Fall College Schedule

Elementary Italian I: should help if i ever go on an art trip through italy
Intro to Philosophy: always good to contemplate existence as an artist
Fundamental Studio: Drawing I: taking this one for obvious reasons
Art History: Renaissance through Modern Art (honors) : pumped i got into the honors class for this, fairly excited to take it
Topics in History: Ataturk: Turkey's Secular Revolution (honors seminar): one of the few honors topics course left available but I also know a bit about ataturk and how he single handily altered the fate of his country so I figured this could be extremely interesting

Unfortunately couldn't fit in the Intro to Programming class I wanted to take but other than that I'm extremely excited/happy with this schedule. I'm sure it will be thoroughly interesting. I'm saving the fundamental studio: 2d and 3d courses for the spring semester.

Andrew Loomis

Finished a new still life painting but I can't take any photos because my camera is broken. The warranty covered what happened so I should have it replaced or repaired by the end of the month.

Recently stumbled upon the amazingly helpful series of books by the now deceased Andrew Loomis. Each covers a different subject in art beautifully and since the copyrights have expired have become public domain. They are all six available for download in pdf format here.

I have particularly been studying from "Figure Drawing for all It's Worth" to get my anatomy skills up to par. However I've skimmed through "Drawing the Head and Hands" and it too appears highly valuable. I definitely am planning on downloading all six books.

Gustave Courbet

Read an article on Courbet today... really digging the sincerity of his highly emotive portraits:

The Desperate Man, Gustave Courbet, 1844-45
Wounded Man, Gustave Courbet

"Self Portrait with Pipe", Gustave Courbet

A Young Neil Young

A referenced digital painting of my favorite singer-songwriter of all time. Not so sure about the background and guitar sharing the same color will have to study into that and see how that effects the composition later. Does it poke holes in the image? Create confusion with positive and negative space? Or does it simply emphasize mr. young's body over the guitar's body? Ugh.

Some quick lyrics to go with the pic:

Old man lying by the side of the road
With the lorries rolling by,
Blue moon sinking from the weight of the load
And the buildings scrape the sky,
Cold wind ripping down the alley at dawn
And the morning paper flies,
Dead man lying by the side of the road
With the daylight in his eyes.

Dont let it bring you down
Its only castles burning,
Find someone whos turning
And you will come around.

Blind man running through the light of the night
With an answer in his hand,
Come on down to the river of sight
And you can really understand,
Red lights flashing through the window in the rain,
Can you hear the sirens moan?
White cane lying in a gutter in the lane,
If youre walking home alone.

Dont let it bring you down
Its only castles burning,
Just find someone whos turning
And you will come around.

Neil Young's "Don't Let It Bring You Down" off of the album "After the Goldrush"

Senior Art Show

The senior art show has been installed at snider. Featuring works developed over the course of a semester by fellow seniors Anna Lepsch, Zakk Roberts, Danielle Humbert, and Ethan Wolfe as well as myself:

My piece (what I've been working on for a good month now), shortly after being installed:

"Family Photo 2005", Mixed Media on Paper, 2008

Self Portrait VII

Anecdote

A very interesting story I read on an art forum posted by Nathan Christie (I've taken the liberty to clean up the internet speak into proper grammar so this is not his actual words but rather the same general sentiment of the anecdote):

So my wallet got stolen April 9th, and i couldn't replace anything for a while (finally got access to my bank account today) because I had no documents. I was thinking about how everyone was good to me and gave me food and shit over the last month, so I decided to get this homeless guy a coffee. We sat down and got to talking on the sidewalk on 14th and Starbucks.

This girl comes by... and... starts to take the homeless man's picture and he asks, "What the heck are you doing?" So she says, "Oh, is it alright if i take your picture?" And he tells her, "No that's fine. But, not like that..." And he starts giving her all this shit about the way she's got the camera setup and asking what she's shooting on and whether she's checked the light and if her film speed was blah blah and everything. And so it turns out he's a photo journalist that lost his house because his wife died and he couldn't pay the rent which sent his credit to hell. Then, the girl got scared and just sorta left.

And he says "What's sad is that she probably doesn't realize that the moment there, where two people realize they have something in common, is actually more beautiful than any of those boring old shots of homeless people that everyone takes."