The Final Lantern Image - Project 1

The final image looks good. And yes, that is a fez. I do own one and wear it more often than I'd like to admit.

One more for the week. Self Portrait #8

Another self portrait

Aside from the hand being a bit awkward, I'm relatively happy with the feel of the drawing.

" Lantern" Artist Statement : 1

This lantern is meant to represent three fears that are specific to me. I chose imagery and symbols That best represented their meaning to me and utilized opposing icons to represent the fears and their defeat.

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Self Portrait -Thinking of simple moments

Random Self Portrait - Jan 20th

a rat in the midst!

A special thanks to my first follower! A long time. friend who really is the better friend of the two of us. He puts up with my persistent flakiness and keeps coming back for more. When I say he's a rat I mean it with the utmost of respect and honor. Thank you Mr. Volkman!

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lantern updates

Here is some recent images of the lantern progress

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Lantern work

Working on a play on the "body armor" concept by using piece of protective equipment (a lantern) .

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A reflective moment.

Today the rain and conversation has made for a warm and reflective mood. I created a simple drawing using an art tool on my phone to share a little glimpse.

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Sprited Self

This is a self portrait of a simpler kind. Here I rendered myself as a pixelated video game sprite. It represents an interest, an artistic influence, and a hobby.

Project 1 : Fears

This is a depiction of me. An altered photograph used to represent some key fears.

I will start with an introduction to myself.

I was raised in New York and moved to WA when I was 21. I'm an art student with aspirations to teach. I work as a content analyst for an international company.

Onto fears, a few of which I shared in my self portrait above. Some of these are obviously fears, others are points of life that create anxiety or worrying when they arise. These feelings are just fears manifesting themselves in new forms.

1. Time (represented by the clock): I fear mortality but have no desire for immortality. My mind sinks into this stasis of time left unchanging and when glimpses of time's passage become too hard to ignore I get nervous or fearful.
2. Ties (represented by the scissors): I'm a hoarder of emotions. Though externally I'm often minimalistic and simple, internally I'm wrought with strong feelings that I struggle to know how best to show. I fear cutting these ties so I hoard the emotions until they feel stifling with only words to express them. Even simpler forms of affection are hard for me to show. My words and art are sometimes by best outlet.
3. Sense of self (as represented by the face) : I worry about losing myself in the intensity of the world. At moments life can seem overbearing or overwhelming.

Other fears...not represented above:

4.  Losing those close to me.
5. Failing to succeed in life. Though I feel little stress about small failures, there is a strong internal pressure driving me to be better on a broader scale.
6. Failing at love...not finding it or being alone, those don't worry me. But to find love and to make such damaging mistakes that I lose it, that is what scares me.
7. Not understanding people. Some thing I'm intuitive about people, perhaps I am, but I'd guess it's more of a desperate desire to understand other people so as to feel less isolated from them. It's hard to understand other people, when you add in boundaries and defenses and social expectations...people become obscured and hard to know.
8. As a counter to #7 getting too close to people, for the opposite reason. I reserve much of myself out of fear that at close examination, proof might become evident that I'm different. A sense of community on a localized level isn't as important to me as a sense of normalcy and similarity in the bigger picture.
9. Self - Esteem. I doubt I'm alone in struggling with physical self confidence. It's a battle between a logical argument that I could be doing more to meet the general median of attractiveness that the world has momentarily deemed necessary versus the internal desire to just accept myself and be content with it. If anyone knows the trick to this, I'd be much indebted if you'd share it.
10. Not being good. Good in the altruistic sense. All the classic boyhood ideas of knights in shining armor and heros of legend apply here. Like good versus evil.

Tomorrow this will be presented. I will be nervous, likely turn red, and will be uncomfortable. And I'll be that this discomfort is one of the learning steps to the class. Will I like it...No. Will I grow from it. Probably.

January 4th

My first self portrait in what sounds like the first of many during my Reconstructing Self class...a humbling and exploratory look at self through art. In the first 15 minutes we were asked to draw a portrait of ourselves. This portrait is a simply rendered head shot.

Pros: Capture key features and overall form in a good time

Cons: Lacks bold lines or creativity

Below are some more interesting pieces of work that we did to address concepts using simple marks.

Reconstruction

A class I'm taking requires what looks like will make for a great sketch/project blog. So here goes.