After seeing how the last unit Artists Steal went, I was very apprehensive as to starting this new unit, Artists Solve Problems. I wasn't sure what problems we'd have to solve or how we'd be expected to solve them. In the pretest I wrote that " When you encounter problems in the world, somehow they're going to show up in your art work. It doesn't matter if you're trying to solve them or not, they will show up eventually." I don't think my thoughts on problems have changed too drastically through this unit because I still believe everything I wrote down during the pretest. However my thoughts on how to approach different problems have changed. During this unit we were presented with many problems that we had to overcome in our art work. The first limitation was creating art with only newspaper.
When first presented with the challenge of only using newspaper I had no idea what to do. I ended up going through all the newspaper and finding a political comic that inspired me. I then found negative words and phrases and decided to do something with that. At first I was going to create juxtaposition and do happy words surrounded by negative words, but I couldn't find enough happy words. In the end I decided to create a crime scene on top of all the negative words. After cutting and glueing all the words and pictures down I decided to draw the outline of a body, like there would be at a murder scene. Then I wanted to draw police tape like a border around the paper, but didn't have time to complete it in the end. My favorite thing about this piece is the blood dripping down the paper. I originally wasn't going to have the paint drip through the body, but it's very hard to control dripping paint and it ended up going right through the body. However I think it looks like an exit wound marking how the person died, so I decided not to change a thing. Overall I'm very happy with how this project turned out because it looks like the picture I had in my head.
The second limitation we had was to create using something from nature. I ended up forming a group with two other people and we made this flower. The middle of the flower is made up of dandelions and red berries we found on a tree. The outside is made from leaves, and the stem is made up of smaller stems. I found working in a group very difficult for this because I felt like no one took my ideas seriously. I said that we could all create flowers and then put them together in a mini garden, or we could create one flower out of nature and another flower out of garbage for some juxtaposition. I thought those ideas were very cool, however no one else seemed to think so. In the end we just created the one flower out of nature. I think our flower would look brighter and better if we had painted the cardboard or found more colorful leaves to use. When looking back I wish I had done this project by myself so I could use my own ideas and create something that I was truly proud of.
The last limitation we were given was a physical one, I chose to experiment with finger painting. I really liked using the paint like it was ink and doing finger prints all around the paper. I also liked using my knuckle to dot the paint and just using my finger tips to smear the paint. By experimenting I found that if you let the paint dry on your hand and then smear it on the paper it looks kind of like charcoal. I spent about three days experimenting because I wasn't really sure what to do with my final art project. I tried drawing tentacles, but I couldn't get the hang of finger painting enough to make them look how I wanted them. I gave up on that idea halfway through and decided to take a step back and just look at my art. After realizing I had no idea what to do on my final art project I headed to Pinterest. I knew I wanted my limitation to be finger painting, and I found that finger painted trees looks very cool. So I decided to paint white trees on black paper and add color dots around it to represent the seasons. I did blue and white dots for winter, green and pink for spring, light green and dark green for summer, and red and brown for fall. I really like how my final project turned out, I just wish that I had come up with the idea sooner so I could do more with it. One thing I really didn't like about this project was how broad it was, I spent most of our work time experimenting because I had no idea what to do. There wasn't anything we were supposed to create and that left me with a really blank slate. I found that when working with limitations they really held me back and I couldn't produce really great art with them. I feel like I have grown as an artist throughout this unit, no matter how frustrating it was for me.