Final Project 2

On Friday I worked on and finished my grid drawing for my pastels. I hated it and tossed it. This weekend I started another using an old cover of a Free People catalog. I'm almost done and excited to get to color.

Final Project

It's been a while. Feels good to be back. I will be focusing on visual art for my independent project, mainly water colors and water based pastels. Im interested in faces and odd use of color. For the past three days I've been looking at the art of contemporary artists that I admire such as Micheal Shapcott and Pakayla Biehn as well as photographs using instagram, of The Carstales, a colorful river in Colombia and japansese ink art. On the first day I sketched a picture of my cousin that I took using a disposable camera app on my iphone. I realized that I needed practice drawing faces accuratly and to scale and so on the second day I grided another picture of my cousin that I took. That day I did a quick charcoal drawing of the picture. I liked the messiness of the charcoal but hated its blandness. I did a watercolor version of the grid drawing using a grid as well but only outlined the figure the second time. Yesterday I started a grid for a pastel version. Im trying to figure out what medium I like the most. To be honest, I did not get much done yesterday. I have to figure out a way to post pictutes from my iPhone and I'll be back.

Expressionism

Expressionism is raw. It striped away all formality people were used to in art. Key was no longer important in music, movement in dance, plot and character development in theater, beauty in poetry. Expressionism is sound, visuals and emotion in it's simplest form. So simple that it becomes complex. Every dance step, every plot point, and every note is drawn out and repeated. What you feel becomes more important than what is there. Expressionism undresses the disguises and symbolism in art. Anger is anger, angst is angst. The nakedness of the art becomes uncomfortable.There is no beating around the bush, no ideas to talk around. Everything is out there in the open, exposed and ugly. Expressionism is gothic and horrific.

Today, I kept thinking back to my first acting class when I was a freshmen. I compared everything. While acting and the method by which I am taught acting has stayed the same, acting is completely different to me now. I am a different actress. I remember hearing most of what Luke said today four years ago, but I heard it differently this time. Now I understand. I used to try to "act" like I understood, make myself believe I was getting it. I wasn't. There's a difference between acting or pretending and actually feeling and thinking. Viviana asked me how you can feel and think in a scene where the circumstances are so far away from what you usually feel and think. How can you act like a grieving mother if you've never had kids? I didn't have a good answer for her then. Now, I think that you wont be able to imagine that your child has died if you don't have a child to imagine dead and faking it wouldn't work either. A bad actor would picture his/her imaginary child dead and show the audience their pretend grief. I think that you have to go by the basic emotion, not what the plot says happened. A dead child is simply grief and I could easily imagine losing my little sister. I don't know if I'm moving in the right direction here. I'm curious to see what Luke's answer was.

Web

Oops writing that last post almost made me forget about writing about the Stac wall. It was different from what I pictured in my head, but I expected it to be different so maybe it was exactly what I pictured in my head. Initially I pictured it as if one person created it uniformly, spaced out evenly like factory made wallpaper. But I soon realized that since a group of 36 individuals were going to be creating it, it would look like the product of 36 different personalities, and so I stopped trying to picture what it would look like at the end. It was interesting to see how someone's handwriting shows how they are as a person. The quiet people in the class had smaller handwriting and small spaces in between words while the more outgoing ones had bigger bolder and more spaced out writing. Organized straight lines for organized focused people. A web of crossed over lines represented those who are unpredictable and all over the place. Some webs kept to themselves as did their owners, while others branched out and connected like the relationship between those who created them. The few words we used seem to sum up our entire lives. It is beautiful in a very simple way. I don't know how long that will last.

Cotton Mouth

Not having a budget sucks. We wont get as many workshops as we used to, we won't be able to buy expensive art supplies or rent out a gallery, we wont have as many guests come in. But I'm more excited for this year than I was for my previous two years. Maybe because it is my last year and I am in more of a leadership position than I have been in before, or maybe it's because my "library" is filling up nicely and I'll be able to do more now that I know more. It's a mixture of the two and probably a lot more. I am really going to take advantage of my independent project this year. Last year I had the experience of working behind the camera for a while, and while I loved that I would like to go back to acting.

As I was writing the previous paragraph my sister who unfortunately for me shares my "office" was loudly banging a battery on her glass desk. I calmly asked her to stop four times before yelling at her. Instead of just stopping the damn banging and letting me do my homework in peace, she slowed down the rate of the banging until they were a good 30 seconds apart. Every time I thought that the banging would stop another one would surprise me. It was like waiting at the doctor's to take a shot and he whips your arm with rubbing alcohol for what seems like an hour. The anticipation of something unpleasant is more unpleasant than what it actually is, and slowing down the rate of the banging proportionately so that I would have to wait for the next one to come was getting me pissed off. I picked up a candle, threatened to throw it at her ( I was never going to) and she finally stopped. Then she asked my for the fifteenth time today if I was sure if Asia is a continent. She is in 6th grade, she knows Asia is a continent. I proceeded to rant. Very reasonably I might add. She got mad because I called her an idiot, pinched me, I pinched her back, she started crying, she ran upstairs to tell mom, and I looked over to her desk to find that the green light on her computer's built in camera was on. She had recorded the whole thing. What does this have to do with STAC? Well, I watched the video to make sure that I could use it as proof that I did nothing wrong incase my mom decides to come downstairs to punish me for the lies my sister told her, and although I gave what I though was history's greatest speech when telling my sister the importance of silence during homework and to grow a brain for not knowing if Asia was a continent, I could not understand a word of it on tape. I know that everybody is uncomfortable when hearing their own voice played back to them, but this was different. I was more than uncomfortable, I was confused. I could not understand the majority of words that I said. It sounded like a drunk Mexican man with cotton balls shoved up his mouth (don't mean to be racist, I have a Mexican accent for some reason). We are going to do independent projects this year. Luke used me as one of the examples when explaining what an independent project could be. He said that since I want to focus on acting this year, my independent project could be on accents. I agree. My accent is not that thick normally, but when I am put on the spot ( ranting, performing a monologue or on stage in general) I sound like ass. I mumble. So this year, my first independent project would be to have clearer and better speech. This could lead to me getting rid of my accent, and maybe even gain some in the process. Plus, I would be learning multiple monologues that will come in handy.

King Lear Workshop 1

On wesnesday I was in the King Lear workshop. I'm exited to be in a workshop that has an end result. We are going to take King Lear and change it into a 5 min abstract piece. This is something I've never done before and I'm going to make the most out of this experience. Before we even begin thought, we have to read King Lear. I'm on Act 4, but I should be done by now. The outside work is annoying but necessary. How are we going to work with a play we've never read?