Life in a Garden

        It's always the same reaction when people walk into my garden. They squeal and gasp and say "It's so beautiful, look at all the flowers!" Yes, look at all the flowers. Not one of them, but all. No one flower is ever appreciated over another, no one is more special. It's a tough life, being a flower. It is in our nature to have big egos, but how are we supposed to think we're the fairest flower to have lived if we're never noticed? In my flower bed, I share with flowers of all kinds. We're one of those gardens, the intermixed ones. Now I'm not one of those stuck up flowers that would wilt if they ever had to share soil with flowers of a different type (like the roses, they think they're all that), but it makes it hard to be noticed. All people see are colors and shapes when they look at my flower bed. So I've been trying to set myself apart, break away, be noticed. Among the flower bed, there are different reactions to my behavior. Some cheer me on, some scold me, ad some are completely indifferent. That just shows all the different types of flowers in my bed, so many personalities! Well anyway, I've tried being taller, but there's a lot of competition in the bed considering   we have snapdragons and foxgloves. So then I tried being brighter, which I thought would be a cinch considering I am a red orange color already. But those annoying marigolds stole my thunder. Well then I tried to be bigger, but I couldn't beat those ever flowering mums who had too many petals to count. So then I tried to have softer petals than everyone else, but apparently daisies are unbeatable. So now I'm here, out of ideas and still just as invisible as I was when I started this whole endeavor. I look around the garden, searching for more inspiration that would set me apart. Just then, two girls walked over to my flower bed. One of them looked right at me and sighed. She pointed me out to here friend and said "isn't that beautiful, I just love poppies." Her friend nodded and they moved on throughout the garden. I stood still, letting the wind run through my petals as I thought about what just happened. I got noticed! Even though I hadn't done anything different, I got noticed! And then I realized, I never needed to do anything different. Just like the snapdragons, the marigolds, the mums, and the daisies, I didn't need to try to be different, I already was! I was just as important to this beautiful flower bed as any other flower, and I contributed something special. I felt a huge sense of relief at this realization. Now I could just be myself, and know that it is very special to be me. 

Blind Contour

                                                                                           We recently started drawing blind contours in art. This is cool and different because we haven't done anything like this yet. It was also really funny to see what you drew, and some of the pictures didn't even look human. When we drew a blind contour that we liked, we used it and wrote "I am" statements on it. This really made me thing about what I am, and it was really cool to write these things about myself alongside an abstract drawing of myself. I felt like it showed a completely different part of me and it went a lot deeper than I had originally expected. It took me a long time to decide what to write, and while some of them are silly, (like I am 24601) most of them are really true and not things I parade about myself. it will be really cool to put in my art book at the end of the year and I'm excited to showcase that part of me as well. This project wasn't about how well you draw, it was about how you wrote, and how you presented yourself. Doing something like that was a different experience and I'm really happy we did it.

"Empty Bowls Dinner" Bowl making

                                              

              My school holds a fundraiser called the Empty Bowls Dinner. Once every other year. People donate soup and food and a lot of people from the town come. The special part is, they sell the bowls that you eat out of and you take it home when you're done, and the bowls are made by the high school students. I have made bowls before in 8th grade art, but I got to again and I realized how much I loved it. Not only making the bowls out of clay and deciding the size and design, but also glazing it. I loved experimenting and mixing colors and glazes in interesting ways to see what would happen. The cool thing is, you don't know what it will look like until after it is fired. I almost never used the same color twice while glazing the bowls, I layered and did a different inside and a different outside. I chose colors that I thought would mix nicely together and would be interesting. I almost always had a color scheme to my bowl but had no idea how it would turn out. I lost track of how many I made and what they looked like, and I really did like the freedom of the project. I put my heart into it and had a lot of fun. It was always exciting when a bowl came out of the kilm that ended up being really interesting, and I'm not sure if one of mine were, but at least I know I tried.

"Seasons in Light" Lantern Making

                           
                  For one of the projects that we worked on in class, we made paper cut lanterns. The theme was seasons, and it could be anything we wanted about that season. I chose winter because winter is my favorite season and I based it around New York city during Christmastime. My goal was to show the skyline and also show the tree in Rockefeller Center. 
                  When we first started this project I was excited, but also a little scared about doing the cuts with an exacto knife. It was intimidating, especially after we saw so man amazing cut paper designs. I practiced a lot before I started because it really does take some getting used to. It was a completely different kind of art that I had never approached. It wasn't easy, but I did realize when i was working on the project that I hadn't given myself enough credit. I got the hang of it and it was better than I expected. I also wanted to make my lantern a little different then just what I had planned. I ended up making it 3 sided, with a skyline on two and the tree on one. I decided I wanted to cut out spots for Christmas lights on the tree and fill them in with individually cut colored tissue paper. Since this wasn't something conventional, it took a little bit of experimenting and a lot of tedious work. After two class periods of cutting and gluing, I had finished the final touch on my lantern that set it apart. I greatly enjoyed the experience and, although there were certainly better lanterns than mine, I was happy with the final product.

Artist Research Post

                 
       I picked Georgia O'Keefe for my artist to research. Georgia O'Keefe was born on November 15, 1887 in Wisconsin. In the early 1900s she attended the Art Institute of Chicago. She married Alfred Stieglitz in 1924. He was a photographer and her works were first featured at his gallery. Their partnership lasted until his death in 1946. O'Keefe moved to Santa Fe after her husband's death and was inspired by the desert landscapes and scenes. She continued to paint until her death on March 6, 1986, but most of her well known works were from earlier in her life.
        Georgia O'Keefe's works greatly interest me, especially her flower paintings, and they always have. I have known her art since I was young and that is the main reason I chose her. I also like the fact that she is a woman, and there are very few famous women artists on the list. I think she set a sort of trend with her popularity and work and I imagine she inspired many aspiring women artists. Her work is also very iconic and original and she inspired a certain style of art. My three favorite paintings of hers are shown below.
Apple Blossoms Flowers of Life Red poppy
These paintings interest me because the colors and the usage of the colors are really beautiful. I had a hard time picking my three favorites, but it came down to these because the angles and beauty of the flowers alone caught my eye. Also the vividness and realness of the flowers in these particular paintings are what I really love about Georgia O'Keefe's work, and I felt that they were good representations of what I like aboutn her work.

Marking Period One-Reflection

            Overall, for the first marking period, I feel that I have improved more than I thought I ever could. Before this, I never considered myself to be an artist, but now that I am more familiar with artistic ways to express yourself, I believe that everyone can be an artist. I have learned more about materials, how they work, and how to manipulate them to make something that I could have never imagined or made purposely. I learned about happy accidents and I figured out that art is all about taking risks. You may fail greatly if you take a huge risk, but you will never greatly succeed if you don't take a huge risk, either.

The Next President Collage- Civil Rights

          In contrast to how I felt about my shoe drawing assignment, I was much less nervous about the nest president collage. I was firm in where I stood towards the candidates, and I had my whole project mapped out. Then I realized that my ideas might be outdated towards civil rights, and I also realized I was not as firm on my view as I thought I was. This project made me think much more than I expected, but honestly I appreciate what it did for me. I made a lot of mistakes (or things that I thought were mistakes) during this project, but there wasn't as much pressure as a drawing. If you messed up, you could cover it up easily, something I did quite a bit of. But in the end, I was happy with my final product and I think it is interesting to view and gets my ideas and opinions across artistically. Like I said in my last post, It isn't the best in the class, but it is unique to me and that makes it more impressive.