First Day of Second Semester!!!!!

        Well, I'm sad to say that I am more than happy to be back in the swing of things here at KU. I am actually really excited about this semester. BDS 102 and the Color Theory class. A little nervous, but I just need to have fun with them and make the time useful to the best of my abilities.

       Today in class we were introduced to our first project of the semester. It is about photographically depicting time and space. I have a couple ideas of what I might like to do. I was thinking of either photographing Mass Street, some river or something in nature, a car driving away, or basketball when the players run out or are shooting, or something to do with cheerleading. I want to try to pick something that is meaningful to me so that I will be able to get a full handle on the project.



Also today in class we watched a few videos, the first one was Masters of Illusion:

        In the video they talked about vanishing points and linear perspective, which was a lot of what I had learned last semester in my drawing class and my art history class. The fact that a vanishing point can change a one  dimensional picture to a two-demensional figure still amazes me. And as I remember it is not that easy to do, especially with multiple vanishing points. That is one of the things I struggled most with last semester in drawing. I think it is very interesting that artists today still use the Renaissance styles and techniques. Special effects have become so advanced that it is sometimes hard to tell what is real and what isn't. These techniques are changing how we see the world everyday. Because I took art history and drawing last semester I did not learn anything new from this video from what I had already known. I feel that with Giotto's work on how he was very close to achieving linear perspective, even thought it was an approximate attempt to recede images into space, it happened to make the image look realistic to the viewers' eye. With this new project this is what we will be trying to do. We will continue to distort the space, but still make it look realistic and interesting instead of cluttered.

Response to David Hockney on What the Camera Can't Do:

         I think David Hockney has really interesting and emotional paintings. Especially when he was painting his mother. I feel like the "Summer Rain" painting is very lonely and dramatic. It depicts sadness, and even his paintings of his mother which depict her in time and space throughout her sickness until her passing. His work is very touching. I did happen to think that it was interesting that a "used to be" photographer was saying that he couldn't capture what the real eye could see. I was surprised to hear him say that he did not want to look through a camera. I feel like all spaces are photographical, even if it cannot all be captured within one photograph, but that is why we take multiple pictures. Photographing is a way of immediate documentation and it is very easy to get details and to get an accurate representation of the space. Even though painting is using a brush to document a space, it makes it different because painting is the artist's interpretation of the space, not what the actual human eye might see in full detail.

Response to The Photographer's Eye:

 "The Invention of Photography provided a radically new picture-making process-- a process based on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put it, were taken." Like I was saying in my response to David Hockney, I agree with this quote. It really explains the difference between painting and photographing. That is what this article was about, about tell the reader not only the difference between photography and painting, but also why photography is so much better. I also happened to like the quote, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." Photography has always interested me. It seems to be more difficult than it looks to be able to get the right shot, angle, or lighting. That's why in this certain BDS project I will be working more and more on those aspects of photography, and to be able to capture time and space of my object. In our projects we have to complete the act of choosing and eliminating, which will  force concentration on the picture's edge. It will be "exhibiting an infinite number of croppings -- of compositions -- as the frame moves onwards." In most words I agree so much with this article, I believe that photography documents so much of what our memories cannot hold onto. It represents the past and future and brings them to present times. With painting there is only so much that a brush can do. And as a painter, they interpret the objects in their own way, so it is not a realistic depiction. I feel photography will only become more helpful and innovative as time goes on.