update

I know that I have been lacking in the whole keeping up with my blog thing, but that doesnt mean I haven't been working on stuff. I officially have two projects done, only I think that I might have to redo one of the sets, because the handles I pulled look really bad. It's hard for me to come up with new ideas for my sets, especially since I am ridiculously terrible at sketching. Even if I have good ideas in my head I can't get them down on paper without them looking like a total altered version of what's going on in my head. I keep hoping that eventually I'll get better at it.

And also I want to give a birthday shout out to Amy and Lindsay! Amy I have know you for 3 years and I still can't get over how much patience you have for all of your students, it's amazing. You are a wonderful teacher and I don't know if I would have been able to learn to or be passionate about throwing if I had had a different teacher. You are like a second mom to most of your students and we all love you.

Concentration

At first I thought that I might do tea sets of a tea pot and 4 cups, but when our deadlines for our first four projects got set I realized that I do not have enough time for that. Now I think that I am going to go with sets of wheel thrown cups that appeal to not only the eye, but the hand of the owner, which just means to me that the own will not only love their cup/mug, but they will also love holding it. So I am going to experiment or find the right sizes of a cup or mug and pull handles that are the exact comfort size. The only way that I will vary these cups is in texture or shape, I haven't decided yet. The reason that I want to do cups for my concentration is because I love holding a cup of hot chocolate or tea or coffee when it is cold outside. I think the challenging part about this is that I rarely pull handles for my cups because I have a hard time with making them the right shape, so this will deffinatley help me to improve my handle pulling skills.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tIhwITwhSg

So instead of a picture I went with a link to a a short clip from Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin in honor of the holidays coming up this weekend and because we just had our pumpkin carving contest the other day. I just have a few things I would like to say about the contest. First of all I think that we had a pretty good turn out and everyone's pumpkins turned out awesome. It is so cool to think about what was going on inside a person's head when coming up with their idea and how is reflects different personalities. This is also a theme that I have begun to notice in people's pieces. Everyone has pretty much developed their own style and I can tell by looking at something on the greenware cart that "oh so and so did this and this person did that". Our task for this weekend is to come up with some potential concentrations for out portfolios and I haven't a clue what my style is yeat or what I would like to work on for the rest of the year. If any of you have seen any of my work and have some suggesstions feel free to throw them out there.

Update

I am still currently working on my doughnuts for my family project and it is going very smoothly. All of the doughnuts are thrown and most are trimmed. I just have to figure out an interesting way to hang them and peice them together. Something that I am more concerned about is gathering new items for the guest artist. I have a few cigar boxes I might use, but I just can't seem to find other random objects that make me want to use them in this project. I haven't ever done an art peice like this before and it's a little out of my comfort zone. It really interests me how the items I chose will fit together into some sort of whole.

Family Art Update.

So for my family inpired at project I finally decided to move away from the focus of one family member, to creating something that has a little piece of each of my family members. I am throwing a series of small doughnuts of similar size that I am going to wire together and make into a wall relect. I have a few ideas on how and what it will look like, but for right now I am just concerned with my doughnuts. I have thrown around 10 doughnuts in the past years and none of them live to be fired. I can not understand why this technique is so hard for me to master, but it is something that I am very interested in and I want to keep trying.

Inspiration for Family art piece.

My family inspired art piece is going to related to my little brother. This picture is a few years old, but he is the same. I would put pictures of my pieces that I am actually working on up, but I don't have a camera so I have to start borrowing my sister's. Anyway, I'm not exactly sure what my project is going to be yet but I can explain why I chose my brother for inspiration. He is one of the most intellegent young people I have ever met. He just seems to know things and he retains so much information in his head it is incredible. Even though he is only 12 he seems to really understand what is going on in the world around him and tries to help out in anyway he can. For example on friday night my mom always takes him out to dinner with her, but this past friday he said "This time I'm paying mom, you always buy stuff for me and I know you can't really afford it." And then he busted out a 50 dollar bill that my grandparents sent him for his birthday and bought my mom dinner. So in my piece I am going to create something that portrays the vast knowledge and compasion of such a small person. I'm not sure how to do that yet, but I will update with any ideas that come to my mind.

Shocking Art Piece

Our first assignment of doing a shocking piece of art is a hard one. There are so many things to think about when trying to come up with and idea. The one problem that comes to my mind is not pushing it too far. Alot of ideas can cross the line of being too controversial or too disturbing. I want to send a message with my piece, not repulse people. The theme that I want to incorporate is rape/abuse. I have a few ideas on how I could do this, I just need some feedback on if it is going too far or not. My main idea was just to get a barbie or two and dismember them with a Ken doll standing over them. This would be placed on a piece of wood that would have scratch marks on it and there would be blood stains. To me this idea seems way in your face like THIS IS RAPE. I want there to be some kind of guessing in it, I don't want it to be so literal. Then I was talking to a classmate and she said I could just use the bottom half of a doll and stick pins in it and have their be blood, but that seems to push the boundaries too far. I want there to be a compromise, but I'm having a hard time finding one. Any feedback or suggestions would be extremely helpful.

This is a sculpture by Lorenzo Bernini portraying the rape of Poserpina. I really like this piece because you can tell that the women is trying to repel him to no avail. It is obvious this is an image of rape, but its easy to look at. It doesn't go overboard.