Bumbershoots and Ladders

Another darkroom class photo.
I don't know why, but things look fine whenever I use the computer that's hooked up to the scanner, but the moment I look at them again on my home computer they always look really faded and gray. It's kind of infuriating.



( Flickr link )

This was part of the first set I ever processed in the darkroom, which is how that splotch came to be. I think it was kind of a happy accident- it seems to fit with the general feeling. Weird how a splotch can serve as a souvenir.

( Flickr Link )

First print!
Our assignment was to just draw anything, really, just to get the hang of etching on our zinc plates. I'm pretty enamored with Angela Carter's short stories and thought I'd do a take on The Bloody Chamber. My professor pretty much thought it was flat-out castle fairytale ridiculous, and my attempts to save my first day of class reputation by pointing out that the hands were supposed to represent dead wives were... not really helpful.






Of course the next instruction was to scrape off two thirds of the surface we'd just etched and revise it... The waves were nearly impossible to scrape. The waves at the bottom were preposterous! It's so much easier to remove straight, parallel lines because the tool doesn't catch as much in the process. This is just a newsprint process scan for the heck of it.






And then it was midnight and I was too exhausted from all of the scraping to come up with any revelations about the plate's true direction, so I just added more hands.





That last one is the print I consider the closest to "final" for this set. Later on I was learning how to aquatint and needed a plate to experiment on so that if I messed things up I'd not have to worry about scraping yet another plate and starting over before my next deadline, so I tried things out on my older plate. This is just the newsprint, but I thought I'd archive for comparison's sake it just in case someday I got access to a studio and took it in an entirely different direction. You never know.





( Flickr source )

Pommes et Oranges: 1889
Bend in Road : 1900-06
Boat and the Bathers, The
Chateau Noir : 1902-05
Chocquet Seated : 1877
Gardanne : 1885 - 86


http://www.expo-cezanne.com/1_2.cfm?StartRow=31&Title=&Theme=*&Year=*&Technic=*&keyword=

In response to
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/07/29/nude.art.ap/index.html

... which contains a link to an article about a museum in Vienna that has opened its doors (for the summer) to scantily clad and nude visitors wanting to see their (air conditioned) exibition of "The Naked Truth," early 1900s erotic art. ( (Here.) )

I looked up some of the artists mentioned, because I like pervy scandals and am also learning figure drawing in art class...
Paintings/sketches I like or want to copy into my sketchbook to show my art teacher:

Gustav Klimt:
The Kiss 1907 - 08 (Of course.)
Stoclet Frieze : Expectation (I liked her posture, the way the shapes in her dress affect the overall visual effect, and I loved the background.)
Schlob Kammer on the Attersee IV (Lovely house with a nice feeling to it.
After the Rain
Apple Tree I
Beethoven Frieze :'Freude schöner Götterfunken' (detail) The
Chruch in Cassone (I have a blue fetish.)
Chruch in Unterach on the Attersee
Emilie Flöge at the age of seventeen
Farmergarden with Sunflower (This style vaguely reminds me of the way one of my friends used to draw.)
Garden Path with Chicken (Because the chicken looks self-righteous, and that makes me grin.)
Goldfish
Houses in Unterach on the Attersee
Lady with Cape (It has feeling to it.)
Lady with Fan
Malcesine on Lake Garda (!!!)
Music I
Poppy Field
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I ('nother nifty-shapes-dress.)
Portrait of Baroness Elisabeth Bacchofen-Ech (I like her dress, too.)
Portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein
Portrait of Serena Lederer (Really sort of translucent and ghostly...)
Portrait of the pianist and piano teacher Joseph Pembauer
Schlob Kammer on the Attersee II, Schlob Kammer on the Attersee IV
Seated Nude Woman, Study (I like the way her hair wraps around her shoulders, and her shy little feet.)
Stoclet Frieze : Fullfilment (Reminiscent of The Kiss.)
Stocletfrieze : Life Tree
Study for "Lewdness" from the Beethoven Frieze (What a sly expression! Hooray for handsome androgeny!)
Water Serpents I (A little Very scary, but it the same time very cool. Posture reminds me of The Three Ages of Women.)

http://www.expo-klimt.com/1_3.cfm?ID=629826183

The proper school to learn art is not life but art
- Oscar Wilde,

Art is born in attention. Its midwife is detail.
--Julia Cameron

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.
--Margot Fonteyn (1919-____) English dancer

Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.
--Katherine Anne Porter (1894-1980) US novelist, short-story writer

I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within.
--Louise Nevelson US sculptor, painter

John Lithgow in Third Rock From the Sun: Quotes: Art
Out of suffering comes creativity. You cannot spell painting without pain.

Pablo Picasso: Quotes: Art
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso: Quotes: Art
The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.

Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
--Jean Cocteau French poet, novelist, director

The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.
--T. S. Eliot

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