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Artist In The City |
Title: Mapped Intentions
Medium: Canvas December 2015 Exhibition Text: For my Artist in the City Piece, my intentions were to create a piece that displayed how I attempt to not follow today's common stereotypical likes and pleasures, and I displayed that by using gray as for its blandness as color, and using a background of a map of the Milwaukee area, inspired by the artist Mondrian, where he similarly created a piece where he stood at the Eiffel tower and mapped out the area below him and created square piece with different colors. |
Inspiration
When I was introduced to this project, I was given the task of creating a piece that reflected how I thought I affected the city around me and how the city around me affected me, through three panels on canvas using any artist inspiration I liked. Rather than first looking into artists that usually drew my attention, I began sketching and attempting to look for a basis on which to create my piece, because this was by far the most difficult piece I was assigned to do in terms of finding inspiration for. Because I had ideas on what message I wanted to convey, but I was clueless on how I should execute the piece. After talking with another art student and deciding on what exactly to create, I had reviewed my plans with my superiors and was told the piece lacked complexity and seemed overly simple, and that it required another overall element.Since I wanted to show connections and influences in the piece, after being suggested Mondrian, I looked at his work and decided that his work was most suitable to take inspiration from.
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Process and Planning
After doing the sketches for the piece, I initially decided that the three panels should include some of the stereotypical likes and pleasures that today's teenage group is known for, the first things that came to mind was iconic social media groups that are incredibly popular today. To display that I included the logo brands of three of the most used and well known brands of social media, them being, Twitter, Facebook, and the more newly founded Snap-chat. I also included the Google Play Music logo to display how listening to music has become something that seems like everyone must do, regardless of personal preference, and the Google Play Music logo depicts this perfectly. Then to show how there's now a considerable liking towards the mobile devices and the must have they've become in the last five years, I displayed a generic looking photo of an earlier generation iPhone. But in terms of the panel that was supposed to display my likes and dislikes, I showed the photo of a car that I set to acquire in the next year and wrench to show my interest in the automotive culture, an area in which people in my age group are no longer being interested in. Then I incorporated silhouettes of people in black to show how liking to these common and now stereotypical things can cause you to simply blend into the crowd and lose the unique identity affect. Although for my panel, to to show how I believe that I attempt to stand out from the usual crowd, I used a silhouette of my head shot but rather than filing in with black, I composed the area with puzzle pieces of different colors to show complexity and a unique figure when in contrast of others. To first create the piece, I put together 3 panels of 2X3 canvases, using wood pieces that linked together, then adding fabric. After stretching and putting together the panels, I then primed then by adding Gesso to the canvases. Then, using photo shop, I created photos of my three panels so that I that could print them onto translucent paper, project them onto canvases so that I could then trace them onto the fabric, so that I way I would have guiding lines when applying paint to the canvases, to prevent a sloppy or lack craftsmanship type of appearance.
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Reflection
Overall the piece came fairly well , with little surprises along the way. Although I did not anticipate just how time consuming painting detailed areas could be, because in order to maintain an appearance that looked well made on the canvas, I could not make large impressions on the canvas, which meant using a small paintbrush, which required a serious amount of time. One improvement for the future would involve the method of preparation of the canvases because I had used a different of brand of gesso within the same canvas due to lack of supply at the time, and that resulted in a rough surface onto which I was applying paint to.
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