Studio Saturday

Here we are at Saturday again. My classes this week were pretty light as far as work goes, but here is what I created for them.

Firstly, in sculpture we are working on making two part molds. So far, I just have one half of it done. I'm making a mold of a plastic lemon; nothing exciting.

In painting this week we worked on making mixed media collages, concentrating on color and shape. The first one I made in class looking out one of the windows. I used a little paint, marker and oil sticks to add to the color already on the collaged paper.

This second one was done at home. I glued torn up sheet music to a large sheet of paper and painted over it. We were to use something 3D on the collage as well and that is represented by the waxed thread I used as strings. Marker was used as well to define. I think I managed to wreck it though by drawing over slightly wet paint.

Our final cyanotype project was due on Tuesday. We had our critique and then our instructor surprised us by telling us that our pieces were going on display in the gallery. We had until Thursday to tweek them, taking into account the comments made during critique.

My piece is dealing with my family and growing up. Before my sister was born, when I was still an only child, my parents would read Goldilocks and the Three Bears to me, substituting Katie Bear for Baby Bear. When she was born, this stopped. That is part of the story here. The other part is how I seperated myself from my family due to long term mental abuse. You can read a little more about that here, where I talked about it. If you have more questions though, feel free to ask. (Like I stated in the first post, any suggestions that I have done the wrong thing are unwelcome. Abuse is unacceptable, period, and considering it continued into my adult years made it horrendous for me.) I found photos that would help portray that idea that my story can be parallel to the fairy tale and traced various illustrations to get the top layer. I used a Japanese book binding technique to put it together. This piece is very interactive and hard to photograph. For obvious reasons, it is hard to portray mental abuse and the photo "showing" that is of my crying as I'm receiving a gift. My parents seemed to think that by buying me things or giving me money that it would erase what they did to me. At one point, I was even bribed to talk to my father again. A pretty hefty $10,000 was on offer... Tempting but not worth it to me.

It was kind of funny to me because I had been thinking how this was a great way to work through feelings but nothing I would want to put on display. Well, it is now hanging up at school and I'm trying to be ok with it. If she had told us we would be displaying the projects from this assignment, I would have made something else, honestly.

That's all that I had to do last week. My only assignment right now is to paint a Valentine's Day themed painting, but it has to not be the expected or use any sort of cliche. I have an idea of what I'm going to do and just need to do it. Good thing it isn't due until Tuesday.

I spent the day doing some sewing, which I will show you tomorrow. Hope your weekend is going well!