I watched the Lunchtime Lecture with the artist Theodora Miller, who became a painter after a brain injury as part of her recovery process. She is a contemporary artist who works with a number of different media exploring different textures and themes. I found it interesting how she did not study art but would try to find ways to be creative, often through crafting and then started taking classes at the VMFA in painting, only picking up painting while recovering from a severe concussion. I was also interested in how she was painting out her emotions in her early work, during this concussion, especially I found the repetition of these circular shapes in these pieces. I found it interesting how she uses wood panels often, building up layers of gesso, then lots of layers of paint, before covering it some with white paint. I think this amount of layering is really interesting in how she has been able to put some thing on a canvas and then take it away and then even put it back again some times. I was also interested in how she deconstructed words in some of her most recent pieces, pulling in greek letters and stylizing them, and some of my favorites of these had the same complex layering as her earlier pieces. Overall I think her journey as an artist has been very interesting and I enjoyed learning about how she created all these different pieces through her layering process.
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These are the process photos from the in class work I had done, which was much more difficult as I was working without a mannequin, thus had to keep reworking stencils using myself as a template, which slowed down the initial pattern making and design, so I spend the first few days of in class work to create stencils and build the form itself. Then for the final few days I mapped out and glued on all of the major detailing pieces before mapping out where I was going to put foam clay, adding some initial vines to the arm and filling in gaps with it. I ended up having to finish the project at home and forgot to take pictures during that process. I added more vines and scratches using the foam clay using the marks I did in class as a guide. Then I made a wire armature for the vines to figure out their form and then covered them with foam clay. I then painted the piece.
Weeks 1/2: This time was spent creating the pattern and cutting out the main pieces of the set before gluing them together. There was lots of trial and error in getting the right size pieces during this time and even more time spent outside pinning the drying pieces together. Week 3: Final steps in glueing the main bodice together and cutting and adding details to it. Week 4: Detail work with the molding clay (filling gaps in the bodice and adding scratch marks to it) as well as the process of painting which consisted up a coat of primer then white paint and now adding detail with paint. This year we had a figure drawing workshop with guest artist Tommy van Auken where we learned and practiced techniques for drawing figures from real life, focusing on gesture drawing, composition, and capturing figures, both general and specific images. The course was a good refresher on how to do gesture drawing and capture the weight of a figure and I feel as though I did improve some throughout the brief course, improving my general proportion of figures and better capturing their weight in their movement. I think I was also able to draw lighter as the course went, so that my starting line work was not very thick and I was more easily able to do contour work later on into the drawing as the lines did not start out as thick as they were at the beginning. In the future, and on my own as well, I hope to further work on my proportions in figure drawings as well as hope to practice the interactions of limbs with in a figure, such as how a figure looks when a hand and leg touch as this is something that can be difficult in general so I would like to practice doing this more.
This has been a long and strange year, but I feel that I have learned a lot and grown a lot in my work. At the start of this year, I began working with textiles for the first time and its very clear to see how much I have improved and how much I learned about working with textiles. I learned how to make my work much cleaner, more professional in the stitching. I have learned how to work with new types of fabric as well and how to better create my own patterns. Furthermore, I have been able to grow in the painting aspect of many of my pieces, as I was able to refine my painting skills to better shade my work and create a better depth. During the year I also created a painting on canvas and a digital piece, both of which I enjoyed as well. My favorite piece however was my second semester piece, which composed of three clothing pieces, a shirt, vest, and skirt which I painted. I especially enjoyed the armor I made as part of this work with scale mail pauldrons connected with chain and wrist guard/gloves with flowers. This was my most complicated piece and the one I found most enjoyable during the process of, as well as afterwards as I felt it was a very interesting piece. I hope to continue working with textiles next year as well as possibly accompanying some of my work with paintings on different surfaces as well. I am excited to see where my work goes in the future.
I attended the live art history lecture presented by the VMFA Statewide Partner Speaker, Dr. Jeanette Nicewinter on Latin American Art History, specifically on Inkan art history. The lecture was quite interesting although it is unfortunate that much of this history was destroyed by the Spanish during the conquest of South America. However, I felt like I was able to learn quite a bit about their textiles process, even though much of the specifics are unknown it was interesting to learn about how important textiles were as an artistic form. I learned about how the textiles were never cut, simply woven into shape and were used as markers of identity. I also learned about how they tended to use geometric designs, which were limited, but often on a large scale. This is something I might want to learn about more as I would be interested to look into this process of textile making further because it is quite different than the more natural forms I tend to use, but I do like the use of geometric shapes so this might be something I look into for the future in patterning. I also was interested by how clothing was related to identity and used show identity so I might also want to investigate this as much of my work is also related to my identity and some of the disconnect I feel with it.
Week One- This week was devoted to creating the shirt itself. I gathered my scrap sections of fabric, was pleasantly surprised as I had more black fabric left than I initially thought, and starting cutting the shapes and pinning them together to create the base shirt. I sewed the pieces together and hemmed all of the edges trying to keep it looking as clean as possible, so this took quite a bit longer. Then I found the blue fabric, cut, hemmed, and attached the square to the front of the shirt and started working on the sleeves. I didn't have quite enough for full sleeves, so I decided stick with some of my original cold shoulder designs and keep the shape a bit more boxy because of the fabric. I sewed and hemmed those. Week Two- The first day I ironed the fabric and then created my new stencil and found my old ones. I then painted the base coat of white on the fabric. The second day I spent transferring all of the designs from the stencils. |
Avarice StankiewiczHi, I'm Avarice, though I mostly go by Kace, I'm an art 5 student at Maggie Walker Governor's school and page is just a space for some reflection, research and progress photos for my work. Archives
May 2022
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