Project #4: my art pieces

Over the past week or two I have been coming up with ideas and creating my four pieces of art. I am going to go through each piece and describe them separately, according to the four categories we had to create art for.

The first category I looked at was the color and rhythm of your favorite song. Instead of focusing on one specific song, I looked at the general type of music I enjoy the most and what elements are within those songs. The music I enjoy the most is slower, has meaning behind it, and can be complex and seen in various ways. Some of my favorite musical artists are The Fray, Snow Patrol, Goo Goo Dolls, and One Republic. I wanted to somehow visually show complexity and detail within a piece of art. I decided to try my hand at origami and made four lilies and a box to place them in. I then made a few music notes and attached them to pipe cleaners and had them coming out of the flowers. The colors I used go together, purples and beige and then the box is green, kind of like the base of the flowers. I think that the lilies in the box represent complexity and tranquility and the piece is also aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

The next category I took on was the rhythm of your neighborhood. For this one I decided to do a basic perspective drawing of a street and buildings to represent a neighborhood. I first wanted everything to be in black and white, but then I decided to put other very bright colors into it. I used a large piece of cardboard and covered it with wrinkled newspaper. I put the picture in the middle of this and made neon paint splatters over the entire thing. There are other various elements such as black spots, neon spots, and neon birds. I wanted to use basic elements and pieces of things that you can find around the house. These elements are apart of a neighborhood; the newspaper, telling about local and national events, cardboard, paper, pencil, paint. These are all basic things and depending on what your history is when you think of a neighborhood, I believe that different elements of the piece will stand out to you. It may seem chaotic, load, or messy. Others may first see the street and buildings and its three dimensional effect. Although it may look messy and disorganized, it is actually very organized and that is the point I wanted to bring out about a neighborhood. Depending on who in that neighborhood is describing it, it may seem bad or it may seem good. It depends if you are from around there or if you are visiting. If you live there, you will notice the details and it may be comforting, it may be chaotic. The whole piece is actually organized, symmetrical and on purpose. It took longer to do the splatter marks and other paint marks than I originally though. Paint splatter isn't as easy as it looks. I decided to use the newspaper as my background because I remember a piece that we looked at in class a while ago and had mentioned the artist using everyday materials and using cardboard and newspaper.

The third category I looked at was a diagram of your daily interactions. I had a few ideas for this one, but I decided on doing a collage of various words and phrases found in magazines. When deciding which words and phrases to use, I look for ones that suited my life and outlooks, as well as common interactions people have with one another on a regular basis. I made sure to include negative and positive, but if you look closely, you can see that they are organized by topics. I put certain phrases next to others to convey a certain meaning of them to the viewer. The context in which they were found in the magazine are not the context I used them for and that is an important element to bring out. Instead of cutting out letters and making my own words, I wanted to find already constructed phrases, but then take them out of the context they were made for and shape them into interactions among people. Connections I have made between them are going to be different than what other people see, but given the topic of the collage, viewers are able to relate them to their interactions and give it their own meaning. I decided to use this colorful poster board so that it almost looks like a poster or advertisement.

The last category was the portrait of your favorite technology. This one took me a little longer to decide what I was going to do. I wanted all of my four pieces to be different types of art, so far I had origami, collage from magazines, and drawing with some paint. I like to think of myself as a very creative person and I enjoy various projects and creating my own things, but I am not the best at making art. I decided that I wanted to try and make a painting to convey my favorite technology. I wanted to keep it very basic and have something that would relate well to the category. For this I decided to make somewhat of a contrasting piece by combing two things that are unrelated and make a connection between them. I painted the background to look like a sunset or at least colors of one and on top of it put pictures of my favorite technology. There are people that will say they don't like technology, they don't like cell phones, it disrupts or is an invasion of their peace and quiet. So the sunset represents that piece and quiet and the technology on top of it can be thought of as disrupting because its obstructing some view of the background.