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| Food packaging finding friends by color... |
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| Immaculate Lewis Creek debris + evidence of planning |
Students are beginning to find ways to work with this material. It is incredibly challenging for most of them - but if it were easy would it be worth doing or teaching?
What is the point of anything easy? Does it expand our knowledge or understanding of anything?
This process usually become increasingly enjoyable after the cleaning is done. I suspect that will be the case from this point forward for most of the students. Once you land on an achievable goal, it is just a matter of doing the work. Typically it becomes a pleasant meditation at around this juncture.
One of the hardest things I've noticed for many is the idea of "transformation". It is essential. In creating art from debris -- we want to avoid making "sculptures" that are really just garbage put together in the shape of a tree or the shape of a moon or a bird or something else. To really transform the material is the key - taking time with each component to make it worthy of inclusion in an exhibit - to have light shine on it and draw attention to it. A piece of art is a series of decisions you make - open to scrutiny. Every choice you make is a reflection of you as an artist. Making the garbage aspects recede and the art aspects come to the forefront are highly advisable. A rough, torn, tattered background with a refined and lovingly rendered foreground is one solution... that is an interesting option if you have an ambitious project in mind without enough time to refine every component.
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| A practice paper peony! |
I am excited to see what they do.
I am doing my best to provide them with the appropriate tools, conceptual guidance and technical advice. Here is some of what is going on:
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| The satisfaction of using a Dremel to soften rough edges... |
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| Exceptionally organized work area + deconstruction. |
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| A question for all of us to ponder. Why are we here? |
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| May the transformation begin! |
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| An inspired work table. |
Tonight we have a class picnic at Professor Ryan's house. Very nice as there is a lot of pressure in the studio with such little time. An extra week would solve a lot of problems - students really only have 8 days to get their pieces together and there are still many learning curves to traverse. Fortunately, the majority of them don't have any other courses they are taking at the moment and anticipated needing to put a lot of time in the studio. For those projects that are on the overly ambitious side, I am stressing QUALITY over QUANTITY.
Now that a jigsaw and dremel are set up, I hope to see some serious progress in the next couple of days. Save a few who are still working out their basic concepts, I think we are off to a great start.
May the transformations begin!
