End of the 2010 Semester

My last post on Images and Ideas was back in October. I had gotten to a place where I felt like I was blogging to myself - or is that flogging? In any case, it would have been good to have had on-going dialogue, discussion, interaction, debate...hello, is there anyone there?

I thought that I'd finish this semester with a few drawing highlights from the final portfolios. Maybe even throw in some commentary to see if I get any bites. Here goes:

David Jones has a passion for basketball, and he extended that passion into his series of drawings. Various athletic poses n the way to the basket.

Daniel Marshall's passion is music. Here is one of the drawings he created that was inspired by his musical instruments and equipment.

Alex Stotts did a series of drawn hands depicting the drawing of hands, cut from their context and placed into shadow boxes. Two are represented above.

This is a digital image of a digital image, so I apologize for the reflections. This was Sam Chumley's series project, creating a 'graffiti'-esque image on the basement wall of a friend's home. It was documented via photos and video. The video, some fifty hours worth, went through a collaborative editing and refining process between Sam and Chris Little. The result was a little more than two minutes of fast-forwarding of the process from beginning to end. Maybe Sam will get this posted on Youtube.

Daniel Frank is a skater, and this drawing was one of six he created this semester that explored the dynamic poses of skaters without their boards. He had explored some the Robert Longo images of Men in the Cities.

Wende Cudmore has been experimenting and exploring the production of vegetable papyrus. She's not only creating hand-made papers from the pulps of the vegetables, but she's also pressing the vegetables into thin sheets. In the bottom piece above, the center panel is actually parsnip cut and pressed into a thin, almost transparent sheet, stitched and mounted between plexiglass.

Shane Doebler created a fifteen foot tableaux of psychological narrative that hinted at so many possibilities that it was a little frightening. The image above was conceptually part of that bigger image, but it was on a single panel.

Patrick Berry created a series of images exploring the effects of a mirror in landscapes. In some the reflected image was part of the environment, and in others the reflection pulled information that was out beyond the subjects of his drawings.

Marie Tingle's series was about a pair of dragons. She explored them through four drawings that eventually focused on the textures and colorations. That focus was, in part, inspired by a shift in her medium, from soft pastels to pastel pencils.

Louise Clausen started her series as she left off this summer (check back there to see those images), with figures in water. Only this time an intense experience she had moved her priority and process into a new direction, where gravity and expression took over the representation.

Lori Ritchie did a series of flowers, mostly focusing on the blossoms, except in this one where she got more involved with the space as much as the flowers.

Kristin Thompson created four large-scaled (30" x 40") drawings of a brick in different settings with oil pastels. The surfaces are energetic and the lights and darks very compelling. The scale of each also adds a great deal to the images. Kristin's process is very aggressive, so she needed that much space to be able to move around with her response.

Kim Salaices also created four large scaled images that were more psychologically charged, based on porno addictions. She chose to represent this idea by creating images of bound women with accompanying text, some of which is legible, and other parts not.

Jessica Elam responded to the ephemeral and hypnotic qualities of smoke. She started using pastels and eventually switched to bleach on black Arches that allowed the illusory layering transparencies of smoke to move across the surface.

Fran Dietl's series allowed her to continue investigating fantasy via computer illustration. Although the image above does not do justice to this particular piece, it is clearly an other worldly character that she made hints of in a series she created last summer.

Danny Palafox found some inspiration in some Jim Dine tool images. Here is an example of the three drawings of 'still-life' nuts and bolts, created with pastels and prisma color pencils.

Alex Kennedy's appropriated Madonna and Child images, this one with gold leafing, are intriguing responses to religious representation in the history of art and his own Catholic upbringing.