Culminating part 2

1. My priorities when I create art are to create something that I’m happy with, regardless of how awful it may look to someone else. My art is mine and it exists for my own satisfaction and expression.
2. I work well with charcoal. I like using pastels as well. I primarily do landscapes.
3. I want my audience to see my art and interpret it however they choose. I do landscapes because I like doing landscapes, I think they look nice, and my audience can interpret it as anything they want. Maybe someone will identify with a location they are familiar with, or maybe it will inspire someone to go somewhere similar or completely different to the landscape in the work.

My final work was done in charcoal and coloured pencil. I wanted to experiment with coloured pencil to see if I could give it the washed-out, hazy look of the charcoal. Unfortunately, the colour is very hard to see in the photo (it looks better in real life, I promise!). I started by drawing a landscape in charcoal and then shading and detailing it a bit with the charcoal, then I took coloured pencil and coloured and further detailed the ground and sky very lightly. The result was this muted, dreamlike look that I really liked, and at first glance it's hard to tell that it's anything but a black charcoal drawing. I used a special type of charcoal pencil that interacts differently with light than regular charcoal. Depending on how dark you shade it, it can look very light and washed-out (the detailing on the terrain), grayish and reflective like pencil (the edges of the terrain), or dark and pronounced like regular charcoal (the darker area in the bottom-left corner). I really like how this one turned out though I wish it looked better when photographed.  

Photography Series

The theme of my series is "changing seasons". Have a looksee:

"House"

"Alley"

"Street"

Now, from the order the pictures are in, you would assume they're in chronological order. You would be right, but maybe not in the order you think. See, the first picture taken is the street at the bottom. The last picture chronologically is the house at the top. See, what happened was that as spring was coming, the snow was starting to melt by the afternoon (when the picture of the street was taken.) However at night and in the mornings there would be a fresh layer of snow (the picture of the alley was taken in the morning). Lastly, we had a cold snap for a while and got a ton of snow around the middle of April (when the picture of the house was taken). I used a cooler filter (filter is actually an understatement, more on that below) on the last photo and a warmer filter on the first to hint at the fact that the last photo was taken closer to winter. It just so happens that those filters also complement the photos really well, with the warm colours of the house and vegetation lending themselves well to the warm filter, and the cooler colours of the sky, clouds, and road lending themselves well to the cool filter. The alley photo has no filter and was brightened to emphasize the lack of a filter, cementing the notion that it belongs in the middle of the two filtered images. 

Over the course of this project I took quite a few pictures (somewhere in the realm of 30, more if you count shots I was unhappy with and deleted) and worked on improving my angles and use of natural lines, editing, drawing attention to objects, portraying scale, and adjusting lighting and color. The iOS camera app has a rather large suite of tools for adjusting grain, lighting, colour, aspect ratio, and more. In addition, the three pictures have been heavily cropped to accentuate the natural lines and remove less aesthetically pleasing things like vehicles, cut-off objects or objects which draw the eye away from the subject, and just to draw attention to the subject in general. 

The process started with the 30 or so photos I took, which were cut down to 10 I thought really stood out. I edited those 10 and then brought the number down to 6 that I thought were really outstanding or interesting. From there I looked over and further edited all 6, then chose three based on how well they looked, what kind of theme they shared, and how I could build a series around them. Once these 3 were selected they were again edited further and arranged in a fashion which benefited the series and theme, I like all three photos but I'd say out of the three the best is "Street" and the worst is "Alley".   

Appropriation in Art

The world of art is a strange one, If you have an idea, chances are, you're not the first. But artists have been "borrowing" ideas for a very long time. Think about this: the classical art and architecture of the Renaissance was inspired by the art and architecture of the Romans, which in turn was largely lifted from the Greeks, who may have drawn some inspiration from the Egyptians, who totally ripped off the original ancient Egyptians, who may have lifted some of their ideas from the Sumerians. That's a chain of idea theft going all the way back to 5000 BCE if not much earlier. But let's go back more. Let's say a hunter-gatherer smears some red berry juice on a leaf and thinks it looks spectacular, and decides to decorate his cave/hut/whatever with it. Now if you put something colorful on something else maybe a bit less colorful, are you stealing? Probably not, I mean, you at least did something unique with it, right? Oh, you painted a landscape? So have a gazillion other people. You painted something abstract? Not really that unique. A portrait? HAH!

So is it stealing? No, not really. "Borrowing" probably the better term. If you straight-up traced over The Last Supper without any intent of using it for another type of artistic expression, that would probably be stealing. But emulating a style, using a philosophy, contributing to a genre? That's not stealing.

Now, let's talk about the artist that is literally selling prints of Instagram posts for hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is probably stealing. He's not really making an expression here, there's no real creativity involved, he's just taking social media posts, making prints, and selling them for money. Let's first start with the fact that some of these posts are already art, be it professional photography or pictures of art. Second, while re-purposing many of these photos falls under Fair Use, they might still be the property of Instagram. If his idea of artistic expression is to show people how loopholes in Fair Use policy can be exploited, well I suppose that's better than nothing, but it's outrageous for him to be selling these easily reproduced images of other people's work, unedited, as prints, for obscene amounts of money. What are you paying for at that point? Someone's name on the back of a public domain image? I could go to a print shop and get hundreds if not thousands of copies made for the price of one of his "originals".