There’s a shocking amount of work that goes into everything we have.
I chose this idea because it’s easy to forget just how much time and effort is put into every processed good. I wanted to show the difficult in creating even something simple like a wood carving, let alone something more complicated and useful as many of the items in a home. It’s humbling to know just how many hours of other people’s effort any american can purchase without much thought. As for if I was successful, well I’m not finished with my carving after 4 hours of work because I wanted to do everything by hand. My choice to create this piece with exclusively hand tools is to experience the difficulty than the vast majority of people would experience in creating a wood carving.
If I create another carving in the future I wouldn’t change anything, the simplicity of working with hand tools for a few hours to make something I enjoy is a fun experience for me. Carving for me is not about the quantity or even the quality of something I make but rather the experience of creating.
Another shocking Idea that I would be highly interested in trying is to create a metal carving out of raw ore and forging down into something usable. It would be even more shocking because metalworking is exponentially more difficult to learn and perform than woodworking. Undoubtedly, I would spend a week on one small project for a metal object as opposed to a few hours for a wooden piece.
Rise and shine, early morning start to avoid traffic coming out of orange county.
Prepped and ready to load up my tiny car for a hour long drive.
Finally getting a bit closer to having fun.
We aren’t anywhere close to front row parking but at least there aren’t to many people.
At last I’m on the mountain, and the snow is icy and horrible.
Seventy years old and my grandpa still skis like a champ.
It was a fun day but it’s starting to turn into water skiing on the slopes.
I am tired, sore, and hungry in this picture, but at least the sunset is nice
I chose to make a story on my ski day with my grandpa because family is the most important thing in my life, and it means alot to me that I can go out with my grandpa and bond with him over something we both enjoy. I think that I conveyed fairly well that I’m willing and able to go to great lengths to make sure I can have a relationship with my family. There’s I don’t like waking up early, and driving for an hour with horrible music. However, the drawbacks are far outweighed by being able to go ski with my grandpa and see him so happy. I think the best image that I took that day is the picture of my grandpa kicking up snow with a smile on his face. Not every picture in this blog post is a winner, in particular the third picture of the freeway sign is rather uninteresting. Nonetheless, I included it in my story to show that I commit a significant portion of my day listening to staticky radio driving behind trucks to have a good day with my grandparent. If I had to do something different I wouldn’t take any pictures and I’d take no pictures and just enjoy my day with my grandpa. I don’t like to take pictures generally because it takes me out of the moment and I’d rather live my life than document it. As far as if there’s any chance at me doing another photostory, probably not. The closest that I would come to doing this again is a one off photograph that might help supplement a story that I’m telling in person.
Kyunghee Valdez is a student in the School of Art’s 3D Media program. Valdez moved to California from south korea to pursue her education in the united states, in my conversation with Ms. Valdez she expressed her heartfelt passion for learning and for art and despite being an older student she still loves to learn. Like many artist her passion for art started young with drawing, so much so that she would constantly be drawing for her grade school classmates and teachers. Eventually as she continued to draw she began to realize she had a creative block when drawing from her imagination and although her technical skill in drawing was excellent she struggled with the creative process. As Ms. Valdez continued in her studies of art she eventually stumbled into taking a stone carving class where she fell in love working with 3D media.
This piece, Faith in light, is primarily focused on texture and shape being devoid of color variation. It’s cylindrical in shape with the base and lid coming out slightly farther than the body of the cylinder. All of the cuts made in this piece are hand cut and wavy, giving the edges a rough but not sharpe texture. It feels as if it had been sanded down just enough so as to not be sharpe. The copper material itself is smooth with tiny indentations in it to give it more texture and make it more eye catching. The piece itself is a candle holder and so the cuts in the copper body allow the light to pass through the bowed out space creating a pleasant shadowing effect with the candle light.
When I asked Ms. Valdez what this piece meant to here she said it represented sacrifice. She then showed me her hands and how nearly every finger was wrapped in a bandaid after nicking herself on the sharp metal edges. The relation being just as the candle inside the piece has to sacrifice itself so that it can produce light, so did she have to sacrifice herself so that she might make something beautiful. Ms. Valdez then related how this piece was only her second time ever working with copper and how her inexperience and ambition with this piece caused her to spend so much of her time and effort to create it. However, instead of being frustrated with the time she had to sacrifice to work the copper into submission she was ecstatic about her ability to learn and improve through her mistakes. She related how she had faith she would improve and believed she her sacrifice would make something worthwhile, hence the name, Faith in Light.
The art itself was nice to look at and I enjoyed how it both held practical utility while still looking beautiful. I hadn’t thought about all the time and effort and sacrifice that was needed to make the piece. However, as I talked with the artist I was surprised by depth this piece held for the artist, and I’m pleased I had the chance to talk to such and interesting person. The idea that you have to sacrifice part of yourself, to create something very much resonated with what I myself think. There’s something very personal about something that you make yourself and I think that’s because you do give up part of yourself whenever you create. You have some skin in the game so to speak and it isn’t just a phenomenon for when you create but when you give your time and effort to anything you lose part of yourself to gain something new.
Although art is wide and broad in its scope it’s undeniable to say that drawing serves as a cornerstone of artistic creativity. Drawing is nearly its own language in many cases it can convey thoughts and emotions better than words could ever get across, images in many cases are more powerful, visceral, and intimate than words. People have drawn for hundreds of years and millions of hours, I have drawn for fifty hours throughout my entire life tops. However, I was surprised with the ease and speed at which I could illustrate even with my gross lack of practice. Already drawing is an enjoyable experience even though I’m fumbling with my pencil as much as I’m putting down lines. If I dedicated more hours to drawing I have no doubt that I would enjoy it significantly more, as well as improve my drawing ability. In addition to being an enjoyable hobby drawing very well could serve to improve my career due to my major in aerospace engineering. All engineers have to be able to draw somewhat well an easy example being diagrams. The ability to properly illustrate the dimensions of an object and to draw a reasonable sketch quickly is indispensable in not only school life as an engineer but in a career in engineering as well.
The form of this piece is a segment of a great big lumbering tree. A cut out of the entirety of the piece is focused and invites you to examine the details of one segment of the form of the tree before stepping back and appreciating the entirety of the tree. This piece brings focus to the natural aesthetic of all the life that grows around us, the complexity of the veins in the leaf, the rough jagged uniform toughness of the bark, the insects crawling along the form that occupies all that they know. The square marking off this piece serves to catch the eye simply because it’s unusual. It’s an invitation to slow down and think about something as simple as a tree it steals moments from your day to remind you about all the life that surrounds you no matter where you are, all the complexity that exist within an arm’s reach.
The Nature of the Art
So why this tree? Out of all the trees that were on campus what makes this tree special? The answer is, nothing. Nothing about this tree makes it any more or less artistic than any other tree on campus. Someone very well could’ve had an art experience with this particular tree in the past but, that’s unlikely. After all why would a tree demand a second thought from anyone ever, it’s just a tree after all. The square of tape on this tree is simply meant to draw attention so that someone will slow down enough to look at the tree and wonder. Then once someone thinks about that tree, actually sees, and experiences it, then it will be art. After the tape is taken away and the tree will stay but now that there isn’t something new and exciting to make people take note it will go back to being a simple unnoticeable tree. So that begs the question what the hell makes anything art? The answer is unsurprisingly, opinion, in other words you, you make art art. The nature of art is a bit confounding to say the least. After all art can be anything, to suggest anything less would imply that there is some objective measurable way to describe art, that art is intrinsic characteristic of the object or action. Saying art is objective is like saying opinions are facts, despite how vehemently some would argue to the contrary it’s simply not true. People judge what is art or not, individually as they experience the piece they determine whether something is worthy of being art, and if that particular piece can convince enough people that it’s worth being art then it takes on a life of its own and becomes art, truely. The allegory to answer runs parallel to a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. If a painting exists with no one to experience it, is it really art.
One of my hobbies that I often engage in is wood carving, and the thing with carving is, it’s really easy to mess up and it’s really hard to fix. Find a knot? better work around that. Chip your piece? Better hope there’s still enough wood to work with. Did the wood split? Time to start over. Carving is all about precision and perfection because really you only get one chance. However, finger painting on the other hand is almost the antithesis to carving. You don’t need a plan, there’s nothing to work around, and you can’t ruin your piece. It was a freeing and expressive experience. Instead of working around your work, all your doing is putting your mark on the canvas. Whatever color you happen to like and whatever shape that’s enjoyable is easily formed and expressed without the need to commit to it. It came naturally and I didn’t have to put thought into what I was creating, all I had to worry about was that I was somewhere on the paper. What I made probably isn’t going to win me a spot in an art museum next to the Mona Lisa but Its creation is the same process that hundreds of other artists have walked through.
I didn’t feel particularly artistic cleaning the “Now” art piece but there’s something very gratifying about breathing new life into something that’s in desperate need of tending to. Its enjoyable to maintain and restore something that’s already had time put into it. I was showing my respect for the artist that created the structure in a more meaningful way then a complement.
Hollywood Star
In class we were shown an image of a woman cleaning donald Trumps Hollywood Star and then posed the question who would we get down on our hands and knees to clean their star. In essence the question is who if any is great enough that we would lower ourselves to clean something of theirs without ever having met them. Few people deserve that kind of respect and admiration, personally I don’t think any entertainer deserves that kind of respect. However a former president certainly does so I would clean Ronald Reagan’s star .
What Is Art
One of the quintessential topics we discussed in class is how can we even define art? What is this thing we’re talking about and what or who determines what is and isn’t art? The easiest solution to what is art is to stop asking me and go to an art museum, you’ll know what art is when you see it. Unfortunately that isn’t at all a definition you can put in a dictionary… or as an answer on a blog post. So some examples of art that we looked at in class were Mierle Laderman Ukeles Maintenance art of cleaning the steps of an art museum and Richard Serra throwing molten lead at an art museum wall. The similarities between these two are they both happened in an art museum. The differences between these two pieces are everything else. So how are they both art? The intent of the artist, and the perception of the viewer. Two different artist with wildly different approaches striving toward the same goal, to convince the viewer that what there doing is art. What makes these actions art isn’t were they are, or the medium used or even whose making the art. The reason they’re both art is because the artist managed to convince us that what they’re doing is worth looking at, worth interpreting, and that we’re gonna walk away with something if we analyze there work. Painting a house isn’t art because its not worth thinking about, but creating a beautiful myural that invokes passion or sorrow or anything is art because it’s worth analyzing. The defining characteristic of all art across all mediums is that people experience it and think about long after the sensation has finished.
“Womens Work” as Art
In the blog prompt It asks Mierle Laderman Ukeles, or Jennifer Lopez, made you think differently about “Women’s Work”? Is “Women’s Work” ever art? Work is work. I work at a gym I study as an aerospace engineer and I go home to cook and clean for my family. Women and men tend towards doing certain work more consistently than others but its not mutually exclusive, if there’s work to be done I’m worried about bodies to do it not gender. So no Ukeles and Lopez didn’t make me think differently because I had never put much stock in distinguishing “Men’s Work” from “Women’s Work”. As for if “Women’s Work” is ever art, well, there’s a reason why they call it artwork.
Zack’s art blog 