Tobacco Free Campus

UGA becomes a smoke free campus Oct 1, 2014.  Sorry, smokers.  Not supposed to take smoke breaks anymore.

What is Art For?

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/video/2014/sep/10/what-is-art-for-alain-de-botton-guide-video

"Philosopher Alain de Botton gives his top five reasons why art is such a vital force for humanity.  Are we wrong to like pretty pictures?  Why is some art painful to look at?  Can art heal your feelings of urban alienation?  Relax, watch and find out. "  -the Guardian

Small Daily Works

This is not too unrelated from the sketchbooks I've been trying to get y'all to use daily.  The artist here is focused on making a work of art a day- shrinking the scale to make it manageable.  They are simple but elegant and not sketchy.  Each paper is considered a final finished product.

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/09/postcards-for-ants-a-365-day-miniature-painting-project-by-lorraine-loots/

Postcards for Ants is an ongoing painting project by Cape Town artist Lorraine Loots who has been creating a miniature painting every single day since January 1, 2013. The artist works with paint brushes, pencils, and bare eyes to render superbly detailed paintings scarcely larger than a small coin. After the first year, Loots relaunched the project in a second phase inspired by Cape Town’s designation as World Design Capital 2014. On her website you can “reserve” a future painting (it’s all booked up for this year), and she’s also printed five limited edition postcards for each day. You can watch her work and hear a bit more about her inspiration in the video below by Gareth Pon, and she also regularly updates on Facebook. Hopefully we’ll see a 2015 project? (viaLustik)

365 Paintings for Ants with Lorraine Loots from Gareth Pon on Vimeo.

John Currin

Drawing II folk,

In critique I briefly mentioned the work of John Currin.  

(born 1962) is an American painter based in New York City. He is best known for satirical figurative paintings which deal with provocative sexual and social themes in a technically skillful manner.^[1] His work shows a wide range of influences, including sources as diverse as the Renaissance, popular culture magazines, and contemporary fashion models.^[2] He often distorts or exaggerates the erotic forms of the female body. "His technical skills", Calvin Tomkins has written, "which include elements of Old Master paint application and high-Mannerist composition, have been put to use on some of the most seductive and rivetingly weird figure paintings of our era."^[3]

                                                         - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Currin

He is particularly worth looking at in context of us moving from observational drawing into personal bodies of work.  Currin combines the qualities of fine art with stylizations developed in the contemporary world.

Currin also is a type of symbolist.  He loads his imagery with visual puns or symbols to direct the interpretation of his narrative, a deeper reading of his work or search for critical analysis will bring you a lot more information than we can get into with this blog.

Art Around Town

Go to the exhibitions UGA has to offer!  But, there is even more to see here in Athens.  The Museum right across from the Dodd building isn't just some campus extension- that is the state of Georgia's public museum- The Georgia Museum of Art, no affiliation to UGA.  Then just past downtown we've got ATHICA, a contemporay non-profit art gallery.  Hotel Indigo, fancy hotel off of Prince Ave, has also seriously gotten into the exhibition of local contemporary art with their own gallery.

UGA.
We just had a large opening reception co-ordinated among the several different Dodd building galleries.  #pizzadodd 
http://art.uga.edu/galleries/

Here is the gallery schedule for UGA, but it seems to not have any listings for October when the galleries change from their current work. . .
http://art.uga.edu/galleries/gallery-schedule/
and our non gallery specific list of Dodd events here. . .
http://art.uga.edu/events/

This is an upcoming event, Photo Topos Artists in Conversation with Asen Kirin
http://art.uga.edu/events/photo-topos-artists-in-conversation-with-asen-kirin
Wednesday, Sept 24th, 2-4pm.
I recommend this event.  Asen Kirin is one of the most accomplished scholars within the Lamar Dodd School of Art.  He recently published a book and organized an exhibition on the works of Catherine the Great to trace the curatorial mission of her collection as bringing Russia closer to the West but also entrenching its culutral history within the medieval Orthodox tradition, and Greek Byzantine.  He is an incredibly insightful Associate Professor you should take an art history course with if you get the chance.  He will moderate a discussion with the photography artists so go check it out and see if you like what they have to say about their work or it changes your opinion of the exhibition.



GMOA.
http://georgiamuseum.org/
The museum is open T,W, F, and Sat, 10-5pm, Th, 10-9pm, Sun, 1-5pm, and Closed Mondays.
This museum is your local source to see the history of Western Art and Georgia's place in it.  Divided into rooms featuring the Arts and Crafts movement, Medieval art, Works on Paper, Modern art, folk art, and European paintings- you can see a little of a lot.


ATHICA.
http://athica.org/
Their current exhibition is, Athens Celebrates Elephant 6.  The Elephant 6 collective is a loose collection of musicians from the Athens scene such as Neutral Milk Hotel, the Gerbils, Elf Power, Apples in Stereo, etc, and is rooted to current generation of musicians through the Orange Twin Collective and groups such as Nana Grizol.
listen here
The exhibition which I haven't yet seen should feature flyers, album art, and props from concerts and music videos.

Aside from these venues local artists exhibit works in bars, restaurants, and coffee shops.

Cross Contours and Hatching.

Hendrik Goltius [detail]

Drawing II folk,

In last class we moved on from the contour homework into taking line in greater detail into the interior of forms.  Remember- hatching is a series of parallel lines; Often an artist will "Cross-hatch" by intersecting the set of lines with another set at a 45 to 90 degree angle.  

This post shows several examples of these high detail stylistic marks.  The "cross contours" wrap around the form; Implying the underlying volume instead of running the risk of flattening an image the way unconsidered cross hatching can.

Hennessy Youngman

Hennessy Youngman and the self reflective satire of identity based performative art; and the contemporary art scene at large. . .




Hennessy Youngman is the adopted persona of Jayson Musson.  Musson has received a BFA in photography and his MFA in painting.   Musson was also a member of the Philly hip-hop group, Plastic Little, and is sampled in that 2013 "Harlem Shake" fad.




These videos which Musson started in 2010, became very popular with art students and the Youngman persona has been asked to curate exhibitions and give public lectures.

Athens Mural

http://onlineathens.com/marquee/2014-08-13/new-mural-celebrates-athens-creative-spirit

Athens has a new mural!  It was painted by recent Lamar Dodd alum Joel Rosenburg.  The mural is on the side of St. Udio- a metal fabrication business founded by former UGA art students. There will be a reception for the mural and I hope everyone makes the effort to attend.

Friday

August 29th, 7-9PM.

1321 Oconee St.

Athens, GA

Contour

Drawing II folk, 

Here are some examples of contour drawing to look over while you do your first contour portrait homework.  Many examples have other methods of rendering than pure contour, but these are some strong examples of linework.

[you should be able to click on the images to see them large]

Haruki Murakami & JM Coetzee on Discipline

The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/the-fierce-imagination-of-haruki-murakami.html?pagewanted=all
by Sam Anderson, Oct 21, 2011, The New York Times.

“Full time,” for Murakami, means something different from what it does for most people. For 30 years now, he has lived a monkishly regimented life, each facet of which has been precisely engineered to help him produce his work. He runs or swims long distances almost every day, eats a healthful diet, goes to bed around 9 p.m. and wakes up, without an alarm, around 4 a.m. — at which point he goes straight to his desk for five to six hours of concentrated writing. (Sometimes he wakes up as early as 2.) He thinks of his office, he told me, as a place of confinement — “but voluntary confinement, happy confinement.”

“Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life,” he said. “If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy. I’m not a fast thinker, but once I am interested in something, I am doing it for many years. I don’t get bored. I’m kind of a big kettle. It takes time to get boiled, but then I’m always hot.

I've never read the work of Murakami, but the journalist's description struck me as very similar to the way author JM Coetzee, who I would recommend to any reader, was described in 1999. . .

The New Statesman Profile - J M Coetzee

The ideal chronicler of the new South Africa, he deserves to make literary history as a double Booke

http://www.newstatesman.com/node/135933

Coetzee is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke, or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word.

I do not particularly believe a life without laughter is a necessity to the pursuit of great art, but I do want to draw attention to the focus, repetition, and discipline of professionals in the creative industries.

Read the full articles when/if you have the time. The important info has been cited here.

Demetri Martin on Learning

http://www.maximumfun.org/sound-young-america/demetri-martin-author-book-interview-sound-young-america

listen to this interview- it’s only about 20 minutes.

There are quite a few pretty insightful remarks and it includes some stand up jokes- so a little more engaging of a listen than an academic lecture or a lot of other public radio.

I've posted some relevant sections from the transcript below. . .

JESSE THORN: That process of learning a trick has always fascinated me about dudes that are into skateboarding, because skateboarding is this culture that is built around being slightly dropped out. It's like the classic slacker culture, possibly second to weed culture, but interrelated; and yet, when I think back to the people I knew when I was a teenager who were into skateboarding, what they did with their time was practice over and over, work so hard, fail so much, to learn to do something that at the end of it, outside of the context of skateboarder culture, wasn't even that cool looking or anything.

DEMETRI MARTIN: It's true, and for me that's a big similarity to standup. It might be because I'm a joke teller, but there's a diligence to it. All these comedians I look at from the outside might seem like slackers or guys who are kind of barnacles on the real world of work and stuff, but when you’re in there with them, you're seeing guys and girls - - women, I'm not trying to be a sexist comic here...you're seeing people who are working really hard at their craft, at what they do. It could be fart jokes, it could be very personal stories, it could be one liners that are kind of absurd. But by in large, you're going to find people that are like these skaters.

That's what I mean almost with the repertoire, you see this guy trying to land this trick over and over again, and then he gets it, and you think oh cool, this guy can do a double kick flip. For two weeks every day he was sitting there kicking the board, picking it up, trying again. It could be just some random bit about dogs or something, but you see this guy one night, oh, he's prepping this thing about a dog, then oh, he's doing it again, there he goes. You either get it or you don't. But there's a similar diligence which to me is great, because I'm over 13 years in standup now and I'm not bored yet. I still like it.

. . .For me, possibility, progress, growth, those things are very - - they feel very good. It doesn't usually come with negativity. I don't really mind sucking at something as long as I'm getting a little bit better at it along the way. I don't know if I'll ever be a master at anything, but I think that's a mistake for me personally. I don't know how much it's about the journey, but it's more about the process. I like short jokes, I like puzzles, there's an incrementalism, I say, to that stuff. You get into one little problem, and then you get your way out of it, you find a solution, or maybe you don't, but you can move on to the next one. Over time, maybe the goals, the results, are just the by products of approaching things with a certain process, a certain approach.

Rakoff on Creativity

David Rakoff was a critically acclaimed humorist/writer. Here he is speaking about creativity. Rakoff discusses the dominant narrative on creativity as simple expression verse a practiced skill. He uses the example of "Rent" and storytelling podcasts.

This is an excerpt from an interview on the radio show/podcast "The Sound of Young America" which now goes by "Bullseye with Jesse Thorn." You can hear a memorial podcast put together of two separate interviews with Jesse Thorn from 2005 and 2011 at. . .

https://soundcloud.com/bullseye-with-jesse-thorn/david-rakoff-a-retrospective