Week of 2/29

Hi All,
This week you are to look up and remember Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans.  For him, the Campbell's Soup Can was cheap, mundane, ubiquitous and easily recognizable, and therefore a stand-in for any consumer product in the home.
You are to choose an object that is a consumer product that does the same thing for our time.  Use the adjectives above as criteria for you object.  Then you are to paint you object en masse in a grid arrangement like he did, illustrating that your object is mass produced.  Your image should fill your paper and be at least 4 grids deep and 3 grids wide.  Have fun and good luck!

Week of 2/22

Hi All,
New Subject.  Pop Art and Logos.  Your job this week that we started in class is to design three logos that might be combinations of other logos.  See if you can choose to combine logo designs that make an interesting combo platter.  Or not.
What makes a good logo you ask?  Simplicity.  Keep your lines/edges clean.  Every logo is self contained.  It is not cropped.  It must be at home on the side of a bus, a notebook, a helmet.  It has a limited color scheme.  No more than three colors so as to be easily reproducible.
Because it is such a simple (as in the opposite of complicated) design, whatever is left after editing out all the unnecessary stuff is that much more important.  Spend enough time deciding exactly where each curve and point will be.  Designers can spend hours agonizing over the placement and proportion of a single shape.  Be willing to make a logo the best way, not merely a pretty good way.

Week of 2/15

Hi Everyone,
This week you will be not so much drawing or painting as making.  As we discussed in class, you are to make a surrealistic object that undermines or subverts itself.  Daniel's cactus chair is a great example, or the soccer cleats with the studs inside the shoe instead of outside, or Meret Oppenheim's furry tea service (http://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/meret-oppenheim-object-paris-1936).

Whatever you choose, try to make a thing in an interesting or poetic way, instead of the easiest way.  If you find that you can't actually make your idea (but it is possible to make), make a painting of it to show us your idea.  Here's an example: The Dufala Bros. "Hair Burger."

  Good luck!

Week of 2/8

Hi All,
As you know, you are to design and execute a surrealist painting in your sketchbooks.  Remember the Exquisite Corpse exercise.  Put together disparate objects or parts of objects.  Use your ideas that you came up with during class, or if you've brainstormed better ones since, feel free to use them.  Look at the links posted previous, and use google (!) to find more artists that could be called surrealists.  Borrow ideas from other artists--it's NOT cheating!

Week of 2/1

Hi All,
Apologies for not posting soon, but as you'll remember from out class discussion, you are to design a Surrealist painting.  The Surrealists loved the juxtaposition of randomness and unrelated objects interacting in a way that becomes a bit unsettling.  Remember that Mad Libs is children's version of the Exquisite Corpse game, which in many ways is Surrealism in a nutshell.  Here are some links to major Surrealist Artists.  On each page, scroll down for links to lots of images:

Salvador Dali: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/dali_salvador.html
Rene Magritte: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/magritte_rene.html
Ives Tanguy: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/tanguy_yves.html
Max Ernst: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/ernst_max.html
Giogio De Chirico: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/de_chirico_giorgio.html