Starting the year off with “art skill inventories” allowed me to recognize which areas of art I was already strong in and which needed more work. I attempted a simple figure drawing, self-portrait, abstract, and still life for these drawings. From this, I can see that I had a pretty continual and creative art style/some knowledge of proportions and color, but lacking in perspective, value, mark, detail, and composition. I knew these were areas for improvement for me to focus on throughout the year.
We began our journey this year focusing mainly on drawing from life and figure, slowly moving into contour and gesture drawings. Especially with the guidance of guest artist Tommy Van Auken, This helped significantly with my understanding of drawing from life- movement, proportion, anatomy, contrapposto, foreshortening, contour line, and more. I made a large-scale artist’s copy of a figure drawing “striding male nude” by Michelangelo, In which I directly copied and learned the artist’s mark and style of figure drawing. I then took my knowledge of this experience to complete my final piece of this unit, A self-portrait- meant to capture a certain aspect of my personality. This really improved how I captured a solid mark and realism in my works, specifically in the human body, and my work ethic as this was my first at-home project and I did not manage my time too well. From this, we moved into woodblock carving. For this, the goal was to create a finished sculpture out of a small block of wood. Following the theme “it’s about time” challenged me as I hadn't had to stay confined to one theme in my art before. I chose to make an abstracted version of a whale’s underbelly, for me, this represents the movement and effects of time. With the help of a mini clay maquette model, I was able to execute the carving in a way I liked while still learning the techniques and tools of wood carving, and this ended up as my first art piece to be bought at a showcase! For my second home project of the year, the prompt I chose was “universal forces”, and though I think it strays from the theme a bit, I decided to focus on family and hereditary behavior. For this project I was to make a performance piece, which I hadn't done before so I was timid to get into it at first. But in the end, I made a piece that I feel represents the uncontrollable when it comes to family circumstances and cycles of abuse/trauma. The last big project of the year was oil painting still life, I was very excited to experiment with oil paint, but worried I would not be absorbed in the still life process as it almost seemed boring to me. But, experimenting with brunaille, glaze, color theory, thickness, stroke, and more made me very keen to perfecting my piece. I struggled a lot with getting rid of lines, especially because two of the three objects I chose had straight edges, but I learned so much in oil painting technique. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to finish it, but was happy with the result. I felt I matched many of the colors methodically and represented my childhood well. To finish with a bang, we did a very speedy acrylic paint unit focusing on abstract expression. Although I have a lot of experience with acrylics, I rarely did abstractism and this was a very cool and freeing encounter that I usually wouldn't do. With this knowledge and what I learned from this year’s art history, I am very pleased with how much I learned. In the future I want to focus more on color theory, expressionism, and keeping a solid theme within my work. I think it will be so cool one day to be able to recognize my own artist’s mark.
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