abstraction of a master

   Franz Hals, The Laughing Cavalier, 1624 oil on canvas

methods

i. Make use of Renaissance or Baroque painting as the beginning of this next exercise

ii. Color copy your selection to a minimum dimension of 5" x 7"

>> It's always helpful to have a few black and white copies as well

iii. Use a plastic sleeve, tracing paper, a transparent sheet to draw on with a permanent black marker creating a break down of the painting to its formal abstract shapes of the original work, as well as the formal dominant lines found within the painting.

iv. Break down your abstract shapes through common value areas.

v. Scale up your traced sketch to a 1:2 ration, thus for every one inch you will now become 2 inches.  Make use of grid to scale up, first grid is @ 1", second is at 2"

vi. Your scaled up work will illustrate 3 separate versions of the deconstructive analysis of the master work. The triptych will clearly show an evolutionary deconstruction moving from representation towards the abstraction.

make your choices count

You may make use of both lines and shapes

You may make use of ink, gouache, acrylic paint, paper

You may scale up larger than the 1:2 version.

Your scaled up versions can be completed on Bristol, illustration board, watercolor #140 paper and arranged in thoughtful manner of your choosing.

You will need to complete, at minimum, 3 thumbnails per version. Total will be a minimum of  9

student work

Johannes Vermeer ; Girl with a Pearl Earring 1665

Leonardo Da Vinci, Lady with an Ermine, 1489 - 1490

imaget3xtualities

Color Translations + Scores

found images, collage > new visual narratives                             

          

Some people have called Pop artist James Rosenquist (US.b.1933) Haiku master of found images creating enormous visual narratives that are visually and emotionally charged.  

At first glance one wonders how a the front grill of a Ford has anything to do with a plate full of Chef-Boy-Ardee? 

Why did Rosenquist decide to bring these specific forms together out of the trillion objects out there to choose from? 
As viewers we are displaced and thrown way off course.

If we care to look for a while, his paintings reveal themselves slowly to us. Rosenquist’s discordant images of birthday cakes, JFK portraits, fingernails, lipsticks and fire arms come together and actually have quite a bit in common when one considers the formal elements of design. 

• Make use of found images that share the formal element of SHAPE to repeat throughout your collected image banks. Experiment with variety of scale and proportion. Experiment with the orientation of the image.
• Create 4 collages each being 8 x 10  inches in your sketchbooks.  This will be used as the 'sketch' for your next local colour assignment completed in gouache, acrylic or oil.
• Select one of your collages to scale up and create a painting from. 
• Grid off your collage into one inch squares and create a grid of that unit on a piece of 140# watercolor paper or stretched canvas. Float your image equally from the edge of the paper. Draw out unit to unit relationships on paper extremely lightly (you DO NOT want to see pencil marks in your final).
• Grid your 140# paper off into 2" squares allowing for a 2:1 ratio. With a pencil transpose the contour edges onto the watercolor paper
• Begin to create the painting – matching background local colors. Creating large areas of colour, working from GENERAL >> SPECIFIC, and working from lightest areas >> darkest.
  

  

Andy Goldsworthy > RIVERS AND TIDES . 2001

The unique sculptor, Andy Goldsworthy (b. 1956, Cheshire, UK) works with ephemera to create visually spectacular, and structurally stunning Earth works.  

Due to the inherent nature of the materials he explores -- from icicles to poppy petals, and more, Goldsworthy's works often only exist for a very brief period of time.  

Following their creation, they are documented photographically and exist in this form after the materials have broken down and/or transformed into another state.

assignment

Students of Design + Color Theory will put into practice what they have learned in our first six weeks together and will create a self directed assignment that puts found materials to the forefront. 

Using your notes from your sketch books, make a list of the concepts covered in class thus far. 

This work is to be designed by you, complete with thumbnail studies (8 minimum) of the project's evolution in your sketchbook. 

You may include a color palette.

The image size is your decision.

Reflect back to the visual information revealed in the film Waste Land by Vic Muniz, 2010

concepts covered

line

shape

space

figure / ground relationships

visual weight 

visual speed + movement

scale and proportion

gestalt

balance and unity

diagonal vs horizontal / vertical speed

figure / ground reversal

pattern + rhythm

sequential works (narratives with more than one panel)

color schema > primaries, secondaries, tertiaries, complimentary, analogous, vibrating color schemas, simultaneous contrast, transparency, intensity + saturation

simultaneous contrast - saturation + transparency

methods : part one

create a 10" color wheel

divide into 3 > 6 > 12 equal parts

use acrylic gouache color additively

Secure Primaries (add white to your dark ultramarine or cobalt blue)

Mix Secondaries > allow them to be close to equal in intensity and value (yellow will be lightest)

On the exterior create tints of each color 1/2" thick - see second example below. 
Your tints should each be of equal value to one and other. 

 primaries only 3

primaries & secondaries 6

Your color wheel needs to have 12 different mixed colors as above

methods : part two

1. Find a small natural object that you will use for this project – i.e. branch, leaf, root, etc. OR find a flat photographic image with an interesting contour edge OR Find a 3-4 letter word. See student examples below.

2. Create 2” square thumbnails and develop a series of 8 ‘abstractions’ from your visual word info. Your sketches will only take into consideration the contour edge of your letters or image.

3. Your contour drawings must be cropped on 2 or 3 edges of each square. These sketches will separate figure (word) from ground (space).

4.   Decide on the contour edge that most interestingly makes use of figure and ground relationships > thus, activating both spatial areas.  This will become the template for your final work. Choose one.

5.  Create a cardboard stencil or template of your word. It should fit perfectly into a 2” square. 

6. Substrate = Bristol or Hot Press Illustration board, minimum 12 x 14”

7. Image size needs to be 8" x 10".

8. Grid off into 2” squares (you will have 20 squares total).

9. Use your template as a pattern, insert into each individual square and trace > rotate on all directional edges to create patterns within patterns.  

10. PAINT: Choose your complimentary pair.  
Blue / Orange
Yellow / Violet
Green / Red
The pair must be equal in saturation of hue and intensity, allowing for illusionary optical VIBRATIONS to occur. Thus, Yellow / Violet pairing is extremely difficult.

11. When painting design areas, reverse your color methods, allowing for figure in one square = A (blue) and ground = B (orange) then in other squares figure = B and ground = A.

12. Create a variety 5 different intense color saturations by mixing complimentary pairs

13. Try to paint as smoothly as possible - do not water down your paints.  

Make use of your Blue Painter's tape to create smooth edges. The lower student example image size is 16" x 16" 

student work - Complimentary Color Vibrations

student work in progress

student work

student work is 10" x 8" 

student work

color wheels

Cazenovia College freshman

Moses Harris Color Wheel, print + published

Moses Harris Color Wheel - watercolor

Schiffermueller . Color Wheel . 15th century

Phillippe Otto Runge Farbenkugel (ColorWheel) .  1777 - 1810

Christian Faur . Pointlist crayons

Color Mapping + light
vocabulary 

local color 

optical color + optical movement 

color perception

intensity of hue + saturation 

successive contrast

student work

additive mixing  

color + light - optical transparency

simultaneous mixing

monochromatic 

student work

polychromatic > primaries > secondaries > tertiaries 

complimentary colors schema > sit directly across each other on the color wheel  1P + 1S

analogous colors > sit adjacent to one and other on the color wheel

Bezold schema > 

The Bezold effect is an optical illusion, named after a German professor of meteorology, Wilhelm von Bezold (1837–1907), who discovered that a color may appear different depending on its relation to adjacent colors.

triadic color palettes > combine every fourth color on the basic color wheel. This gives you 4 different palette choices of 3 colors each.

Afterimage / Retina Burn
Refers to a color / image continuing to appear in one's vision after the exposure of the original image has finished. Go to > Web examples

NYC Barry McGee installation 

                      
                    

Vic Muniz WASTELAND . 2010

In what ways has Vic Muniz affected change on a regional / national and/or global effort?

What current humanitarian efforts are Muniz, other artists and organizations involved in on a regional / national and/or global effort?

student writing example . SA131. FA 2015 . SEPT

Vik Muniz, an artist and photographer from Brazil, completed a three-year long documentary about the catadores- the people who pick recyclable materials out of the garbage located at Jardim Gramacho, a land fill in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, depicting their struggles and innate sense of pride, dignity, and optimism, even though much of Brazil considers them to be underclass citizens. 

When watching this movie, you see how very real these people are, they have hopes, they have fears, they’re scared or downtrodden (barely scraping by on their paychecks), they do things for each other (such as twenty people donating blood for one injured comrade), every single aspect of their personalities are every day. They’re not unique from other people, they’re just as curious, just as loving, just as sad. And I think that was the most important part of the whole endeavor, not the selling of the portraits, not the fame, but the recognition of the pickers, and anybody who saw their portraits, that they were people, real people with hearts, and with brains.

Waste Land, the name of Vik Muniz’s documentary, was, essentially a humanitarian effort on his part. He didn’t go into the landfill with the hope of making himself money (he donated all the proceedings to the Association of Recycling Pickers of Jardim Gramacho), but rather he wanted to prove how human the pickers were, as he realized when he compared the inhuman pictures of the catadores taken from the window of a helicopter with the very personable photos from his meet and greet. 

This transition of proving to the catadores they were worth everything anybody else was, made the documentary for me. This aspect was what made me pay attention. Learning how one woman went from embarrassed to be a picker, to being proud, saying how it was a dignified job, an honest job. 

This idea of taking people that are often overlooked, or looked down upon, and transforming them into human beings (even though they already were and many people just can’t recognize this) has been undertaken by more than just Vik Muniz.

In Skid Row, LA, a photographer by the name of John Hwang has beenphotographing the homeless, for no gain- he just posts the pictures and the people’s stories onto his Facebook account- he doesn’t get any fame or recognition nor does heget any compensation for his time, money, and supplies he gives to the homeless when he talks with them. It’s all on him, and his six days a week job, and expensive student loans.

Hwang says that he photographs the homeless in Skid Row because the conversations are the realest you can get. That they talk about important things, and completely managed to change his outlook on his own life. That’s what happened to Vic Muniz too. He changed the catadores’ lives, but they changed his too. He realized how much personality was crammed into those downtrodden people, and it touched his heart. Hwang saw how much the homeless had to say, and captured both the stories and the faces.

Vic Muniz, through selling the portraits of the pickers, gave back to the Association of Recycling Pickers of Jardim Gramacho all the profits. This changed how much the association could do for the catadores, a library with books was built, classes were offered, and when the Jardim Gramacho landfill closed, the association managed to get a payout of $7500.00 for each picker, and a place in the decisions of the new recycling facilities in Brazil. 

Hwang, through his photographs, managed to create a sort of “butterfly effect” where one photo spurs a hundred people into action. They would go meet with the photo subjects, buy them dinner, help them with transportation, anything they wanted. And this could then allow a job, a family, and then more lives to be being changed, and it created a web of people helping each other…..all because of a photograph and a paragraph of a man, or woman’s, story.

I almost can’t put into words what these photographs did for the people who were the subjects. It completely changed their lives. Gave them hope, gave them spirit, renewed vigor, it catapulted them into an entirely unknown, unseen, or forgotten world. This is truly the epitome of anything humanitarian, and anything worthwhile. Taking people who are worth it, showing them, and then showing everybody else. 

That changes things. That could change a whole hell of a lot of things.

Works Cited

 "This Brazilian Artist Makes the World A Much Better Place One Piece At A 

​Time." Xpatnation. N.p., 05 Mar. 2015. Web. 26 Sept. 2015.

20, 2012 June. "Cyntoia’s Story Finalist for Casey Medal in Journalism for Families and 

​Children." PBS. PBS, 20 June 2012. Web. 26 Sept. 2015.

student writing example . SA131. FA 2015 . SEPT

                                           One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure
         “I’d rather want everything and have nothing than have everything and want nothing.” Artist Vik Muniz, in the 2010 documentary Waste Land directed by Lucy Walker, meant that if you have nothing and want everything, you have something to strive for and that’s what makes life more meaningful and worthwhile; otherwise, life has no purpose if you have everything. Born in Brazil, Muniz came from nothing and dreamed of one day having everything. As an artist and photographer, Muniz wanted to one day earn a living where he could help the poor areas of Brazil. During his three years creating works of art out of garbage at the Jardim Gramacho landfill, one of the world’s largest landfills on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Muniz is able to use his art as a means of making social, economic, and cultural changes for the garbage pickers, their Brazilian nation, and the global art community.
         Muniz took pride in creating art that he hoped would change the world and minds of the people living in it. Using everyday items, like sugar, chocolate syrup, peanut butter, dirt, assorted garbage, he set out to achieve this dream. He took portraits of local people and then transformed them into works of art through the use of everyday materials. After having success with his “Sugar Children” series where he recreated portraits of Caribbean children using sugar on black background paper, Muniz wanted to make a positive change in the lives of the garbage pickers, who were being ostracized because they were in a lower class and worked at the Gramacho landfill.
         Vik Muniz wanted to prove to Brazil, as well as the world, that the landfill had a human side. While meeting with the pickers at the landfill, Muniz listened to their stories about what led them to collect garbage. Muniz was inspired by their stories and wanted to portray each garbage picker, known as a catadore, as accurately as possible. “They are no different than any other person in how they relate to the idea of art.” He wanted to show Brazil that even though these people sort through trash as a living, some because they simply have nowhere else to go, the catadores are still people. They still deserve respect and are not lower on the society totem pole solely because of their occupation. Muniz is credited with making changes in how catadores are viewed in society.

For his Gramacho project, he took portraits of six of the garbage pickers and then he employed the individual pickers he had photographed to help fill in the shadows of the portraits with recyclable materials taken from the landfill. Instead of just making works of art, he made friends. At the end, each catadore was allowed to see their final image from high above on scaffolding. At this higher viewpoint, they got to see themselves differently than they had ever seen themselves before and it gave them a new sense of respect for themselves and the strength to make the changes they wanted in their life.
         The pickers no longer saw the trash as simply trash, they saw it as a way to create art. To the catadores, “it’s not garbage, it’s money.” The garbage was really “recyclable material” and businesses paid good money for recyclable material. The money earned from their catadore job allowed the women to earn a living and kept them from being a prostitute, which they viewed as an even lower class of person than a catadore. Muniz was able to create works of art, some which sold for over $50,000 at auction and put that money back into ACAMJG, the Association of Garbage Pickers of Jardim Gramacho, to help them purchase a truck and get the rights and protection that they deserved. Before, the pickers felt that they had to fight for their rights using confrontation. According to Tião, one of the head catadore, Muniz’s project changed all of this and provided them with the partnerships that they needed.

          The “Pictures of Garbage” project focused on six main pickers. Tião was the leader of the ACAMJG society and mimicked the famous portrait “The Death of Marat” of a man in a tub. Irma was a cook who had worked there for over thirty years and was proud of what she did. The pickers were her family and she cared about them. Suelem, a single mother with a three year old and a two year old, was only 18 and had been a picker since she was seven. Magna was a woman whose husband had lost his job and she decided to work as a picker. Embarrassed, she did not tell anyone about her picker job. After the movie, Magna told everyone that she was a picker and she became proud of her job. Zumbi and Isis were also changed by their experiences with Muniz. Almost all of Muniz’s subjects had spent their lives surrounded by trash. They have collected it, sorted through it and dealt with the smell. Almost all the catadores were forced by poverty to take up the job as a picker, but they have all developed a strong family bond.
         Tião, as the leader of ACAMJG, continues to work to make improvements in the recycled materials industry and for the lives of the catadores. With the financial help of Muniz’s project, Tião has been able to improve the role ACAMJG plays in the recycling program. By getting local mayors and the governor to work together and help find ways to improve the recycling industry and create new standards, he is bringing awareness to an important economic and social issue. According to Tião, Brazil is looking at their recycle contracts and finding ways to recycle efficiently when they host the World Cup in 2014.
         With local and global artists using trash as a medium in their artwork, they are helping to spread the word about the importance of the famous “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” motto. Artists today are taking an active role in educating millions about the importance of reducing the amount of waste that is produced in the world, in order to reduce the effect that the garbage has on the economy, our cultures, and on society.

         The 2010 award-winning documentary Waste Land brings the issues related to landfills and the importance of recycling into focus and is able to reach a wide audience. As an artist, Muniz is doing his part to improve the lives of the garbage pickers and improve the recycling program in his native country of Brazil. By artists helping to spread the awareness of the importance of reducing our consumption, finding new uses for our trash, and recycling all the materials that we can, we can reduce the impact garbage has on our world. Artists, like Muniz, have the ability to reach millions with their message about recycling. Important organizations, like ACAMJG, and political figures have helped invoke important changes, also. By everyone doing their part, we can reduce our waste and improve the lives of our people now and in the future.