I don't know. That's just my theory. So, I didn't feel that my still-life was very lively, despite the funny objects, if that makes sense. If this were a concentration, I would probably shoot myself in the foot. No. I guess I'd try to apply that theory of mine - the giving life to the inanimate. I'd try to do this by expressive mark-making and using specific energy that I felt coincides with the object.

Dramatic Self Portrait
If light were a metaphor... The light in my drawing is the morning I wished wouldn't come. With the morning, comes the truth, and with the truth comes the acknowledgement of the new day and the surrender of denial. I seem to be shying away from the light in my drawing, or at least facing it with a sort of sad grimace, so I am facing this morning with a sort of resigned moroseness. I feel tired, and light, and gentle, and small. I suppose this expression is not too far off from my "common" self, so I think it portrays my true nature, which is quiet and understated. I also feel that there is a fragility in this facing-of-the-light and in my expression, so perhaps that has to do with //my// fragility... or //our// fragility, as human beings in a lonely, chaotic world.

If I were to proceed with this work, or this idea, I would try to photograph people in their waking moments. When they are just beginning to open their eyes, or just before, or just after, to the new morning - and try to catch the emotion on their faces. Then I'd try to put it down into a series of drawings or paintings, to further capture and convey this perfect moment of fragility.

=CATS != I used to think I wasn’t much of a cat person at all, but there is definitely something aesthetically nice about the feline in motion. So, that’s where my cats painting developed into an observation of cats moving. The ambiguous space they create (and their own general ambiguity as cats) is, I think, very interesting, so I tried to get that across in my painting with confused figure/ground relationships with the background and “hidden” cats bouncing around the board.

The acrylic paint was useful for this idea… I’m most familiar with it, so I could manipulate it fairly well to do what I wanted. But if I could do it again, I’d first of all have to time travel back a few years and invest in some oil paints. I think it would have been really interesting to have the sheen of the oils adding to the overall painting, but that’s a resource I neither have nor know how to use…

If this were the start of my concentration, the direction I’d probably take would be to keep thinking about ambiguity paired with my interest in figures, human or otherwise (cats painting, part deux?). I like trying to capture the look of bodies in motion, the twist of a muscle or the stretch of a back, but the idea of vague and confused space I think adds another layer.

So, cats. Cats are pretty. They’re also interesting to look at. Everyday and everywhere there are pretty things and interesting views – life is beautiful and intriguing and demands some observational staring. I guess, then, what separates art from life is that art is all about trying to recreate, with illusion through media, the interesting views.