Art and stuff

 Been a while since I've posted anything here. Keep promising myself I'll do more. And less Farmville.

Anyway, when we last left our fearless heroine, me, I was in the midst of Life Drawing. For the first time. I did a couple self portraits I'm sort of proud of, started doing silver point, struggled with charcoal. Signed up for Painting I and Jewelry (yep, I'm surprised, too) for Summer A. Painting I got canceled. Signed up for Life Drawing for Summer B. Only A and B term classes, at least in Art this summer, perhaps school wide. There's smartness behind it, sort of. Apparently more students are likely to sign up for summer classes if they're the half-term ones. That way they get some summer vacation.

Life Drawing during the summer was fun. I wasn't the oldest one in class. There were about six of us who were "non-traditional" students.

I got a little better at charcoal. Something Dan said, whilst showing us a bunch of Georges de la Tour's and showing us how the light would drop off and coupling that with a remark about "your eye doesn't have a fixed aperture" made it click. I was able to get the tones better but still have trouble getting the whites really white.

Signed up for Painting I and Mixed Media (with the dreaded Matthew Newell), as well as Jewelry (yep, I'm surprised, too) for Fall.

And here we are.

Painting I made quota and I go to class and struggle. I wish for the wonderfulness which is charcoal.

Mixed Media...and the dreaded Matthew Newell. I'm...well...I don't know. I started out really excited by Mixed Media. And I'm less so now. Matthew was going on and on, and he has before, about how the old masters, well, we shouldn't try to make anything like them because their art is "dead art." It's not contemporary, it's not part of our culture and we're not part of that conversation. When we talked about my project, he showed me pictures of sparkly arabians puking rainbows. "Horses have become pets."

I should have heard what he was saying.

More later. Probably much later