Alchemists of Art

These images (unfortunately) don't do any justice to seeing these works up close and in person. Yet driving all the way to Western to see the show is probably out of the question for most of you. The next show will be a bigger deal, this was just practice really. I think the art work is pretty good for two first year students with little to no art training. Plus I think for my first hanging of a show I did pretty good. The frames were hand made by Rachels dad Joe and myself, and Rachel painted all except one, which I ended up painting.

So here are some pics from the show.

Setting Up: In these shots you can see Huachao and Crystal helping hang the sign. This was the last Friday of the term and we started hanging this show at eleven that morning. It is somewhere around four in these pictures. We were all so tired we didn't bother to ever get out of our jammies.

 

The sign is made out of vinyl and stuck to this paper so as you peel the paper away you have to make sure that they are sticking to the wall and not being pulled away with the paper. If they don't stick and you pull one off from the paper it usually becomes a disaster to try to get that one letter back into the correct placement.

As Huachao peels away crystal watches to make sure that doesnt happen.

 

 

SUCCESS!!!!

A Walk Through: Here is what the show looks like if you walk by it. I think the curved wall is pretty cool. The wall to the right of this picture is all glass so you can easily see the show even if you are walking on the outside of the building. Which I also think is cool because it means that there is more of an opportunity to pull people inside to get a closer look.

 

 

 

 

Individual Pieces: And here are some views of the individual pieces. Sorry about the lines and color, sun was setting when I took the pictures and I couldn't really get good shots.

Blue Sky 36 x 36 oil on canvas 

Huachao Zhou

  

Colorful 18 x 24 oil on canvas

Huachao Zhou

 

Parietal Lobe 18 x 24 oil on canvas
Brandon Cline-Jones

 

 Ribbons 20 x 24 graphite on bristol
Brandon Cline-Jones

 

 Nude 1 18 x 24 graphite on bristol
Huachao Zhou

 

 Nude 2 18 x 24 graphite on bristol
Huachao Zhou

 

Nude 3 18 x 24 graphite on bristol
Huachao Zhou

 

The Dark Tower 18 x 24 graphite on bristol
Brandon Cline-Jones

 

 Blaine The Mono 18 x 24 graphite on bristol
Brandon Cline-Jones

 

Flowerfield 6 x 10 acrylic on canvas
Huachao Zhou

 

 View from the Tower 16 x 20 photograph
Brandon Cline-Jones

 

 The Myst Part 1 16 x 20 photograph
Brandon Cline-Jones

 

 The Myst Part 1 16 x 20 photograph
Brandon Cline-Jones

 

 The Artists

 

Color Theory Class

Some work from my color theory class:

Color Wheel - The first project was to design a color wheel that maintained its functionality but was more artistic than a normal circular color wheel. Since entering school I have been rather obsessed with the shapes of buildings and clouds. I love the harsh angles that buildings provide tempered with the lightness and fluffiness of clouds, these two elements juxtaposed really fascinate me. For my color wheel I combined these two elements, and for the most part I think it looks pretty cool. My one disappointment was with my inability to control and maintain the value of all the colors for each ring. I did OK, but there is room for improvement. I do believe that the colors themselves are mixed pretty well, and I like the design.
 
City and Clouds Color Wheel (20 x 15) Acrylic on Illustration Board

Complimentary Colors - In this project we were asked to draw a plant of some kind and then paint it using only one set of complimentary colors (which are any two colors across from each other on the color wheel). We could mix the two colors together in anyway we wanted and add black or white to those colors to tint or shade them. We also had to have at least 3 transparency effects in our painting and have two sections where we used the pure colors that we mixed from. Which is why there is a red-orange branch.

For my colors I chose to do red-orange, and blue-green. I could have done green and red, because you can get a nice gray, but not the right kind of brown. However, most people were doing that color combination because of the green which made me not want to use it. Plus, I felt that blue-green, and the pinkish color I could get from red-orange seemed more Japanese somehow.

Bonsai Tree Transparencies (20 x 15) Acrylic on Illustration Board

Here is a close up of the transparency effect.

 

The painting turned out good for the assignment, but I don't really like how abstract the solid colors make it. In the drawings you could really see how the bonsai twisted together, so I think I am partial to the drawing, even though it was done on crappy paper. In hindsight, I wish I would have just drawn it on nice paper. I didn't only because I thought I would use this drawing as the transfer, which didn't happen because the transfer would have been backwards.

Sort of hard to see but here is the drawing (click for a better shot)

Here is the transfer, but it is flipped correctly, I couldn't bring myself to look at it the other way. It is too weird.

Cultural Patterns -  In this project we were asked to find a pattern of some sort from a culture that we found interesting. Since I had just been looking at bonsai trees and a lot of Asian art I kind of wanted to stay in that part of the world. So I found this Indonesian Batik fabric design which I felt was really cool. Once we found the design we were supposed to replicate it as closely as possible, and then do another version using a color scheme of our choice. I chose to do a monochromatic color scheme using only red.

Original fabric picture from the web:

Batik Indonesian fabric design (20 x 12 each square 8 x 7) Acrylic on Illustration Board

 

Closeup of Duplicated Original Side:

 

Closeup of Monochromatic Side:

Artistic Inspiration: For the final project we were asked to find a painter, or a painting, that inspired us and do a report on the painter, or painting, and then to create our own painting from the inspiration of the artist's techniques or content of a particular piece.

I chose Jacob Van Ruisdael as my artist, but had no one particular painting in mind. He does these amazing paintings of clouds and the Dutch landscape. Seeing as how I love clouds but have never attempted to paint them I figured this was my shot.

I learned a ton by doing this, and while I feel this is probably my strongest painting to date, there are also some things I dislike about it. But that's part of the learning and I am ready to do it again. Also, being that this is my 10th painting ever I feel that I have shown vast improvement in a very short time.

In Ruisdael's works you can see how realistic his clouds are, which is what I wanted to do, but an accidental late night use of purple made me head into a more abstract looking cloud. I still think it looks pretty cool, but for my next cloud painting I really want to try for realism.

Some Ruisdael pieces:

Clouds, and Barn (20 x 15) Acrylic on Illustration Board

I kind of got lost in the top half of the painting, and I wish I could fix it, but worry I might screw it up more if I touch it. Here is the pic with the top clouds cut off.

Worse or better?

My First Painting Class

So last term I took my very first painting class. I did ok I think for first time painter, but far from anything worth mentioning. Which is why I am going to talk about each project in depth! We used mostly Oils, but there were a few times we used acrylic paints as well.

Here are all my paintings for the term. Don't judge too harshly! But if you want leave me a critique, as always, feel free.

24 x 20


The first abstract painting thing... I think looks pretty cool. It is extremely vibrant and colorful, and for a first painting I think I did a pretty good job... at what I dont know, but It looks better than some other first paintings I've seen (granted those were by second graders). In my intro to painting class on the first day we went around and talked about what painting experience we had. People had long resumes of their accomplishments and or skills, but when it came to me I said "I've used paint by numbers before". It got a pretty big laugh and the professor then went off on a long rambling speech. The thing was I wasn't joking, but thank god people took it as one.

We were given two weeks to finish the painting. I took a day designing and laying down color ideas. The painting is suppose to be grid based so I felt that probably all the people would do variations of squares and or what not to accomplish this. So I contemplated what I could do that was still grid based but without being obvious squares? Could circles be grid based? of course, but its still just a basic shape repeating, and thats when I came up with the idea of these organic shapes (that if reduced to basic lines or the negative space) would form a simple tic tac toe grid and then I thought, "well I might as well throw some circles in for good measure just to have some shapes and plus they look cool". People questioned weather it was a grid or not... the professor ruled in my favor... although i think hesitantly.

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8 x 10


The small hand painting was just a quick study of my hand, it was literally done in... maybe five minutes. It was just suppose to be a mock up of tonal transition and conceptualization for the larger picture. It also gave me a chance to work with acrylic, and.. I dont know how I feel about acrylic. We had two weeks to finish the small painting and the larger hand painting.

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18 x 24


The large hand painting is pretty far from done, the hand still needs to be rendered completely, and the background was suppose to be something but couldn't figure it out and so it became blue with these horrible yellow streaks... (garrish). I think the foreshortening and form of the hand are pretty good. For me each painting was an exercise in staving off frustration. I knew not a single thing about painting and so.... I wasted so much time just trying to teach myself habits about painting that I hardly had time to figure out technique, and when I felt I had finally figured out something technical, it turned out I had done no such thing. I felt really lost at times. It was really quite pathetic.

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18 x 22


Now the self portrait is... really really really bad.... I mean really bad....I hate to admit that I painted it. The painting feels like it was painted by a third grade kid that eats paste all the time, that's who turns this kind of self portrait out. It is so embarrassing to show it, but I feel in the long run it will be a piece that I can point to and say, look at the progress I have made. Also to make myself feel better I always say, Van Goghs first self portraits look really bad. dont stare too long it sucks at the soul.

Anyway, there are things in the picture that resemble me, but its kind of a caricature of me really. I don't understand how to mix good skin tones (hence why Im like some other ethnicity), I drew the form nicely, but when fine tuning it and looking in the mirror everything became sort of wonky. The perspective gets all mixed up and discombobulated, There are harsh outlines, everything looks flat and stretched its very weird. I noticed that the eyes weren't aligned properly the day of the critique so I decided I could probably easily fix it with an hour before class. So i fixed it, the result was that I moved the eye to an even shittier position, I really dont know what I was thinking....

Anyway, I think we had two weeks on this one as well.

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6 x 12 8 x 8


Now then we had a few class periods where we did quick 5 to 10 minute paintings on poster board from sketches that we made over the weekend. No pictures allowed just notes on color or whatever we sketched. the colors kind of run on these boards so it was interesting trying to learn how to paint on them.

1. the trees and contrails one is, well it should have had a better composition.

2. Sand dunes, i think that the sky is probably (even though its subtle) a very good representation of what was going on that day. I think the forms of the people are ok, but obviously simplistic because of the time. The ground is a bit... flat and... vibrant. I am color challenged it seems.

There were several more but I seem to have misplaced them, which could be a good thing.

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24 x 20


and then finally the last one, the landscape (I included two shots one is kind of over exposed and the other one is dark, I couldnt get it quite right so its somewhere in the middle of these two). I think it looks better in person because I took a lot more time to think about brush strokes, as well as having had 5 weeks of getting into a routine. I was feeling fairly confident that I wouldnt completely suck ass at drawing or painting some trees. I believe we had 2 weeks and a class period to finish this.

I like it, i think I did pretty well. I am obviously still challenged by color, and I dont have a real nice concept of how to paint, but it looks ok for my sixth painting ever... who knows.