im pissed

I spent two hours today converting image files to have a portfolio to show but instead, they all converted to 72 dpi--I dont' know how I missed that. They look awful. Anyways, I hate my computer it really is giving me a hard time, and for some reason I feel like posting that. Its good, because I thought "Ah, I'll just post that other aspect of my future BFA, my Zshiki book project" because I really am writing something. I don't have the thing I wrote becuase my computer sucked, but at least I wrote it, and I should be happy about that and I am making a post to say I should be happy about it. Because no one even knows about this blog so I don't really have to post anything interesting in here. Because I can't. My computer freezes when I open painter. I finished my sketchbook. This was one of the good things that happened today. Everything else kinda fell out from under. But that would involve talking about my personal life and I have promised myself to make this blog entirely art related--and I write way too much as it is even talking about that. Anyways, I'm going on a Hiatus until I get a new computer or something. and I'm pissed.

Update 1 of 2. The second part might come in like 4 months at this rate.

I wish I hadn't been uploading my blog for a good reason, like getting into a really amazing relationship and with my large-nosed foreign boyfreind painting from the top of the eiffel tower and eating some really good gyoza. Or getting doused in chemical waste on my way home from school and turning into a pool of mercury and saving the planet one nuclear plant at a time. Unfortunately I've got no good reason other than my bad computer, which has made me afraid of computers. I avoid them all the time now. I even handwrite sometimes, and if you knew my handwriting...you'd know the gravity of that. I wish I was uploading with things that were more current, but right when I went to finally upload my picture card to a computer in the library, the sun went down and I didn't feel like battling it out with the halogen lights. So this will be the entry where I work out with myself what I want in life. Artistically.


So don't get me wrong, I love realism. In fact, coming into illustration it was all I did and its sort of awful what came out my weird illustration 1 stupor. see this and this:

(a cup of food coloring and small muffins. It still sits in the kitchen so I can look at it every day and ask myself why, oh why couldn't I have just moved the plate up .2 inches?!)



(a laundry detergent and his best freind. Krystle wanted it to hang above the washer and dryer of our old house but I ingeniously forgot to mention anything about it until we moved here and the washer and dryer are in open domain)

I hit my realism peak as well as my boring peak. So dull. Anyways, I kept doing that, and it was about the christmas card that I realized...



...that I wanted to quit illustration because it was getting too boring--that and I can't paint fire to save myself. We'll come back to that. Anyways, I was doing 350 R Figure drawing like a good girl, so I decided to switch it up with head painting to just focus on color. Unfortunately, all of the paintings I had in my camera were my bad head paintings! So here are the few that didn't completely suck. Even though they still need a lot of improvement. They're all about 12 inches in oil. Some a bit bigger. The big ones turned out better.


I discovered pthalo blue and it was a big deal. I got a big swipe across my eye and the model kept trying to tell me and I didn't get it. Later I found out it doesn't come out very easily and I felt like I was in 6th grade. Because I had eye shadow like that in 6th grade. Boys didn't talk to me.





This is an unfortunate piece that my roomates like that sits on our wall, made with pastels and acrylics its about 40 inches long and fits perfectly in its IKEA frame. Because it was made on top of the cardboard that backs the actual frame. The tricky bit is finding all six letters. Yeah, its not tricky and its not unfortunate for how it came out, its what I accidentally did with it. So: talent awards. I thought talent awards were judged by the same people who judge the student contest every year--which is basically the entire studio department who don't really like any illustration to win anything. They put us off on the side when they need extra space and if your an animator your basically screwed because I've never seen any animation in there. So I put this in my talent award portfolio. As well as other things I have dubbed my "studio portfolio" and by the time I found out it was the illustration faculty judging the talent awards I could have gone back and changed the work I sent, but at that point I was too swamped with work. So, regrettably, this unfortunate peice was looked at by the illustration faculty who probably said

BH: Thats Rachel? She doesn't do that in class assigments...
BB: As a matter of fact...there isn't a single class assignment except for these head paintings and these figure drawings from last summer.
BA: Give her money anyway!

Anyways, I don't know how much I got or when I get it or anything. A little bird told me I got some talent money, the mail has not confirmed such bird.

Anywho...I was inspired a couple years ago--before I even really considered illustration--when I was in Music Civ when I was cramming for a test because I was a freshman and never studied before the night before. My eyes rested on the work of a man named Kandinksy. He was a german expressionist. Yes, a German Expressionist opened my eyes to art and--this is the weird part--made me really want to be an...illustrator. I'm still figuring that out. Hypothetically I should be angsting to throw paint all over my body and do interpretive dance on a box spring.

He made this painting which has been on my desktop for almost four straight years for a few reasons



1.) Its guash (or maybe even tempora. I forget. Both are about the same.) Huh? The colors are amazing becuase of how they're placed next to eachother--guash/tempora generally makes really awful color but in this you can't tell. The play with gray and lavender and that shocking fuschia is...shocking.
2.) Considerable tangents all over the place that don't bother me at all because the composition is so solid
3.) Amazing texture. Just amazing! I love every single part of this painting.

I also have another artist named Paul Klee, who I discovered when I went to the art section of the library and pulled his book off of the shelf about a year ago. I remembered him for his gradation studies, and I realized quickly that the man had style ADD and made a lot of things I am not fond of and a few that I really, really do love. There were some clever things with a burlap sack that I admire, but for what I'm thinking of doing I want to look at "Twittering machine" and "tightrope walker." I mean, check it out.





Yousee, this oil-transfer line stuff is amazing. Amazing and Hilarious. Kandinsky's guash stuff is creepy and magnificent and so subtle. So I've been wondering how to combine the two, as well as this realism that I still like but secretly am really sick of, to make something that I can be proud of--as opposed to most of my work where I work it and work it and work it and decide, ultimately, that I am a failed artist and I would throw my paint brushes and pallate knifes through the canvas and hand it in anyways, if only modern art hadn't come along and cliched all of my angst. Maybe 30 years ago I would have been a modernist.

I've experimented a bit and I will show you, once the daylight comes out and I no longer fear the halogen light bulbs that sit among us, yellowing all of my night-time pictures. Its not really where I want yet, but I think its something that I...can play around with this summer. This summer I want to come back to school as an artist with more of an identity. Because right now I look like everyone else, and I think that is what upsets me so much when I finish a painting.