Copy-cat

One of my middle schools just had a school festival and during that time a bunch of student art work was on display.

There was a whole section of tree art done by 1st graders (7th grade USA) and this one picture particularly stood out for me with it’s vivid contrast of Pink and Green.

This picture is poor quality and taken with my phone but you can get an idea of what it looked like.

Fast forward to a water color painting party with my friends. I decided to copy that painting colors and image because I really admired it. So here’s my version of the tree.

Haven’t tried painting with watercolors in years! Fun experiment.

I’m not sure if I can track down the student who made the original painting since I don’t teach them and the name is really blurred, but if I can I want to tell them their art inspired me.

I bet in a million years they would have never thought the random foreign teacher at their school would like their art so much she would copy it.

This blog is dusty

Wow.

Apparently it’s been over a year since I’ve last blogged. Where did the time go? I think I must have been abducted my aliens….

I’ve been busy, sure, but one year without posting is a little ridiculous….

Sorry everyone!

Really going to attempt to brush up on my blogging and art projects because it’s been so long I think I forgot how to do art. Noooooo!

I just love this.

Day 62: Sarah Kay meets Sarah Kay

While I find it annoying that there are so many Sarahs running around in the world, I find it amusing that there is another Sarah Kay in the USA. (hey, it rhymes!)

People like to call me Sarah K to distinguish me from all the other Sarahs they know. Somehow this has evolved to my friends writing my name as Sarah Kay which is more fashionable than just the “K”.

So when Megan Mc sent this TED Talk to me, I was prepared for awesomeness since the speaker is named Sarah Kay after all.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0snNB1yS3IE&list=FL0vshux8uaBgRe-f3h4HyKg&index=2

I was blown away. I think Sarah Kay is a great poet (the speaker, not me; I am terrible at writing poetry) and I love how she makes every word count. She has a powerful and compelling voice, and I only hope that one day I could be 1/10 as engaging as her when I give presentations and talk to people.

I love the idea of having a poet “perform” the poem in order to convey the deeper meaning than a reader could get just by simply reading the words of a poem.

Watching this TED Talk reminded of something my playwriting teacher at UMW, Mark Scharf, told me in class once: “There’s nothing like seeing a performance live with the actors right in front of you.”**

This is exactly how I feel about spoken poetry because with the rate of how fast or slow the performer talks, the intonation they use, not to mention the hand gestures they make, affects how the audience reacts to a word, a line, or even the whole poem in itself.

Sarah Kay mentioned that one of her activities she often asks her students to do is to list 10 things that they know to be true. They aren’t supposed to think too hard about it. They should just write the first things that pop in their head.

Here is what I ended up with:

1) I am American.


2) I am a girl.


3) I like photography and singing.

I just love this.
4) I like being a foreigner in Korea sometimes. Makes me feel special, like a unicorn.


5) I hate being a foreigner in Korea sometimes. I don’t like the attention.

6) I want to be a writer, but I don’t know if I am trying hard enough.


7) The beach makes me so happy I could cry.

I love this movie
8 ) People who like winter are crazy!!


9) My tongue trips and stumbles over words much like my feet over anything on the ground.


10) I think hugs are the best thing in the world.

Although too much of this kind of hugging might kill you

I find it interesting that all of what I wrote started with “I” or at least had to deal with me, myself and I. I suppose that I find it a lot easier to find truth in what I believe about myself, than is for me to make statements about other people or the world.

I have asked 10 people now (and counting) to tell me 3 statements they believe to be true because not only is it a great conversation starter, but I am generally curious what other people would list.

The most recent person I asked was my friend Gigi. Her list of 3 things she knows is true:
1) The sky is blue.
2) The road is hard
3) The store has a glass window.

Her statements had nothing to do with herself, but rather the external world around her. As for the other people I have talked with, their statements tend to range from all about themselves [the narcissistic lot, haha] to the people who only talk about environmental things.

All in all, spoken poetry is a topic I want to explore more as a listener and maybe a poet myself.  I am happy my re-introduction to this kind of performance art came from such a talented person as Sarah Kay.

**I am paraphrasing Scharf’s words since he told my class this in 2008 so my memory of his exact words is a little on the fuzzy side.

Day 49: Art with Salt

Day 49’s assignment was: “Be a minimalist today. Work with only white materials. Try working white on white for a real challenge.”

I was inspired by this post on 9gag and by this video to play around with salt today:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVDRCYs9L10&feature=player_embedded

This is the first time I’ve actually attempted to make anything with salt and for a background I used a black t-shirt (mistake: the material make it difficult to move the salt around without bouncing it all over the place!)

I decided to start of simple and then possibly work my way up to a masterpiece as the Joker salt image. One day in the future….

 

 

 

 

 

Day 34: Paper Clip Man

Day 34’s assignment: “Work with wire. Thin-gauge wire can easily be bent by hand, so no special tools are required. You don’t even have to buy wire if you have some paper clips handy.” 

What I learned today was that bending paperclips is a little bit harder than I remembered/expected it to be. I had no idea what I was making today and so turned to google to solve my problems. Saw this really cute paperclip dragonfly on flickr and wondered if I could make it.

 

from Flickr by Annadriel

Definitely not. I think I would need a bigger paperclip for this, although the paper clip I was using was a lot bigger than average.

I ended up shaping the paperclip into a form of a man; totally random luck this worked out the way it did.

Shadows!

 

All because of the Dragonfly! Took this photo with my paperclip lying across my laptop screen.

Part 2 of project: 

The next day I decided since Valentine’s day was fast approaching and I still needed to mail off cards to friends, that  I should make a Paper Clip Girl and have her kiss my Paper clip man….Subsequent attempts to repeat my earlier stroke of genius did not pan out. :/

Instead, I mailed off my Valentine’s postcards all by themselves. I will attempt to make part two of this project work at a later date if I have time!

Day 8: The day I destroyed a book & discovered the theme of my 366 day project.

Day 8 assignment was: “Transform an old book into something new by cutting, folding, gluing and so on.”

Now at first I was slightly horrified. Destroy a book?  Impossible!!

But then I thought about this book on Degas I had rescued from my grandma’s house in August when it was about to be donated.

 

I could not get a photo of this without me in the photo... :/

It was filled with many of Degas’ great paintings and I thought it would cool to use these prints as part of an art project. So I kept the book, waiting for the right time to rip into it.

Today was that day.  It was weird at first, cutting into a book, but after a while it became a lot of fun. I ended up saving most of paintings found in the book, only leaving those I  didn’t like as much. I even ended up reading more of the book than expected as well.

The book was torn apart in half.

Once I cut out everything I wanted I had to decide what I wanted my project of the day to be.

all the clips

I ended up making a college out of 1 1/2 paintings

 

 

This is my thought process for this piece. The woman is trapped in a box, the box called “her life right now.” Outside of it, there’s a lot brighter/ more interesting world that isn’t exactly perfect. Will she ever break free of  her life right now and explore a world that offers much more potential for her?

 

I am probably going to finish this piece by mounting it to blank paper so I can write a letter on the back of it and send it off.

Which leads me to the theme of this 366 day project: Mail.

I love mail. I love writing letters & postcards and receiving them in turn. A lot of my projects thus far have been things revolving around mail/letters and I want to continue this pattern by making it my general project theme. I want most of my projects to be something that I can send to other people, so that it’s not something that is just going to pile up around my house. Also, I am always looking for new cards to send to people, so now I can just make my own.