NOTE: I have been contemplating the best way to start this blog again after not writing about my projects for four years. I think what's most interesting is to split up my freshman year at Cornish into six units reflecting how our first-year curriculum was designed. Each semester we had three groupings of rotating classes every 15 weeks between groups of the first-year visual arts majors. Each class would focus on specific topics and sometimes mediums of use. The first year of Cornish is designed to give you a well-rounded education by having you dabble in every form of visual art. Flim students would have to draw, and people who've done nothing but oil paint for the past ten years would have to sculpt. This year was also designed to weed out the students who didn't want a career in the arts or weren't willing to work as hard as needed. We were given rigorous deadlines, three sets of three different classes, and one consistent elective. In my first year at Cornish College of the Arts, the first unit was Composition and Decomposition, Comp Decomp for short.
Comp Decomp was about the human form and the rethinking and decompartmentalizing of the body. We started by taking pictures of each other in striking poses, keeping the composition of a square in mind. From this, we would ultimately draw a simplified 2D square drawing of one of our poses and turn it into a plaster sculpture.
Below is my final pose from that day and my six concept sketches:
After our first critique, of many, my class expressed that this pose was also their favorite. My classmates also said they liked how the middle part looked like a keyhole. Since it represents the figure's head and hands, it was as if these elements are the "key" to a person. Finally, we concluded that I should add another bar at the bottom to make the middle look more like a keyhole. This solution would also help prevent cracking in that area. We then had to make the plaster molds out of styrofoam and hot glue. We had less than a week to do this, and the late nights at Cornish started fast. I had never done a plaster sculpture before, but I had felt confident until it became time to pour. My mold kept splitting and breaking; plaster quickly ended up in the wrong areas, which I had to fix by using clay to patch the holes. After finally getting it to settle, I let it sit over the weekend. When we came back, we had to crack our sculptures out of the molds carefully. This sounds easy but proved to be a challenge, especially when it came time to destroy the mold around the sculpture. I had both taped and glued together multiple times, you know, so that it wouldn't split or break. Unfortunately, one of the legs on my sculpture had accidentally broken off, and the edges also had relatively large creases and uneven bumps that I couldn't sand away. I was not feeling good about how my first college project had turned out. From here, they had us do perspective drawings of our sculptures. Also, we did a Sumi ink positive and negative drawing from a composition of all the sculptures stacked together. One side of the drawing would have the sculptures in the positive/negative space, and the opposite side would be the vise versa of the other.
Below is the final picture of my plaster sculpture and the picture of my semi ink drawing:
It was time for the next project at last. We were all assigned a body part to sculpt either life-size or twice life-size from cardboard. I had to make an arm. I started more mathematically than creatively and decided to case my arm in newsprint to make a rough casting of my arm at an angle. This casing was to figure out the different radiuses throughout my arm. I used those as points of reference when figuring out the measurements for my sculpture. I used an octagon as my main shape for the different sections of my arm. I was sure to have the different sections and side to tapper off from top to bottom to align with the way my arm gets skinnier towards my forearm and again to my hand. I decided to line the strips with alternating patterns of rhombuses on each side to give the arm a stronger sense of movement. For the wrist, I made two slightly three-dimensional pentagons together to provide a thin yet flexible shape. The hand is more of a simplistic boxy claw made of trapezoids, triangles, and rectangles. I removed the top layers of the cardboard on the hand's knuckles to make them appear more rough and dimensional. I used a soccer-ball-inspired pattern with hexagons for the elbow to make the arm look more round and less boxy. I had also sculpted this entirely with paper first so I could use my cardboard more efficiently. This piece felt like more of an achievement so far, even though this project was purely aesthetic-driven.
Below are pictures of the final arm sculpture, my notes, and my paper sculpture:
Then our professors had attempted a collaborative project where each group would have five to six people. We were to display our pieces together in some way of our choosing. My group decided we'd make a collage, and each person would create a small representation of someone else's piece. We'd bring them together in the end. I was to interpret this torso made by Jenna Stevens. Since I hadn't touched my camera yet, and I got into this school for my photography, I decided to take experimental photography of the piece. My group enjoyed how I incorporated the bars in my photo to make the feminine-looking torso appear trapped. The background was the window showing Seattle, which could represent the free world behind her. This piece ended up feeling thrown together as the communication within our group sucked. This project felt unnecessary, though fun for some of us.
Below are the pictures I took and edited and out finally collage piece at the end:
Now it was finally time for our final project of the first module of freshman year. After all our hard work on our body part sculptures, we were rewarded by taking in apart and take interesting pictures from within them. We would then pick two contrasting pictures to draw them in charcoal together as a diptych. It took me a long time not to be upset about this project, but it ended up being fun for me, as I've never done a diptych or drawn-on Stonehenge paper before. I was mainly excited to get an opportunity to practice my drawing range with charcoal, which was something I hadn't worked with too much before. The concept made no sense to me, but now I understand the assignment isn't asking us to draw something out of nothing or rethink the body. They're asking us to compose as in to create our sculpture rather than decompose to draw our abstractions. The assignment brought me outside of my comfort zone with how I look at/ think of my subjects in a way that helped me develop as an artist
Below are the pictures I took and drew from and the final charcoal diptych:
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