Category Archives: Drawing II

Mapping the Brink

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Open assignment, must be mapping narrative in some way

This was my most intensely personal project all year. I began the year following assignment guidelines, making sure to give my best within the rules and try out new things, experiment and be a good, solid art student. In a way I was re-integrating myself into life, and certainly life around other people, and a lot of my time was spent simply getting to know my world and my surroundings, and the people I came into direct contact with.

Christmas break gave me a nice break from that world, and time again to process and have space from things. I spent time doing web work, and cooking. A lot.

Second semester I dove more into projects, thinking hard about the concepts behind them and making every part of my work represent or portray whatever the point of the piece was. This project was my final for Drawing 2, and was my long overdue confrontation of the last few years, what they’ve meant to me, how they have changed and shaped me, and how I’m going to proceed with life despite the hurt and cold they represent in my mind.

I mapped the song On the Brink by Coheed & Cambria. Starting with the waveform of the song, I mirror that with my emotional response to the song, be it the lyrics or the music or both, forming squiggly spikes poking upwards, making a bed for the symbols that form the meat of the piece. The majority of the symbols respond to the lyrics using imagery from the past two years that is significant to me, all in traced silhouette forms, meant as icons of what the lyrics and music are saying, what they’re meaning, and as a reminder to me.

Using the song as an intermediary, I am portraying and interpreting the last few years of my life in a synthesized and archival way, to record and display and finally just put down, so that I can move on with the things I’m coming into now, in this new phase of my life.

Assignment Proposal (PDF), Artist Statement (PDF), Final Piece (JPG).
Coheed & Cambria, Song (Video), Lyrics.

Mapping Loss

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Map loss, in whatever way you want

This project was seriously ambitious. Near the end of the year, with a few projects, I developed the habit of coming up with an idea, loving it, and just saying ‘Yea, I’ll do that, that’ll be so awesome!’ I didn’t take into account the work involved before completely deciding, without bargaining room, on what I was going to do. That said, I got everything in on time, and serious compliments from everyone who saw the projects.

This one was about loss; we simply had to map the idea of loss, at whatever scale, in whatever way we wanted. I decided to make the flags from the countries I’ve lived in (other than the U.S.), with my silhouettes cut out of them at the ages and poses fitting the times I lived there, and then use those cutouts to assemble a silhouette of myself now on a plain white flag. I ended up adding the white background fabric just to hold all the pieces together and make hanging them easier, and I don’t have to worry about the wall behind them too if that space is just empty.

It got fantastic response from people, even the janitorial staff had some nice things to say about it, my teacher told me one of them said “It’s good because it’s simple, it’s clear, and it’s good.” Nice to know my stuff is appreciated by non-art-students :P .

Mapping Space

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Goal: Use tracings (of anything) to compose an image
Method: Trace my future home to make a map of my present self

This was a very open assignment, as were most of the later-semester projects in my studio classes, that simply asked us to trace lots of stuff – anything we wanted – and assemble those tracings into a drawing. We did this over spring break, so we had 3 weeks to do it and finish our Mapping Routine project, so naturally mine became much more complicated than that… Continue reading →

Mapping Routine

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Portray something you do on a regular basis using an invented vocabulary

For this project, we had to some up with our own means of portraying and recording something we do on a regular basis using just imagery, and no text. For example, one classmate devised a grid system using both horizontal and vertical axes to portray the layers of clothing he was wearing during each hour of the day. Pretty crazy, and abstract when you look at it, but very cool in theory. It made us think hard about every aspect of the image-making we were doing.

My decision was to portray how badass I was feeling during social interactions using facial hair and viking adornment. The more facial hair and viking adornment there is in an image, the more badass or awesome I felt during that interaction or that day. The less of those things, the more insecure and down I was. It was great fun as an assignment, so long as I kept track of my moods throughout the days. And the week I ended up doing this was somewhat of a rollercoaster, as you can see.

Mapping Change

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past, present and future self-portraits using objects

Ahh, this one I could get super deep into, being various reflections of myself in objects both from those times and from now, or hopeful future perceptions of myself… but to avoid that, I’ll simply say this was interesting.

At first, I hated that we had to do this, I wanted to avoid labeling myself in any period, especially the future, because I don’t know, and I’m just becoming comfortable with that, so to approach it and try to craft something satisfactorily unknown into something relatively specific was daunting and in a way scary. I like how this came out very much, technically and as a piece.

The images aren’t the best, but the three pieces are shown vertically, past to future. The past and present drawings have their notebook fringe still on them, while the future one doesn’t. The present image is more playful with style, using a sort of comic-y take on movement and action, a bit more of a conceptual image, with a clear presence of a maker’s hands. That was important.

The past is small and contained on purpose, the future is only a glimpse, and of object mostly, things that won’t change, representing values I won’t lose: tolerance, understanding, adventure, playfulness. The sticker at the bottom seemed to fit as a label for the whole piece, though I never thought of it as a title until people started using it as one.

All three done with a charcoal pencil. I watched a bunch of X-Files while drawing them…it’s becoming the background for any drawing project I do. :P