Winter Arts

Downside Up film at the Brooks on December 6 at 2pm

Sunday, December 6 | 2 pm
Downside Up
Can art make an impact on an individual, a community, a city? With the majority of its downtown deserted, many people had given up on North Adams, Massachusetts, until MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) located there and breathed life back into the community. The Brooks Museum collaborates with the Urban Art Commission to present this moving documentary about how art can bring the tentative, dangerous notion of hope to a city widely viewed as hopeless.

Stay afterwards for a discussion on how art makes a difference in Memphis with representatives from the Urban Art and Center City Commissions.

Tickets: Free for members; $5 for non-members.

2009 Crabs

I have finished painting crabs for this year:

caritas

Image Swirl

http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com

Here is a great new tool for digging through source images for your next art piece! So far by using it I came across images of coconut crabs, which grow to be up to 30lbs and climb trees. Yikes. I'm not painting those!

WiiSpray

seaweed crab

I look forward to discussing this in class tomorrow

Recently my Foundations classes watched and discussed Persepolis, the 2007 animated film based on Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novels of the same name. We compared the film to the graphic novel, in which Satrapi translates the important events of her life into a series of narrative images. Many of us concluded that the drawings in Persepolis often communicate ideas about what was going on in Iran at the time more effectively than the translated idioms.

Now we're doing a project called Found in Translation.

In this project you will consider an important event in your life and translate it into a work of art. You are encouraged to use some of the techniques we have practiced in this class to compose your project. To brainstorm, you are encouraged to use mind-mapping (like we used in the Fused Interest Project). To research, try analyzing works of art, music, or literature that are related to your idea (like we did in the Place a Jar Project). To execute your project with superior craftsmanship, use the standards we established in the perfection project.

Part of the restraint in the project will be to share your idea without narrating during the critique.

I hope this TED lecture by Chimamanda Adichie adds another layer of interest to the discussion.

Caritas

Like Milan Kundera wrote, "How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!"

With all of that said, I hope you'll make it out to Caritas Village in the upcoming weeks to see the First Annual Peace Exhibition. The reception is Friday, December 4 and I'll have a couple of little watercolors on the wall.