Reflection of the Year

The school year is coming to an end, and with it, so is my first experience of Creative Arts class! The memories and lessons I have from art are so wonderful! Art was a time to be with friends and to laugh and have fun, but it was also a time to express yourself and test your abilities! I really have learned so much from Creative Arts Class, in fact, I have a list of things I never thought I would be able to accomplish, but I did: paint a huge self portrait, draw a somewhat realistic apple, saw metal, SOLDER metal (ah fire!), create things with clay and sew together a book! I am still somewhat in shock of the fact that I sewed a book! Art was sort of a sanctury hidden away from the boring odinary school day! It was so cool to be in a class filled with so many talented, people, and to see how differently everyone's projects turned out, even when they were about the same thing! A few weeks ago, Mrs. Kiick was telling the class about how she stood up in front of the Board of Education to tell them why we needed better art classes. She read us her speech, and firstly, it was an amazing and well thought out speech that would have taken me WEEKS to come up with, and secondly, she was talking about 10 Lessons the Arts Teach, and one of them was "The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution, and that questions can have more than one answer." I really like this quote, because in most cases, I think kids in highschool believe there is only one way to do things, and if you do things differently, you are wrong and considered strange. But art teaches you that its okay and even good to do things differently! If we all solved problems the same way, we would all be the same, and that would be boring! This is probably one of the most important things I've learned all year, in any class, and I can't wait for art and Mrs. Kiick to teach me more next year!

TAYLOR SWIFT

Please get ready for a lesson of awesome, because this post is about my inspiration, Taylor Swif. To me, Taylor isn't just a music artist, she's a way of life. In my house, Taylor Swift is a household name. When you walk into my room, you are bombarded by pictures and posters of Taylor. Taylor Swift is the reason I play guitar, the reason I wear cowboy boots to school, and the reason I spend two hours curling my hair when I go to fancy events. Taylor has helped me so much, which is a lot to say about someone I've never met. When ever I feel angry or depressed, I just listen to Taylor and pour my heart into my hairbrush microphone, pretending I'm singing on stage with her. Taylor taught me its okay to be different and weird, and to not hide who I really am. She taught me to overcome fears, and to stand up for what I believe in. If Taylor Swift had never been in my life, I can't even begin to imagine how different I would be. For these reasons, I chose Taylor as the person to make a place setting for. I feel like I could never properly represent Taylor, someone who's had such a big impact on my life, with my beginner's knowledge of clay. I did all I could though! I made a guitar for my bowl, and painted the rim blue, yellow and red (the colors on her junior jewels shirt) and attempted to paint the rest of the bowl a dark purple, like the color of her perfume Wonderstruck. For the cup, I made the chalice (which I have talked about in a previous post). I painted the outside to be a castle wall-like color, and the inside red and blue: Montague and Capulet colors for Romeo and Juliet. For the plate, I carved Fifteen into the clay, and then painted Speak Now over it (they are both titles of songs by Taylor.) I did this because I'm fifteen, and I think it's a good time to learn how to 'Speak Now'. I am so happy to know that I am now in the possesion of a Taylor Swift place setting, and I am looking forward to eating cookies off of it! (Taylor loves to bake cookies!)

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Ceramics!!

My fancy chalice!

     We started a Ceramics Unit in Creative Arts!  Our latest assignment is to create a place setting out of clay for someone important to us.  A place setting has to include a cup, a plate and a bowl.  The person can be someone we actually know, a celebrity or even a fictional character!  The person I chose is of course, Taylor Swift!
     I started off by making a bowl.  To make a bowl, you take wet clay and drape it over a bowl mold, cut off the extra clay, and dry it with a heat gun.  It seems like there's always something trying to burn me in every unit, because heat guns can supposedly give you third degree burns!
    But the fire of the heat gun is nothing compared to the fire of the kiln!  When we're done with our bowls (or plates or cups) we set them in the back of the room for Mrs. Kiick to fire in the kiln.

Guitar tab

    But we have to make our place settings for the people we are paying tribute to, they can't just be ordinary boring dishes.  So to make my bowl Taylor Swift-y, I patterned the outside to sort of look like guitar tabs, and sculpted a guitar to stick on the inside of the bowl.  Unfortunately, clay doesn't just stick together, you have to slip and score it.  Slipping and scoring is done by slashing up both pieces of clay where they will be stuck together (the back of the guitar and the spot on the bowl where I put the guitar) and then making the clay soft with water.  THEN you can stick two pieces of clay together!

Taylor Swift in Love Story

    I don't have pictures of my bowl, because it is hopefully being fired, but I do have pictures of the next thing I made: a chalice! I made this by making a small bowl and then slipping and scoring a stem and base to it.  This chalice is mostly inspired by the first Taylor Swift song I ever bought: "Love Story", which is about Romeo and Juliet, but with a happy ending!  The stone pattern on the top represents the stone castle she lived in in the music video.  The vine is symbolizing Romeo and Juliet, since I do not feel skilled enough to make an actual balcony with vines growing on it.  The pebbles around the base of the stem are for the lines "you were Romeo and you were throwing pebbles" and the ring is for the line "he knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring and said marry me Juliet".  The chalice itself represents the time period the song is set in!  I just finished my chalice a few days ago, and I am very excited to use it!

The ring and pebbles!

Finished Metal Piece!

This is what we used to saw the metal!
The actual saw blade is in the left corner of the picture.

     After endless days of sawing and filing, my metal piece is finally finished!  I must have broken over 20 saws in the process, so many that my table had a pile of broken saws everyday!
     When my metal was sawed and filed, it was time to solder it! To solder something you had to put pieces of solder between the metal, and then melt it with a torch, which would make the metal stick together.  That was the first time I had ever used a torch! Before I started soldering, Mrs. Kiick looked at me very seriously, and said "Don't drop this."  But I didn't drop it or set anything on fire!

                                           
     After soldering, I rubbed my metal piece with sandpaper to make it shiny and smooth.  It is currently pinned to the wall along with the rest of the class's amazing metal creations!

Metals!

     The second marking period is coming to an end but its just the beginning of our new project in art: metals!  When Mrs. Kiick told everyone we were starting a unit of metals my first thoughts were "Cut through metal? Sometimes I have trouble cutting paper!" And since then, I had been dreading the day when I would have to start cutting my metal, and I took my time on planning out my design with paper.

     When I finally sucked it up and started sawing out my design, I realized it wasn't as hard as it looked! Although the lines I cut aren't very straight, I was VERY surprised that I even had the ability to simply cut out a shape.  It turns out that I like metals a lot more than I thought I would!

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali

            Salvador Dali was delivered into this world on May 11, 1904 in the town of Figueres, Spain, which is only a mere 16 miles from the border of France.  He lived in this town for his whole childhood, and vacationed in the costal village of Cadaques during the summers.  This is where his parents built his first art studio.  Some of his paintings show his love of the area of Spain where he lived.

            After attending the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts, his talents as an artist were recognized in his first one-man show in 1925.  Dali soon became identified as a Surrealist, and was a leader of the Surrealist movement.  The Persistence of Memory is his most famous surrealist painting. 

            Dali had different views than the other Surrealists, and he began to have conflicts with them.  He was forced to leave the Surrealist group in 1940, although he continued to produce surrealist works for international exhibitions.  But by 1940, Dali had begun painting with religious and scientific viewpoints.

The Persistence of Memory
I found this portrait interesting because its very unique and it makes you think.

            When World War II began, Dali and his wife took off for the United States, where they stayed until 1948.  The Museum of Modern Art in New York provided Dali with his first retrospective exhibition in 1941.  Later, in 1942, Dali published an autobiography titled The Secret Life of Salvador Dali.  After this, Dali entered his classical period and produced many paintings including The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, and The Sacrament of the Last Supper.

The Sacrament of the Last Supper
I liked this portrait because I have learned about the Last Supper, and it was interesting to see Dali's interpretation of it. 

            In 1974 (by this time Dali was back in Spain) Dali opened the Teatro Museum in his hometown of Figueres.  Salvador Dali died of heart failure on January 23, 1989 in Figueres.  Dali was an artist of many genres and has famous works from nearly every style of art he worked in.

     The reason I like Salvador Dali is because he  has worked in so many different genres of art, so its easy to find a painting by him that you like.  I especially like his surreal paintings because they are so different and strange, and they make you think.  What I found interesting about Dali is the fact that he came back to the town of his childhood: he was born there, and he died there.  He was famous, and wealthy enough to live anywhere, but he chose to come back to his hometown.

Finished Self Portrait!

     Everyone finished their final self portraits a few weeks ago, and there were huge paintings of faces hanging all over the art room!  My finished portrait turned out in the same way my practice one did: the ink caused the paint to chip off in weird patterns.  It surprised me that this weird thing could happen twice, to the same person! But I'm glad that my portrait is the only one that looks like this, because it sets it apart from the others! 

     Every Creative Art Class voted on each portrait in specific categories.  A few of the categories were most intense, most dynamic, most peaceful, and best composition.  I was very proud that my portrait was voted most haunting, most mesmerizing, and most like my personality! 

Collaging Your Identity

     Collaging: my favorite activity so far in Creative Arts Class!  The whole classroom was covered in supplies- glue, tape, paint, buckets of water, magazines and old photos, basically anything you can think of!  We had been given the assignment of making a collage of our identity.  This was a hard topic for me, I'm only a freshman, how I am I supposed to know my identity?
     Since I couldn't think of what to do, I looked up identity poems online and wrote them down on a paper, along with some lyrics from my favorite songs.  This became my background, after I drowned it in water and paint.  Then, I started gathering things from my house: old baby pictures, toys from my childhood, even some things that I had drawn a few months before (most likely while watching T.V.)
     I made sure to have an item that represented everyone important in my life: my family, my friends, and of course my wonderful golden retriever.  I had a letter from a friend, a toy snake I had found with a different friend, pellets from my brothers air-soft gun, and foam from a jewelry box.  Then I began mashing everything together on the piece of cardboard that was the base of my collage.
   
     To explain the buckets of water mentioned in the first paragraph, I must explain the concept of a packing tape transfer. To make a picture see through (like the one of the baby in the top left corner of my collage) we put tape over the picture, rubbed it down with the back of a pair of scissors, and left the taped picture in a bucket of water.  After waiting for some time, when the pictures were taken out of the water, the paper would rub off the tape, but the image would stay imprinted into the tape, making it transparent.

     My favorite part of my collage is the picture of me as a baby, looking out the window next to the front door of my old house.  The other part of my collage I like is the eye, which is supposed to be Taylor Swift's eye.  Taylor Swift is my favorite music artist, this blog is even named for one of Taylor Swift's songs!
     Making my collage helped me figure out my identity.  What I realized is that the person who I am is still evolving, and that I don't have a true identity yet.  I think my collage shows that I'm still looking for my identity, lots of random things are sort of stuck together, but in a way that works.  That's how I feel like my identity is now: crazy random things all put together to make one person!