I remember the first day of art III like it was sixty-three days ago. My long term memory is mediocre so all I really remember is entering the room, sitting down at a table, marveling at how different the room looked from the opposite corner from the corner I used to sit at, listening briefly to somebody talk about art, and then I think I drew somebody, but that may have been the very similar sixty-two-day-ago art class. One particular memory, however, still stands clearly in my mind. Mr. Sands, standing in the center of the room, and through some forgotten conversation, I remember that he said "I always though toast would be an interesting medium to make art with, but nobody ever does it." I remember thinking, "challenge accepted." Here I am, sixty-three days later, fulfilling my promise. For my self-inflicted problem, I chose to make art solely out of toast. The image in my head was millions of tiny crumbs, ranging from burnt to untoasted, arranged on the ground like a Tibetan sand painting, depicting a windmill. It didn't take me long to realize that that is just impractical. My next idea was to take a really hot stick and poke the bread with it until a windmill appeared, which was closer to reality. Testing this idea with the soldering iron, it proved only to be effective at tearing the bread into small, soldering-iron sized pieces. I also tested using water to block whatever magic toaster ovens used to toast things from hitting the bread, which worked incredibly well and is currently my plan B. My plan A is, however, way cooler: shooting beams of heat out of a handgun-like object onto the bread and making a picture. Now, when I was thinking about what to write on this post, I planned on writing about how well this method was going, but then I realized it wasn't actually going well at all. I'll list the problems: -Even with a stencil, the heat from the heat gun is really hard to focus on one place. The stencil, after it was coated in what I can only believe is extreme sunblock, no longer lays flat on any surface, particularly the already uneven bread canvas. Any attempts to stick the stencil to the bread either doughn't work or damage the bread. The only way I've found to hold down the stencil is to stack dozens of metal rulers on top of it. Still, the image comes out not nearly as crisp (no bun intended) as I would have liked. -I have currently burned myself 11 times. Those rulers get hot.
-The stencil was paper, and I was going to be blasting large amounts of concentrated heat at it for a while, so I needed to make it fireproof. After searching around the room, I found a large paint bottle labeled "NOT PAINT DO NOT USE" so I figured, hey, I'll slather whatever this is all over the stencil. Turns out, whatever this non-paint substance was, it was fireproof. However, I only covered one side of the stencil with whatever it was; the side I would be pointing the heat gun at. Makes sense, right? Well, I discovered that while toasting the bread under the stencil, something was making smoke. It might have been the stale bread, the drawing board, the stencil itself, but whatever it was, it was getting trapped on the underside of the stencil. Yes, the non-fireproof side. I could only safely toast the bread for three seconds at a time before pulling the heat gun back to let everything cool down. A PSA to all future stencil toasters: slather BOTH sides of your stencil with mysterious fireproof substances. -If you draw a windmill a certain way, it may look like a swastika. Learn from my mistakes. -It is too tempting to use the heat gun to reach a perfect level of toastedness on some pieces of bread and one may find themselves (or others) eating their materials. This has been Problems. Tune in next week for Solutions!
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So, you know when you're making lots of art at once and then you suddenly have an existential crisis? Well, that usually happens for me, but this time it was relevant to the blogging prompt.
I was painting in the last Mongolian raider hamster when this project's existential crisis hit me. For most people experiencing existential crises, the crisis focuses on its owner. The victim will often wonder things like "why am I here? What am I for?" and other similar nonsense. At this, I laugh. I had already surpassed this meager stage by the time I was finished with the fourth stork. It was but the tip of the existential criseberg. No, my crises are not so egotistical; my existential crises are for my art. The eerie feeling of pure uncanny philosophy which had began with the final hamster had, by the time I had reached the first market stall, evolved into fully realized absurdist musings. At this point, the hysteria had already set in and proclaimed itself through the bright oranges in the bazaar picture. I greeted the existential crisis like an old friend and subsequently began to wonder why I am even bothering making groups of personified animals in the first place. Did I really have anything to offer to the genre of groups of personified animals? I didn't invent anything in the pictures; not hamsters, not mongols, not bazaars. I simply took these elements and put them together. That is why I say that the primary merit of this series is directly proportional to the value of the visual puns they represent. It is not often one sees a group of animal becoming their collective noun literally, and if I had attempted to be purely original it is entirely possible these wonderful humanized animals would never have been brought into this world. And now, as the time approaches the point at which the 4th period bell will toll, the 2-week long existential crisis fades, and I return to my regular programming, observing the passing of life like a mediocre sitcom with no deeper meaning. My life prior to this project did not have an adequate amount of ink drawings. Needless to say, I have fixed this problem.
When I told people that I was planning to make ink drawings, some of them were under the impression that I was going to make drawings out of ink. No, no, no. There is not a drop of ink in any of these drawings because they are made out of charcoal. And I have, over the course of this project, developed a lot with charcoal; I first befriended the medium in the first drawing I made (the one in the middle that looks vaguely like an upside down brain). We bonded over the 2nd and 3rd drawings (The two leftmost ones), getting along very well, telling jokes, laughing, singing shanties, mutually helping each other hide bodies, preforming Juju rituals, and all the things friends usually do. By the end of the 4th picture (bottom left) we were getting somewhat bored of each other. The charcoal became very passive aggressive, irritable, and in one particular argument about what the plural of mongoose was, even violent. It began to try its best to foil my attempts to draw ink. "Good heavens," I would exclaim, reaching for the pencil sharpener. "Your bluntness is simply disadvantageous!" "Who are you calling blunt ?" it would respond, spitefully and repeatedly crumbling upon contact with the sharpener. Our friendship was finally broken by the end of the fifth drawing (the top right, totally-covered-in-charcoal one), when I saw the charcoal chanting in ancient tongues at my art. "Ka mmụọ nke nkà ike ike na manụ agba mgbanwe gị ngota!" it said. I burst through the door. "Is this betrayal in my midst?" I say. "A juju ritual summoned against me?" The charcoal laughed. "You fool," it cackled. "you are too late, the ritual has just completed!" "Why would you do this?" The charcoal looked away. "I could not tolerate the tyranny of your pluralization of platypi." I had an idea. The ritual it was performing could not be sustained without the caster; I grabbed the charcoal and threw it into a small, plastic prison. I gave it one final look and shut the box. "I think you meant platypuses." And that is the tragic tale of how my skills in charcoal so dramatically improved, while my friendship with it so dramatically declined. |
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January 2015
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