Scale II - The Finals

 The piece above was inspired by the Black Death, I have used a map typical of the 1300's for the basic shape, and rimmed it with gold/yellow embroidery thread. Using acrylic to create the textured surface resembling the bulbous symptoms of the plague, then adding knotted red thread for scabs and salt for a festering appearance.

Titled 'Black Wave', this piece is acrylic on linen - hand painted. A resonating image for me was the black wave of water that followed the tsunami in Japan, I thought of the loss of life that was caused by this singular event and developed this design.

Raindrops and Rooftops - Hurricane Katrina overhead view of the houses affected by the flood

Glass Fusing - An art yet to be mastered

My flimsy attempt at glass fusing

As part of our Transformation brief we were given a class on glass fusing, that proved to be less than succesful in my case. The prinicpals of glass are simple or so it seemed. The cutting tool has a small blade sometimes with a oil cartridge included, topped off with a rounded metal sphere on the end. To cut the glass you must hold the blade completely vertical above the glass and move in continuous straight line. Then using the ball, tap the underside of the glass, your cut acts as a breaking point and as you are tapping underneath the glass will start to shard. Once you arrange your glass in the way you like it is ready to go into the kiln. Just a general warning - DO NOT try this at home in your oven, I don't speak from experience, but I speak as a person who has the common sense not to try. The reason I say this is because glass can explode if cooled too quickly.

It seemed that in my first attempt at glass fusing I was just not able to tell the glass what to do. I think it may have had something to do with my abundant lack of straight lines. My advice, use a ruler.

Scale

Following on from the fruit brief, we went on to our next topic - scale. It could be any sort of scale from the scales of justice to reptile scales, even to the Richter scale. I must admit that when I first heard the word scale, it brought a huge wave of panic, my first thought was of strong swear word.This however, was soon replaced by my second more rational thought 'How on Earth I am going to make something out of this!?' Yet, as it was explained to me, the ideas that arose from the panicked state of my mind started to put me at ease. There was the opportunity to create sculptures, spatial designs, costume design from the right topic. It was choosing said topic that was the problem. 

I am not in the habit of picking the most obvious choice - sometimes it's unintentional other times it's deliberate - so it was very difficult for me to find a subject matter that not only interested me, but inspired me. I do apologise for sounding like a broken record but I am a designer, namely a costume designer, trying to find a subject to match my expertise was impossible. Therefore, I settled with the next best thing, textiles - now only the topic remained. What was complex enough for me to look at and easy enough to understand in the restricted time? 

It struck me after watching a documentary of the Japanese Tohoku tsunami in 2011, and the word which had been plaguing my mind for days was attached to the event. The scale of disaster. For a time it was staring me in the face, we are often faced with these images from a day to day basis, but without ever really paying attention to them. So I endeavoured to create a variety of textile pieces based on the events that have caused the most cataclysmic effect on the world. 

Below are a list of the cheery topics:

• The Black Death (1348- 1350) - 1/3 of the world's population was wiped out by this plague
•  Hurricane Katrina (2005) -  One of the most expensive and deadliest hurricanes to hit the coast of America costing more than $81 billion.
• The Indian Floods (2013) - The heaviest monsoon experienced in over 80 years.
• Tohoku Tsunami Japan (2011) - The most powerful known earthquake to hit Japan

My time was limited so consequently my topics had to be too. 

BRAIN

Many layers of brain! As part of my transformation brief I decided to look into the structure of the brain as that is where all dreams are concotted from - shocker. These were made using the clay wall effect with plaster.

Negative and Postive Finals

 

 

Here are some of my final pieces from the Negative/Positive Space Brief, each piece was made using monochrome pastels on cartridge paper. I was told to select areas from each preliminary sketch and incorporate them in a more abstract composition. Being entirely unnatural for me to create abstract drawings, I found the progressions of these works to be quite liberating. Who knew?

Fruit III - I am the Creator

After researching the world of fruit, I started to develop my own ideas. To begin with I needed to consider the environments that each fruit might be found to grow in. The brief had opened the concept to any conceivable idea, provided that you gave reason behind your choice. New dimensions were able to come into creation, uninhabitable environments became liveable, even new countries could be made to suit that story of the fruit. Considering my options, I decided that to design an entire world for the sake of a fruit seemed slightly farcical, as I would be much rather spending my time designing the fruit itself. It struck me that a fruit from a familiar habitat within Earth’s eco-system was an easier concept to grasp rather than warping reality.

Er’ za

My first idea was the Er’ za – the name for which, I came up on a whim, so please don’t judge. This fruit was to be found growing in the Volcanoes of Hawaii and along the West Coast of America. To come up with the basic design I researched the make-up of the plant – basic botany 101- such cycles as respiration, transpiration, and guard cell functions to figure out how the plant was to actually have any chance of survival.

The Er’za in my mind was scorched black by the heat of the volcano, but still remained to a show red vine structure around the casing of the fruit. A basic five petal structure that protected the precious fruit in the centre, it therefore needed to have a thick heat resistant casing that was able to withstand the temperature of such a hostile environment. The outer skin of this casing had microscopic hairs that were responsible for catching the moisture in the air. The fruit of the Er’za grew as one singular fruitlet in the centre of the petal structure; it resembled the shape of a garlic, only with a fuller body. The skin of the fruit would be jet black, but with a rich burgundy red once cut into. Seeds would be scattered throughout the flesh similar to that of a figs’. Within the fruit’s final stages of life it will begin to swell until eventually exploding, scattering the seeds across the volcanoes cliff face.

As the basic structure of the fruit was finally developed I started to look into possibly functions of the fruit – what was it going to be used for? I was drawn to the idea of it being used for tribal initiation, which I later linked to Native Americans. Young warriors are giving the task of acquiring the fruit of the Er’za by scaling the mountainside, to then return to the shaman. The shaman would then brew the Er’za into something resembling a tea. The warriors would drink the brew and undergo powerful hallucinations that brought about the most frightening images that the human mind can conceive. This would not only leave them paralysed for up to a week but would also cause muscle cramps, incontinence, vomiting and in some cases death.  Once the warrior have awoken from their ordeal, they would no longer fear their enemies as they had already stood before the gates of madness.

The Vacuum Former

The initial mould

The finish plaster cast

 

The vacuum former is a specialised tool that allows you to create basic moulds using the surface of other materials. It is by far one of the coolest things I have ever seen! Which shows how much of a life I've lived. You place a sheet of plastic in what is essentially a oven grill and wait until the plastic wobble to touch. Then lifting the heater you raise your mould until you can just see it pushing the plastic before swithcing on the vaccum. The mesh suface allows air to be sucked from underneath forcing the plastic to literally wrap itself around your materials.

Positive and Negative Space

Drawing was a class that I personally looked upon with great excitement. From a very young age my ability to draw was a comfort to me and in some cases my strongest asset. Whether it was a quick solitary doodle or a laborious body of work, I found drawing and painting to be a source of fun and absolute freedom.

In this instance I was allowed to delve into the world of Positive and Negative Space. The concept of positive and negative space is to take an image and exclude all tone and detail to create block colours of either black or white. By doing this you are able to concentrate on the use of shape and space of an area.

Victor Vaserely

Our first objective was to produce a variety of monochromatic sketches from the college surroundings as a starting point for later pieces. Imagining how to produce a clean cut design that you can identify as being particular everyday objects is certainly a challenge that I had not encountered before; however it was not a challenge I couldn’t overcome. A method that I found helpful was to eliminate texture and colour from what I was drawing and focus on the basic structure of the shape. By training the eye to view blocks rather than tangible forms allows you to draw in a manner that shadows that of other positive and negative space artists.

Jackson Pollock - 'Convergence'

Using these drawings we were then asked to draw elements of each sketch to create an intriguing abstract piece. When I heard the word ‘abstract’, I could not help but recoil and despair as I thought of the work of Josef Albers, Jackson Pollock, and Pablo Picasso. All of whom were credible artists but chose to strip away any control from their work – as Picasso put it ‘I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.’ 

Edward Hopper - 'NightHawks'

My particular style followed the works of J.M.W Turner, John Everett Millais, and Edward Hopper – favourites of mine. Despite, my views I decided to throw myself into the process and create an abstract style of my own. I will not lie when I admit that my first few attempts were feeble, to say the least, but as with most things, I improved with practise. I was able to add elements of the more classical sense of painting to the my abstract interpretation to create pieces that I was proud of producing.

Fruit II - The Evolution

 

For the build up to creating my fruit, I have explored a variety of techniques that will eventually go towards deciding the physiology of my final creations. Above is an analytical drawing of a fig seed. I like to accentuate colour in my work, so I took the slightest hint of colours that I found within  the seed and made them much more visible, as you can see.

 

Mono-printing was another technique shown to our class, I was really quite proud of my results.

 

Some initial sketches for one of my first designs.

 

 

Fruit

Fruit

Fruit.  Nutritious and delicious you might say, but, as I soon discovered those innocent sweet fruits have been involved in some interesting and sometimes sinister pasts. Following my introduction into Creative Concepts, I was given the brief to investigate various fruit as well as adopting a fruit and keeping a diary or journal for my time said fruit. My research could range from botanical terms for a fruit to the habitat and history surrounding them.

Choosing an adopted fruit was difficult to say the least, as it is not often that you find yourself asking, what fruit would make a good friend?

However, after much deliberation I eventually settled for the exotic pineapple, affectionately naming him Jonty. I spent one blissful week with Jonty, walking to college together, taking drives together, spending time chilling out with one another. It was not until one fateful Sunday that Jonty saw his end at the hands of my mother, a kitchen knife and a fruit salad. Jonty – forever missed. Forever delicious.

To recover from such a tragedy, I decided to research Jonty’s ancestry in an attempt to gain closure. I began my research by attempting to find the earliest mention of the pineapple, which was recorded in 1493 by none other than Christopher Columbus. During the famous explorers’ second voyage to the Caribbean, he discovered the fruit on the volcanic island of Guadeloupe. It was here that the exotic fruit was first christened as the pineapple, as the sailors described the fruit as having the coarse exterior of a pine cone, yet, the sweet centre of a apple. Upon returning to Europe Columbus brought the unusual fruit, where it soon became a sorely sought after commodity.

In a time when sugar was a luxury reserved for the rich and aristocratic levels of society, the pineapple was a highly prized piece to own. Voyages could stretch on for months, with even the fastest ships taking weeks to return from the ‘New world’, meaning that the pineapple would reach Europe in a rather grim rotten state. The few pineapples that did survive the journey were not consumed as we would do today; they were instead used in floral arrangements for flamboyant dinner parties as a status symbol. Owning a pineapple proved you had money and influence, as you were able to acquire such a rare centrepiece. This became such a common occurrence that florists saw a business opportunity by hiring out arrangements with the pineapple displayed, allowing their clients to create the illusion amongst their dinner guests that they were able to afford such a grand item.

The pineapple soon became a symbol of hospitality because of these dinner parties, as many were set in the entrance of homes to welcome guests. Architects, designers, and artists later began to include the pineapple in their own designs, many can still be found today in stately homes across Europe and America.

It was not until the twentieth century that the pineapple was no longer seen as a luxury, as travel had become much more efficient with the invention of the airplane. This allowed the pineapple to become affordable for the everyday consumer, reaching its status as a common fruit to be eaten and enjoyed.

The pineapple is one of the more innocent fruits, as no dark secrets surround its prickly exterior , but, there are many more fruits that hold a bloody past, that I may divulge into at a later date.

 

The Art of Origami and Paper cutting

The Art of Origami and Paper cutting

Origami first came into prominence in 17^th century Japan with the literal translation meaning folding paper. It is a technique that allows the artist/designer to create basic or complex 3D structures using a piece of paper by the means of folding. The level of difficulty can range from the simple fortune teller/ salt seller structure to more elaborate designs such as these:

There are two folds that you will always use in origami.

A mountain fold:

And a Valley fold:

 

These two folds alone are the basis for every design in origami, they will allow you to start creating structures and textures.

Here is an example of one of the simplest forms of folding. This technique can be repeated on one piece of paper in a grid format, it is however, as I soon learned, technically difficult as the squares become smaller and the numbers of squares increase. I recommend practising and gradually building up your technique before attempting more intricate structures.

Another design, I personally found interesting for textiles, was this piece:

 

There are many variations that you can use for this technique and it produces very bold and effective results.

Paper Cutting or kirigami (literal translation meaning “to cut paper”) is another form of origami yet it involves a variation between cutting and folding. The simplest form of this technique is the basic step structure.

 

From the basic step structure, a design can evolve into a detailed and often elaborate design, for example:

 

I am yet to attempt designs such as those above, but, as I progress and develop my skills it may be possible to create designs up to that standard. As they say practise makes perfect.

Welcome to Me, Myself, and Art

Welcome to Me, Myself, and Art, written by Catherine Christie. For nearly fourteen years of my life I have developed a strong and passionate attachment to Art and Design. When others were singing, dancing, or playing, I could be found doodling or painting in the corner of a room. Throughout my school life I continued to excel in the subject – with the chance that I may have sacrificed my other subjects in the process, who knows- and found my style and skill develop as the time passed. Now as I enter the world of higher education at Forth Valley College Stirling, I am endeavouring to study BA Art and Design. Within this blog, I hope to provide a documented tour through my trials and tribulations as an art student through my artwork, experiments, and classes for the next three years. One can only hope that from here the only way is up.