Ahh the old " rectangles of death"

To: Art School,

    Today was our first class of Drawing 1 at Lyme. Me being my special self didn't show up until 1:00 P.M. (Class starts at 8:30 A.M.) not because I wanted to miss class. My parents are crazy and I seek help about it. Don't worry, it's all cool.

Anywho,

We drew a still life, some boxes. Rectangles and such. I've done a lot of still life drawings, so this was easy. I'm so much better with a pencil and charcoal than painting. Although I had such an easy time replicating the shapes to my paper, Cody was having a harder time.

    Ps. Intense game of ping-pong today again , and what felt like 9 year old playing hacky-sack ( except Cody, he is too pro )

With love,

-Allison

Painting 1...

    I've taken many "painting 1" classes or differently named equivalents over the course of my education, so I was a bit wary of having to take another. I was told they wanted to teach me how to paint well and correctly so that I could move forward knowing how to paint correctly.

    It turns out that I won't be wasting any time, because though I may have painted before, I've never used oil paints before, nor have I had a room full of students who want to learn how to learn just as much as I do. Not everybody is in the same place with their art, and It's humbling to be put into a room of people who a lot are just as good if not better than myself at what we're doing.

    I'm going to try and focus as much as I can on actually observing what's in front of me and taking my time. I've always had a problem with not knowing how to proceed, or feeling like I'm done long before I ever reach a "presentable" point.

    

    So we'll see how that goes...

-Cody

Media introduced today: Oils

Difficulty level: fairly easy if you're an artist

Difficulty level today with a new medium: what the freak am I doing.

So we used oils today. I have never used them in my entire life. Some emotions I went through today while learning oils:

Confidence

Unsure

Sadness

Hopeless

Frustrated

Rage

Sobbing (internally)

I realized a lot of these kids in our class are pretty good, it bothers me though that they are 18 years old. And here I am. With an Associates in Visual Arts , and their work is just as good, or better than mine. Although there's always that one kid that isn't that great, and you're like " alright! I'm not the worst!" It gives me hope 

Side note: I played a mean game of ping pong today between classes. Plus my English teacher is super rad and she's like " you're artists you don't wanna be here, I get that. We can do whatever we want" 

Here is my oil painting it's the same subject as Cody's , but in a different location. It looks pretty lame now that I see it in a photograph.

-Allison

Feel free to leave us a comment, or discuss our work and all that's going on with us. We'll be trying to post at least Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday regularly so keep an eye out.

"Remember, only you can prevent wildfires." -Smokey the Bear

Popular Art

    So today with a good chunk of the new incoming students to Lyme we went to the Yale University Art Gallery, in New Haven. After a pretty long bus ride, of which I haven't had since around middle school because I walked to school in high school, we arrived. There was a lot of art from all over the world from many different eras on display.
 

    Hundreds of beautiful pieces of work, but I was pleasantly surprised to hear that they had some pieces by Roy Lichtenstein, a pop artist whose worked I've enjoyed and "studied" through various projects and reports throughout my academic career in middle, and high school.

    It was pretty amazing to see some of these pieces in person for the first time, photographs and scans give off the impression that the art is exactly perfect. While still tedious, and meticulously put together the artists hand is visible if you can put yourself 6 inches away from the canvas'. Which is something I enjoy very much in art, one of the things that makes something a piece of art, rather than a piece of media to me is the link to the artist themselves.

-Cody

The Beginning of School, the End of Our Wallets

    So today was our first "real" day at Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, a lot of stuff happened, and a lot of nothing happened.

    Over the summer(in the last two weeks of summer) we were sent an email suggesting a summer project that we work on to bring to the first day of orientation. It was to be a self portrait, made out of recycled materials. Which for most students would probably seem a challenge even conceptually, but when Allison and I read the email we looked at each other and smiled.

    I've been doing recycled art since about my sophomore/junior year in high school, I'll talk more about that in another post someday down the road, and Allison is no stranger to the medium...mediums... mixed media? either. We both have very different approaches to our pieces, but I'll let them talk for themselves.

    As you can see mine ended up being an entire sculpture and Allison's more of a drawing with slight relief. Just two of the many ways we're our ideas are different. 

-Cody

Aye,

    So today was pretty okay. I did enjoy seeing the people we saw on Sunday again. We met some sweet rad people at the picnic and today was about "rules" and "lets walk the school for A WHOLE HOUR"  Now, for me. I can't sit still for more than 10 minutes. Yet I also don't like walking nonsense for an hour. 

   The critique was a little  long for our summer projects ( approximately 385 leg bounces of my time ) . My friend made a piece in approximately 20 min, and we talked about it for 30 minutes. I feel like people were trying to pull some crazy emotional meaning to life out of his sculpture. We laughed a lot because people who "like to do art", instead of people who want help others do better art, say what they like and pull things out of their bums, and not about what they think could help the artist grow with their art.

   Yadda Yadda. I'm not afraid to tell someone that they need to think about their composition more. Yet kids are like " HOLY MOLY YOU'RE SO NEGATIVE " the moment I tell them there's too much white.

Anywho, Thats my side of the day.
-Allison

Ps. Art supplies are dang expensive, and our wallets are significantly lighter because some "quality" 1.5 oz. tubes of paint cost $15.

Check back here on Wednesday and we'll have more to share/say!

"Until next time..." -He-man

In Construction

Look for our first post by Monday, August 25th.
-Cody