Monster

So I thought I’d make a post about the graphic novel I put together last semester. It’s called “Monster” (weirdly, I stuck with the first title that came to mind) and it was probably the most fun I’ve had on a project, ever.

(Not pictured: my good qualities)

I had always been interested in doing something like this, but assumed I didn’t have the patience or the know-how. Then I had the opportunity to set up a project for Advanced Studio, so I started putting images together. Originally, the plan was to make a book about someone trying to make a book about something trying to make a book – the images would start out very realistically rendered, and degenerate more and more into childlike scribbling. To complete the joke, I thought the person trying to make the book should very clearly be me. I started drawing up pages of self portraits in which I would argue with a dead fly on the windowsill, who would act as a sounding board for story ideas, berating any plotlines I might come up with, angry that I had swatted it. This whole book-inside-a-book plan fell through pretty quickly, and I was left with lots of drawings of myself staring down a dead housefly.

I didn’t want to just scrap them. There was something about the wordless imagery that I really liked. When the dialogue was removed, the sort of absurdist element became something more serious. It reminded me of a child poking at a dead thing, trying to wake it up and slowly realizing that it won’t happen.

Not wanting to drop the comedic angle entirely, I split the book into three short sections that address the same issue in different ways. The fly section comes first. The second section is fairly abstract; it’s meant to address the same issues as the first, but in a more internalized way.

The third section is the only one containing any dialogue. Stylistically it’s much simpler and more cartoonish than the first two, and consists of an argument between an umbrella-headed child and a dying/dead fish, which made it the most fun to work on.

Which is all to say that it’s amazing what a little encouragement from professors and a deadline can help you come up with; I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have finished this project without those elements. I’m tentatively sending it around to publishers now, but in the meantime I’m self-publishing on Lulu.com. If you are interested in filling up your eyes with sweet, sweet images, this thing is for sale here. You could also ask for a copy if you see me around campus. I'm usually somewhere around David Hall.

Fake Rocks and Botox Redux

Here's a slideshow from the reception of the Fake Rocks and Botox II show last night, at the Tahoe Gallery, featuring work by SNC alumni.



Work by Nikki Ballare, Jonah Harjer, Rebecca Kerlin, Babs Laukat, Jeffrey James Mohr, Ya'el Pedroza, Samantha Shaw, Sierra Slentz, Bryan Stieger. That's Bryan, Rebecca, Ya'el and Babs in the last few shots.

The New Xtranormal

As a starter project for the Intro to Digital Entertainment class, the students wrote scripts for an Xtranormal short -- Xtranormal being a service where you can type a script for pre-built avatars to "act out," giving them gestures, picking camera angles, and so on. The class picked these two as the best of the batch:

I Am a Cat, script by David Arslanian, directed by Victor Gutierrez



Coffee Shop Career Change, written and directed by Trevor Jackson

Coffee Shop Career Change
by: tbyrumjackson

2011 A+E Conference at the NMA - Ticket Sponsorship

Upcoming this month is the Art + Environment Conference at the Nevada Museum of Art (http://nevadaart.org/conference2011/) from September 29 - October 1. The conference "brings together artists, scholars, designers, and writers for a dialogue that fosters new knowledge in the visual arts. During the Conference, the Museum's galleries feature exhibitions that question our relationships with natural, built, and virtual environments, while serving as a springboard for Conference sessions
and keynote presentations."

Art museums can be temples to culture or cultural catalysts. They can be passive and predictable or unpredictably idea-driven. Museums can watch the world pass them by, or they can shape the trajectory of its course. Art and ideas matter here. We see art that challenges minds, melds environments and cultures, and responds to the uncertainties of the future. Art has a point of view and it deserves a voice at the table. That's what the Art + Environment Conference gives it.

This year, Gallery Club has sponsored the purchase of 5 student tickets to the conference. They are opening up eligibility to receive these tickets to all current Sierra Nevada College students. Any interested students can submit a 1-page, double-spaced paper addressing why they would like to attend the conference and what benefit it would have to their work. Submissions are due Tuesday, September 20 and selections will be made by the Fine Arts faculty. Please send all papers to Logan Lape (llape@sierranevada.edu). Notifications will be sent out later that week.

Due to the limited number of tickets available from Gallery Club, they and the Fine Arts Department invite any students not selected to purchase their own ticket join their fellow students at the conference (http://www.nevadaart.org/shop/productview?pid=659).

TOCCATA, Elizabeth Pitcairn, Donna Axton

I'm behind the curve presenting the direct SNC connection to this event, but thought it would be of interest beyond the purely local angle. Elizabeth Pitcairn will be playing her Red Stradivarius Violin with TOCCATA in a series of performances from Sept. 11-17 in the Reno/Tahoe area. Pitcairn gave a wonderful recital at SNC two years ago, with Donna Axton, our music Prof, on the piano. Pitcairn is in fact playing with Donna as I type this, for a TOCCATA fundraiser in Gleshire/Truckee. The concert series will take place as follows:

Sunday, September 11 at 3:30pm at St. Theresa Catholic Church in South Lake Tahoe
Tuesday, September 13 at 7:30pm at St. Thomas Aquinas Cathedral in Reno
Friday, September 16 at 7:00pm at Trinity Episcopal Church in Reno
Saturday, September 17 at 3:00pm at the North Tahoe Events Center in Kings Beach

A copy of the press release, with more detailed info, can be found here.

And here's a video of Pitcairn playing Op. 14 Samuel Barber Violin Concerto with TOCCATA last year, with Donna accompanying her on piano:

Masereel, Herriman, Maggots

Well, clearly I didn't make good on my promise to keep the blog humming over the summer -- I ended up jealously guarding my writing time for the graphic novel I was working on. I did have a small handful of pieces published elsewhere during the summer, so I might as well get the ball back rolling again with links to those -- a couple short appreciations of some "art heroes" of mine, and a look at a graphic novel I admire very much.

The two appreciations were for Hilobrow.com, for their daily "HiLo Heroes" feature, which gives a tip of the hat to a wide variety of people (artists, physicists, actors, and on and on) on their birthdays. On July 31st, it was Frans Masereel's birthday, of whom I wrote:

Belgian artist FRANS MASEREEL (1889-1972) raged against the stupidity of war as an illustrator for a series of pacifist magazines and books. He was a propagandist, the clarity of his high-contrast style suited equally well to the crude printing-press and the ideological punchline, but his agitprop kept strong strains of slapstick and poetry.

Read the entire piece here.

Then, on August 22nd, it was George Herriman's birthday:

GEORGE HERRIMAN’s (1880-1944) comic strip “Krazy Kat” spun its three-point wheel for thirty years on the axis of a perfectly balanced love triangle (or masochism triangle — same difference). Much has been written about that triangle’s principals: Ignatz Mouse, a napoleonic id; Offisa Pup, upholding the prosaic squareness of Authority; and Krazy Kat, embodying grace as blank abuse (laid out by the missile of an Ignatz-hurled brick, Krazy might’ve said, like Swayzee, “Pain don’t hurt”).

Read the whole thing here. The piece also includes a link to a full-page comic appreciation I did for "Krazy Kat" back in the day, on the back page of the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review.

And lastly, I had a short piece in the brick-sized The Comics Journal #301. It was a look at Brian Chippendale's graphic novel Maggots -- which took a very distinctive approach to showing the passage of time. There's a nice overview of The Comics Journal #301 here at Win Wiacek's blog; and here's a paragraph from my article, contrasting the way time functions in classical painting, and the way it functions when we have access, through film or video, to the brief split-seconds:

This traditional pictorial surface doesn’t so much freeze time, as to put time in abeyance. This is not a snapshot record of an event, but a memory of an event, reconstituted after the fact, all its pertinent details congealed in an authoritative simultaneity. The duration of time there is not measured by moments, but by experiences. This is in contrast to the way an animator must reconstitute time – or the way one becomes conscious of time when scrubbing through a video clip, looking to isolate from the stream a representative still. The weirdness of time there is most evident in facial expressions – the way human visages are distorted into strange grimaces when motions become moments. A visual stimulus does not always rise to the occasion of an image; an image or a gesture is something that sustains itself beyond the imprint of the moment – something that lives as an echo in the mind after it’s vanished from the gelled chamber of the eye.

The article isn't available online, so you'll have to actually shell out for a copy (or, you know, just swing by my office and ask nicely to borrow mine).

Sketchbooking

Hello! My name's Jessica, and I'll be your student blogger for the month.

I thought I’d start by talking about an ongoing blog series at Book By Its Cover. The site manager, illustrator Julia Rothman, has built up some extensive documentation of working artists’ sketchbooks. Many of the contributors to the series are illustrators, but there are also sketchbooks belonging to painters, collage artists, and sculptors. I’ve always been very interested in artists’ sketchbooks, sometimes as much as finished work. It’s fascinating to see where ideas begin, and there is a real sense of intimacy when looking at these more private objects.

Below are a few examples; for the whole series, go here.

Anders Nilsen:



Mattias Adolfsson:



Lars Henkel:

The Biggest Little Tree

For those of you who are still in the Reno area, I wanted to mention that Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life is currently playing at the Century Riverside, a couple weeks ahead of its general national release. I think it's a remarkable film, and like all of Malick's work, it really cries out to be seen on the big screen. It's too bad that it wasn't playing during my indy film class last semester -- it would've made for an excellent field trip. The film centers around the coming of age of a boy in 1950s Waco, Texas, but it's filmed in an audaciously elliptical style, which makes room for extended sequences that measure the family's history against the scope of geological and celestial time.

The celestial passages in Tree of Life have been compared to the "stargate" sequence in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a probably-inevitable connection, as the special effects sequences in both films were overseen by the same man -- Douglas Trumbull, who has been behind a number of special effects sequences that have burned their way into the collective consciousness (including work on Blade Runner and Close Encounters of the Third Kind).


In some ways, the Tree of Life/2001 conflation is too easy, and the case could be made that, in terms of positioning human life against the scope of the cosmos, the two films have diametrically opposed temperatures. Where Kubrick contemplates his human characters at an icy remove, Tree of Life is suffused with tremulous empathy. That said, the sequences themselves have the same stately sense of awe. Trumbull hasn't worked on a film for almost 30 years, having devoted himself to various media technologies and multimedia rides and environments (his website showcases the work of a restless inventor -- with recent pages devoted to a humvee customized for UFO-spotting, and a prototype for an oil spill cleanup system, devised in response to the BP catastrophe). Despite his prolonged hiatus from special effects for feature films, there's a remarkable consistency of vision. Scott Bukatman, in his excellent book Matters of Gravity, summed up the Trumbull approach (the book was published back in 2003, but his analysis is still apt for Tree of Life):

An examination of Trumbull's work reveals a surprisingly coherent aesthetics. A Trumbull sequence is less a description of an object than the construction of an environment... "I like the idea of creating some crazy illusion that looks so great that you can that you can really hang on it like a big master shot of an epic landscape." ("Epic landscape" suggests the affinity between Trumbull's effects and the majestic paintings of Turner, Church, Bierstadt, and so on)... Where [special effects artist] John Dykstra's work in Star Wars or Firefox (1982) is all hyperkinesis and participatory action, Trumbull's work is especially contemplative.

If anything, the Tree of Life sequences are a culmination of that contemplative, "epic landscape" approach -- even the prolonged "stargate" sequence from 2001 had the urgency of "what will the astronaut find at the end of this?" It might have been a rudimentary suspense -- one that's short-circuited by the sheer length of the sequence, which arguably batters you to submit to the state of contemplation, like smashing you over the head with a pile of Rothko and Pollock and Kandinsky canvases. But in Tree of Life, the sequence comes as a sort of musical movement, a recapitulation of the movie's themes in another register. There's no plot to be chewed through while the effects unfold -- they stand as self-sufficient as musical notes.

I especially liked the organic character of the effects. The fact that Malick approached Trumbull because he didn't like the look of CGI is perhaps a bit overstated in this interesting WIRED piece on the film's special effects (digital means were clearly used to get the final results -- it's more that there was a combination of the analog and digital, rather than a complete banishment of computer technology). But clearly, part of the heft of the effects comes from their organic origins, the way Trumbull exploits the formal coherencies between macro and micro scale -- the way the curved arms of a galaxy appear when you drop cream into your coffee cup.

The film also incorporates work by some experimental artists, including the filmmaker Scott Nyerges, who was interviewed at the Fandor blog:

Nyerges is puzzled that amidst all the hype surrounding The Tree of Life, more attention hasn’t been given to artists whose work clearly feeds into Malick’s vision. “In the media coverage on this film no one’s really mentioned that they used the work of experimental filmmakers in these sequences.” But for Nyerges, the overlooked, perpetually co-opted status of the avant-garde is nothing new. “This kind of filmmaking has influenced everything from commercials to music videos to movies. And now you can buy iMovie, punch a button and get an effect that took avant garde filmmakers years to develop.”

Here's the Nyerges short which was excerpted in Tree of Life:



An image that's used as a sort of "chapter break" in the Tree of Life -- a diaphanous whatsit composed of interpenetrating warm colors, which appears onscreen as characters ask whispered questions of God -- was also, it turns out, a borrowing from another artist. It was the filming of a work by Thomas Wilfred, an early pioneer of "light art" (a New Yorker article tipped me to the fact).

From William Moritz's article The Dream of Color Music, And Machines That Made it Possible:

Danish-born Thomas Wilfred came to America as a singer of early music, and got involved with a group of Theosophists who wanted to build a color organ to demonstrate spiritual principles. Wilfred called his color organ the Clavilux, and named the artform of color-music projections "Lumia." He stressed polymorphous, fluid streams of color slowly metamorphosing. He established an Art Institute of Light in New York, and toured giving Lumia concerts in the United States and Europe (at the famous Art Deco exhibition in Paris). He also built "lumia boxes," self-contained units that looked rather like television sets, which could play for days or months without repeating the same imagery."

Here are a couple recording of portions of Wilfred's Lumia, as well as a trailer for a documentary on Wilfred:







It appeals to me that the trascendentalism of the film is a kind of grab-bag transcendentalism, splicing together the work of artists whose concerns with light and the sublime stretch over the span of nearly a century. Measured against the lifespan of a star, that's a pretty modest blip -- and so is pretty much everything else, which is more or less the point. Light isn't a fixed substance, which is why it's so easy to project ourselves into its modulations, fluctuations, its negotiations with darkness and cessation.

Windows, stairwells, walls, mirrors

Just before the semester wrapped up, I snapped some pics of student art that had materialized in various nooks and crannies of the art building. Stairwells and windows often form a distributed display space in David Hall -- here are a few examples of uncommissioned "public works" -- I'm making a couple educated guesses as to the authorship in a couple cases, and if I've guessed wrong, please correct me in the comments to this post and I'll rectify the situation.

I think this text application was done by Molly Allen:


I know this is Victoria Buck's -- she did it for the final for my independent film class:





The clocks above the windows in the printmaking area were done by Jesyka Hayworth; I think the raindrops are hers, too:




I don't know who painted the "instant hairstyle" mirror, also on the third floor:


The rose prints, I believe, are Jennifer Yordy's:


More work by Jesyka Hayworth -- her take on the indepenedent film class final:







And this four-part sculpture, unless I'm mistaken, is the work of Anza Jarshke Pete from the New Genres class (anyone got a last name?):

Ben-Day Dots and Bugs

I've taken a breather from the blog in the past couple weeks, doing a bit of a wind-down -- but this summer I'll be keeping up a flow of posts, so keep your eyes peeled here. I have lots of stuff to catch up with (several BFA shows included), and lots to write about -- and here to begin to pick up the slack is a link to a post I put together for hilobrow, as part of their "4CP Friday" series. The series invites several people to curate a handful of images from John Hilgart's 4CP blog, where Hilgart posts beautiful scanned blow-ups of comics panels. The theme for my pick was "resolution." Click here to see the gallery.


And this also reminds me -- I neglected to post a link for my prior piece for hilobrow, a short appreciation of botanical/entomological illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian -- click here to read the whole thing:

"Even today, a sketch of her biography would mark her an eccentric trailblazer: a divorced woman of 52, after a stint in an anti-materialist religious commune, leaves the comforts of Amsterdam for a two-year sojourn in Surinam in order to paint insects hitherto uncataloged by science. That MARIA SIBYLLA MERIAN (1647-1717) did this in 1699 is a genuine shock..."