Links to Final Project

Portfolio: http://students.smcm.edu/sakalm/
Get Lost: http://students.smcm.edu/sakalm/GetLost/GetLostHome.html

Art Event: Will Raulin & Morgan Bailey

Will Raulin and Morgan Bailey are in the Advanced Digital Media class and created a projection project on the admission’s field on campus. The artists wanted to create a piece that would create an outside world within the St. Mary’s context. The artists wanted to project a foreign landscape onto their work since the college is located in a very isolated place. They wanted to break students away from what is known, and what is seen day to day. The artists filled up 100 white balloons, and attached them to a wooden board. They then projected spheres onto the balloons. As the images were being projected they were also rotating, and morphing into the subsequent images. The images transitioned in a very dynamic way and became somewhat of a meditative experience. 

Art Event: Kate McCammon

                Kate McCammon is a painter who graduated from MICA. She talked mainly about her experience abroad, and how her work developed and changed through residencies. She initially created life-sized portraits about heirlooms, heritage, and family history. She initially painted herself and people in her family. She focused on texture, and dramatic lighting. McCammon then studied in both Norway and Paris. During this time she worked with the artist Odd Nerdrum who integrated figures and landscapes in his work. She learned more about how she could develop her paint application style. Her paintings then became less texture oriented, and more narrative. After this she studied in Sorento, Italy she became more interested in landscape painting instead of portraiture. She then worked in Florence where she moved away from paint and began to experiment with charcoal. When she returned to Baltimore she tried to express memories of Italy in her work, along with the combination of figure and landscape. She then returned the Venice twice, and ultimately ended up creating work that referenced images from her childhood. The figures became somewhat spaceless, and were about reacting the memories. 

James White & Fabio Sasso

James White is an artist from Canada who has been working with visual design for about 12 years. He has worked for many different companies including Google, Nike, Wired Magazine, and Toyota. He started working in this field right out of school in 1998. This gave him a lot of experience quickly, especially during a time when the internet, and web design started to become much more serious of a field.
Fabio Sasso is from Brazil, and has been working with design, and web design since about 1999. Before that, Sasso worked designing stickers which is somewhat evident in his art.
Both has successful blogs that I was drawn to. The sites are relatively simple in layout, and easy to navigate. The typeface is consistent and legible. The websites are more of an elegant supplement to the material than actually works within themselves. For this particular project, I find that kind of idea, and layout much more appealing. I want my website to simply display my work, and convey a little something about my personal style without being too overwhelming to taking away from the pieces I show.

Sources

http://signalnoise.bigcartel.com/

http://abduzeedo.com/tags/wallpaper

Flow Chart

Vito Acconci

It's interesting to think about how a city does not actually belong to it's inhabitants. Even a space that is designated as a public space is under governmental control.  In some cases, the public still needs permits, and access in order to put up art, or create something in that space. People are able to use their designated public spaces, but only within certain limits. The spaces may be public, but there are still limits as to how one can act within these public spaces.

Vector Portrait

Logo Alternation

Portrait Progress

Magnus Blomster

            Magnus Blomster is an independent/freelance graphic designer living in Stockholm, Sweden. Blomster is 31, and has been drawing his entire life. He does illustration when he is not working at his day job. He has always appreciated the style of Art Nouveau and this has a very strong influence on much of his work. Magnus uses exclusively Adobe Illustrator in creating these pieces. Many of his works are adaptations from photographs of his girlfriend. He then sketches the aspects of the image that are not part of the photograph on a separate layer, and combines these on the computer.

            His work has a very strong illustration element. The pieces are so detailed and feel as if they are almost hand drawn in some instances. His work adopts the Art Nouveu style, but makes these pieces more contemporary and relevant to today’s viewer by finalizing his images on the computer. His work has strong 20^th century overtones, but adds dynamism to this style by transforming his images through the use of contemporary digital tools.

Aesthetically, the work is extremely ornate and decorative. I like the more graphic-feel that Blomster’s work seems to have. I’m not usually dawn to most vector art because of the strong computer-generated aesthetic. However, Blomster’s work feels almost hand-drawn. There is so much depth, and intricate detail in so many of his pieces. Some of his earlier black and white pieces remind me of some of the first illustrations that I used to create by using pen and India ink. The work is strongly referential, but also has a personal and captivating undertone which seems to draw the viewer in.

Works Cited

http://magnusblomster.com/ 

Music

Line Art

Portraits

Sonya Rapoport

Sonya Rapoport was born on October 6, 1923 in Boston, Massachusetts. She has studied a variety of topics at a variety of schools. Rapoport first began attending classes at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Later, she studied at the Massachusetts College of Art for two years. She later ended up earning a bachelor’s degree in Biology from Boston University. After this, Rapoport received a B.A. in Labor Economics from New York University, studied figurative art and oil painting at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C., and finally got a master’s degree in art from the University of California, Berkeley. Her art has been shown around the world from Brazil to France. Her earlier work in painting seems to explore the abstracted form of the human figure. In the 1970’s her work shifted and she became more interested in electronic media. She is a multi-media artist, but became known for her influential work in the realm of computer based art.

Her work has a strong element of both natural and social sciences. Rapoport’s background in Biology is very evident throughout many of here pieces. She adds a more personal aspect to science and technology. Her work adopts pieces of modern science and technology and through her work, attempts to make these concepts for relevant, accessible, and personal. There are strong interdisciplinary themes in Rapoport’s work. One of her largest projects entitled Objects On My Dresser shows images of twenty-nine objects from her dresser which were then paired with twenty-nine other images that were chosen based on both psychological and cultural associations drawn by Rapoport. She first evaluated the objects more objectively looking at shape, color, monetary values. The artist then became to make more emotional responses to said objects. The work also explored the ideas of metaphors and word-associations.

Aesthetically, I was very drawn to the organized feel of Sonya Rapoport’s work. In particular, Objects On My Dresser feels as if one is looking at a somewhat complex map based on hidden meanings and secret codes. However, the piece also has a somewhat more personal feel with the clumsily placed labels, and images of varying sizes. Her piece Periodic Table of the Elements again successfully fuses a more scientific, and organized idea with more personal feeling pictures and associations. Many of Rapoport’s pieces have this balanced feeling of objective and subjective which is why I feel so drawn to many of her works. The layout of these pieces feel carefully calculated and premeditated, but there is an overarching emotive feeling that helps to keep the viewer interest and connect him/her to the piece.

Works Cited

http://users.lmi.net/sonyarap/

http://sonyarapartblog.blogspot.com/

http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/sonya-rapoport/objects-on-my-dresser-phase-4-exhibition-in-print-1981

http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/sonya-rapoport/objects-on-my-dresser-phase-4-exhibition-in-print-1981#supersized-artistPaintings-288804

Digital Space

Celebrity Mash-Up

Maggie Taylor

Maggie Taylor is an artist who was born in 1961 in Cleveland, Ohio. However, Taylor is now living in Gainesville, Florida. She lives with her husband, Jerry Uelsmann, who is a photographer known for using darkroom techniques to create somewhat surreal pieces as well. Maggie Taylor also began her art career as a still-life photographer. She has worked with photography for over ten years. However, her current work primarily consists of digital images. Taylor creates these digital pieces by using a flatbed scanner to scan objects onto a computer. She then manipulates the objects to create composite digital images. She works with many different kinds of objects including vintage toys, sea shells, feathers, dolls, and much more. She finds these artifacts everywhere from online auctions and flea markets, to her own backyard.

Taylor’s work has a strong theatrical overtone. The subjects the in photos often feel as if they are often presented in the foreground. The soft-focused and somewhat dreamy atmospheres give off the feeling of a 19^th century storybook. Her digital work has a very soft and fantasy-like feel. Often, I find that digital work has a somewhat cold or hard feeling. However, Taylor’s work emits a somewhat warmth and cozy feel that can at times be somewhat harder to convey in purely digital works. 

The compositions in her pieces feel somewhat clumsy or awkward. However, I feel as if this adds to the charm and endearing aspects of the work. Her mythical and child-like characters are reminiscent of magical childhood stories. Aesthetically, I was drawn to her work because of its very surreal quality. The pieces feel very whimsical, and dream-like. I was also interested in the fact that she is able to create such transformative and magical landscapes with everyday objects. Her work has a very strong painterly overtone. The work has a strong sense of texture that promotes a feeling of depth and dynamic space.

Works Cited

http://maggietaylor.com/home.php

http://www.paciarte.com/paci/en/artists/144-maggie-taylor

http://www.vervegallery.com/?p=artist_biography&a=MT

24 Hours Without Technology

This past weekend I spent 24 hours without technology. The time spent without technology was much less anxiety-filled than I would have guessed. I ended up just running errands, and making sure to keep myself busy. I realized that the most important aspect of my phone is that I use it as a clock. I found that I wasn't as aware of time when I was without my cellphone for the day. The twenty-four hours weren't too difficult because during the weekend I seemed to have much more plans and things to do to occupy my time. However, I think that if I were to have given up technology during a school day it would have been much more difficult not only because I use so much technology to completely my schoolwork, but I also just seem to use my phone and other technology so much more frequently in between doing my work as a kind of break.

Image Edit

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

Collage

Scans

Pixel Art

Charles Csuri

Charles Csuri began to create digital work with a computer in the 1960’s. Around this time Csuri started to create computer animated pieces. He is seen as very influential in the field of computer art and computer animation.  Csuri’s piece Hummingbird was seen as particularly influential in this field: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awvQp1TdBqc. Csuri used drawing as a basis for these types of work. He later used these drawings to subsequently create similar works.

This piece In particular has a very transformative quality. There is a particular part in the piece where the objects are being deconstructed, but the circular motion gives the video a very cyclical and infinite feel. Although the piece is being defragmented and decontructed the video gives off the feeling that the figures are going to morph into something whole, and the viewer will be left with a sense of unity.

Aesthetically, some of the early digitally-oriented art feels antiquated. I think it is sometimes difficult to look at this work in context. At this point, digital art and digital media as come so far in regards to quality that sometimes it can be hard to really truly look at an earlier piece from this field and not see it as somewhat unpolished.