Introduction to Printmaking Syllabus

In case you lose it, the syllabus can be found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/26564336/Syllabus-ART-243

articles you may find interesting

Here are some things I've come across lately that you may find interesting to read (or not). These are not listed with any particular order.

From the New York Times:

Mistakes in Typography Grate the Purists

Finding a Bit of Animal House in the Bauhaus

Did I mention this art blog before?
Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof's Artblog about Philly art

TED talks are really interesting and cover a wide range of topics watch this one on the invisible

The Glass Onion

That's the title of an okay-to-decent Beatles tune, but also kind of refers to the project we now find ourselves beginning that looks at this idea of Layers. The song appears on the White Album and refers to a half dozen other Beatles songs; giving it not only an ironic distance, but making it pretty darned layered.

Okay, so not the deepest thing to begin with, but it's the Beatles!

Let's think about this again...and again. Let's complicate things here. What we are talking about here is developing an idea so that it has more layers of meaning than what you see initially.

The example I used in class was Shakespeare who made sure his plays were thick with drama and comedy, but also addressed much heavier issues of life and death. The British playwright Tom Stoppard wrote a terrific play that is centered on two character's from Shakespeare's Hamlet titled "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead". These two characters are in Hamlet only briefly (invited by Hamlet's mother to cheer up the depressed Hamlet) and both characters die offstage later. Stoppard's play takes place backstage of the Shakespeare drama. It's interesting, you see, because there is already a play within the play that occurs when Hamlet has actors put on a play about a king being murdered by his queen. Can you believe the layers here? Anyway, here's a clip from the movie version of Stoppard's play, it is the scene of the play within a play:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkvpDErv8n0&translated=1

You can find anything on YouTube...

texting while driving?

Just thought this was interesting, play the game and let me know if you do any better at it than I did (I will now stop texting and making coffee while eating donuts as I drive).

http://www.nytimes.com//interactive/2009/07/19/technology/20090719-driving-game.html

Wallpaper sticks to walls

The paper for the wallpaper should arrive tomorrow or tuesday, so we should be ready to print on Wednesday. I will begin printing at 9:00am Wednesday for anyone ready at that time. We will be starting the next project that day as well and save the crit for the wallpaper until Monday.

Though we talked about the project in class I just wanted to reiterate some of the crucial details:

- 5 examples of wallpaper from a time period or of a style you find interesting and inspiring should be posted on your blog.

- a finished design that measures 24x72".

Simple enough, huh?

your wall your paper

"It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw — not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper—the smell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell."

-Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

For some interesting information about the history of wallpaper you may want to look at wallpaperinstaller.com where among other interesting stuff you will learn that "the oldest existing example of flocked wallpaper comes from Worcester and was created in approximately 1680."

Wallpaper has been used by many contemporary artists as either part of an installation or as the art itself. Here are some examples of contemporary wallpaper:

John Baldessari, Mike Bidlo, Adam Cvijanovic, Drew Dominick, Nicole Eisenman, Viola Frey, General Idea, Robert Gober, Lonnie Graham, Rodney Graham, Richard Haas, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jenny Holzer, Jim Isermann, Peter Kogler, Roy Lichtenstein, Virgil Marti, Jane Masters, Michael Mercil, Takashi Murakami, Paul Noble, Jorge Pardo, Francesco Simeti, Kiki Smith, Will Stokes, Do-Ho Suh, Rosemarie Trockel, Andy Warhol, and William Wegman

And this is just from the RISD and the Fabric Workshop companion exhibitions in 2003 on Artists' Wallpaper you can read about them here and here. In my next post I will include links to images and the proper description for the project.

My apartment was not pretty

I just came across this web art project while working on something... let me know what you think?

http://www.turbulence.org/Works/apartment/