first Days of New York

Yesterday I went to the Guggenheim Museum. It was almost overwhelming, it was like being in a visual/sensory russian dolls. first of all to be in the city of New York with all of its stimulus, and then to be in the actual Guggenheim, my first time in a Frank Lloyd Wright designed building, and then to be looking at amazing old paintings by the likes of Vuillard and Kandinsky, and then at top of that to be taking in all of the brush strokes of the paintings.
It was difficult after a while to continue to take everything in, to try, during my 4-5 hours there, to keep noticing the building from its many levels and nooks and crannies and changes in light, as well as to take in all of the art.

The main attraction was Richard Prince. I got what he was doing with his work, his commentaries on consumerism, the american dream, its pulls and repulsion, but I didn't find it to be that layered of work, it got a bit tiresome after a while.

It was pretty intense, while going to the restroom, which were these intimate triangular rooms, to think, this space was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and I felt very close to his artwork in those moments!

My friends Nikki and Anjali going for breakfast at a diner before they both headed back to Providence then to England.



Today I will spend the day in Brooklyn, tomorrow, to the Met, which takes up something like four blocks. wtf!

pulled a rabbit out of the hat...pressure is off!

I'm here in New York with my two friends from Glasgow, I just arrived today at around 8pm. I was going to leave sooner, but found out the studios would be shutting down before I returned to Providence, so I had to go to my painting studio and take all of my canvases off their stretchers and then roll the canvases (about 8 of them) around a tube. Then I was out of there!

Actually, the day before, on Friday we had our final day of crits in painting (2 day crits - intense!). So the night before that on Thursday, I stayed all night in the studio, from the time our class ended at 6:30pm, until the time our class started the next day at 9am. I wasnt' the only one, there were about 4 of us all-nighters. And I finished up one painting, and started and finished two other paintings, plus added some colour bits to a large drawing! I had told my teacher I was only going to have one painting finished, but I felt really sick about that, I felt like I would probably get skewered in crit, so I thought I may as well attempt something. It was a good thing I had a concept in mind before I started painting. That's the hardest part usually, coming up with the idea.

So, the funny thing was that the paintings turned out well, and everybody liked them very much - Go figure! People were saying, when it was over, "keep painting what you're painting!" so it was really encouraging. The concensus was that my paintings showed a deadpan humour. It's weird because I don't ever try for that, for the paintings to be houmourous. I'll post the paintings as soon as I can figure out how to do it. Actually, I only took photos of two of the paintings, the others are rolled up, so it might be a while before they'll be posted. It was a raucous crit, everyone was exhausted and giddy, and it was actually a fun time. So last night I got home at 7:30 pm and slept until 10 am and I feel quite back to normal, it hasn't really sunk in that risd is over!!! Wow, it was quite the slog! Now that it's over, it's a bit like giving birth, I've already begun to forget the parts about the semester in which I was in excruciating hell (refer to previous post)!

My friends are leaving tomorrow, and then I will have a whole week in New York to do as I please, with no assignments to worry about, but it's funny, because as I was on the bus this afternoon, I kept thinking about what I'm going to paint next, and the whole process is starting over in my mind. New York!!!!

Still life with packaging (one of 4 paintings from final crit):

Is it over yet? or, procrastination central

This is an illustration done by a student in the illustration dept, Morgan Blair, I think it's really good.

I finished my children's book class critique today. We were critiqued by 4 people in the publishing biz, they work at Houghton-Mifflin and Candlewick Press and others. It was positive, for sure, and the feedback was stupendously helpful and bang-on. I need to work on my colours, they said, also to resolve the ending a bit. Will do, I say! I wish that I could take a watercolour painting class, as I really don't know what I'm doing! Oh well. I'll try to work on it over the holidays. One young woman from our class, Kate Pfeiffer, got chosen today by one of the publishers to get her book, "Crying is for Babies", published. That is sooo great! Her book is a young reader chapter book, it has about 4 chapters. Her book genuinely cracks me up, she has a perfect ear for how kids talk/think. She is graduating next semester. She kind of struggled throughout the semester in working in the picture book format, she was always kind of forcing a sweet style, but the easy-reader format is so perfect for her. Wow.

I didn't get any sleep last night, working on putting my book dummy together. Now that I'm done that project I'm completely avoiding going to my painting studio. I told my teacher I wasn't going to finish all four paintings required for the final project, because I couldn't see it possible to do 3.5 paintings in one week, plus a kids book dummy, plus two finished illustrations for that class.

I am feeling completely BAD about this. I have never sloughed off an assignment before. My teacher said I wouldn't fail, but it would bring my mark down, and I'm really afraid people are going to totally nail me for it in my crit. I do not want to go to studio, but I have to. Please God, let the next two days (a two-day long crit, no less) go by painlessly then I can scurry away from here with my tail between my legs. O, the pressure! & shame! I wish I could take some drug to make it all go by in a blur of painlessness. Is this too dramatic?

it snowed/ femSex is over

It snowed lightly yesterday. The sidewalks were long and narrow skating rinks.
Also, we had a femSex wrap-up party (the workshop I took at Brown). It was sooo much fun, and full of good vibrations, I only wanted to stay for a short time because I was so tired, but ended up being one of the last to leave, it made me energized with all of the lovely folks both from my unit and the two other classes. Here are some of the inspiring, beautiful and femsexy women (and one man!) from my class:


Watch out in Vancouver, I vowed to bring snapping back home with me - that is, snapping my fingers when I agree with what someone's saying.

ceramics show

A piece by current risd & former ECI faculty Linda Sormin

Wow, wow wow. I was so inspired by the ceramics show they had here. It was a juried show from all levels of ceramics folks at risd - undergrad, grad and faculty. I loooove ceramics, I can't hide it! Why am I not a ceramics major? I love it!



What really got me excited were these "painted" ceramics pieces. I should have written down the artist's name, it's so bad of me not to know it. I believe she is in one of the other junior painting classes, like me. I've been having ideas to add images such as painted images to ceramics, but wasn't sure how it would look, I think she did it very beautifully.

The following pieces reminded me of Grayson Perry. I love the pop imagery mixed with the olde-worldy medium of ceramics.


These ones were delicate and underwatery/with a fabric like tecture and covered most of a wall:

good old hockey game

Last night I went to the Boston Garden to watch the Montreal Canadiens vs. the Bruins. I never go to see a hockey game in Vancouver because it's really expensive, and I'm just not that into it, but it is funny how being away from Canada makes me miss it, that I went to the hockey game to be closer to Canada. And when I got into the arena, and I saw the white rounded rectangle of ice, it was so cozy and soothing. And then when they sang the Canadian national anthem, I sang along, quietly so no Boston fans could hear me, but I heard a lot of other people singing too. I think it's because one quarter of the fans were Montreal fans (I know, Montreal fans are so anoying at Canucks games, but I liked them in Boston because they were from home - even though I 've only ever been to Montreal for one weekend).

The Habs won, and it didn't matter, I was going for both teams and for a good game. Which it was, ending so quickly.

other programs at risd

Sand Dune house by Katharina

risd has a lot of programs here that we don't have at ECI. The ones I can think of are:

architecture
glass blowing (glass)
jewelry and metalsmithing
apparel design
textiles
interior architecture
illustration

I went with a couple of exchange students who are in architecture, Annabel from New Zealand and Katharina from Germany, and went to check out their studios:


It was one huge room, as far as the eye could see, full of drafting tables.

I also went to check out textiles one day, they had rows of looms, and rooms full of colourful threads/yarns that looked like it would be very fun to create designs with. I saw this work in a classroom:


I wrangled myself an illustration studio, so now I have one on the top floor of the Illustration studies building, and one painting studio. It is interesting to see some of the paintings in the illustration department. They are helping me to understand painting as opposed to illustration. Illustration painting is a lot about straight up representation & rendering, whereas painting, well, I don't know what the hell it's about! (but that's another story!)Here is my illustration studio with someone's illustration painting seen in the foreground:


There was a talk by a former risd illustration student, David Weisner, last week. He won the most recent Caldecott Medal for children's picture book illustration for his book "Flotsam". He has won a total of 3 Caldecott medals. Our class and another class got to talk with him in a classroom, a pretty intimate setting. He talked a lot about how he struggles struggles struggles! to come up with story ideas, and even after he has received his advance payment from the publishing company, and it is done and spent, he said he still has no idea what to write about! Such pressure! It takes about one year to illustrate a book, once he has his story idea figured out. And he said that he is now in the position where he doesn't have deadlines, he takes as long as he needs to illustrate a book, because of his success. It was refreshing to hear that with all his success, he still struggles to come up with ideas. On the other hand, this was also daunting to hear: What, with all your success, it's still a grind of pressures?? Here is an image from his new book from his slideshow, He creates his images in many many many thin layers of watercolour on watercolour paper. it sounds like a very time consuming process: