Challenge #20: October 21 Challenge

The Stories of our Communities

A Collage of the "Event"

Lauren's narrative

Sandra's narrative

Megi's narrative

Danah's narrative

Sean's narrative

With today's challenge, you are officially two-thirds through the Creativity Sketchbook Challenge!  Bravo!  Keep going. As we get closer to the end of the challenge, I'll start forewarning you of some of the upcoming finalizing activities.  

Keep in mind Rob Dunlavey's presentation on Wednesday in Gulski, 5:30-6:30.

I will also have some new materials for you soon. Materials that will help you, especially, on the last three activities of the challenge.  

Watch this space for when you can stop by to pick up the new stuff.

Here's our thoughts for today:

I would like us to continue to work with words and thoughts about the narrative that we wish to tell about our community. Some of you have chosen happier stories, others less happy and more compelling in different ways.  That is fine and good. Be aware that you are not fixed at the hip to any of these narrative choices, and so you can change them as we go along--if one gets hard to work with or you wish to pursue something else.

Now, don't give up too soon! But be aware you can always change your focus if you wish.

Look at your first square from the previous challenge -- the "event." For this page of the challenge, I would like you to build a collage that calls to mind this event. The goal is to tap into as many senses and visual images that would recollect this event for you.  

Use the skills you have developed so far to think about how to build a base on which you would collage these items--maybe a construction color page, or a watercolor wash, or another approach you wish to take.

After you have your background, don't overthink the placement of the items on the background, but work for a sense of the event as best you can.

Here are some items with which to build your collage:

• Photocopied images from the web
• Actual Pictures
• Newspaper images
• Actual fabric and fabric patterns that recall the moment
• Quotes from people who have spoken about this event
• Passages from poetry or fiction that speak to the idea or thought or actuality of this event
• Splashes of color(s) that come to mind when you think of the event
• Found items around you that surprisingly or not surprisingly connect to this event in some shape or form
• Organic elements, items around the campus or elsewhere that you feel connect somehow

Try to work less on the level of the square 2 (character elements) because we will come to that soon, but get at the event (and by extension, the location) that comes to mind for you when you think of this event.

Good luck!  Keep the images coming. thassele@bryant.edu

Challenge #19: October 20 Challenge

Narratives of our Community:

Stories we live by . . . . . 

Lauren's mandala

An update on Judith Moffat's presentation.  Judith plans to join us on Wednesday when Rob Dunlavey is at Bryant. She is hoping you will share your work with her, so she can see how your sketchbooks are developing. So when you see her on Wednesday, please do not be shy. Come say "hello," and share something you have been working on.

Also, I am attaching a link to her blog (Miss Moffat). Please take a look, especially at the entries on Bryant. She posts some pictures and comments from her work with us, and some pictures of fellow sketchers. Lauren's mandala (the completed mandala, above) is referenced on the blog, calling to mind Moffat's recent work with the "eye" as a deeply important symbol.

Miss Moffat Blog

Also, an added acknowledgment: I failed to mention the inspiration for the last challenge--found collaging. I drew upon my studies with Suzi Cousins, an excellent collage artist and educator, who works with multiple collage styles, including shadow box (Cornell Boxes), paper-making, and book binding. She has been a real inspiration for me in my work in collage and in paper and book studies. Because of being her student and working with Lauren Pearlman (The Paper Connection), I have developed a course on books and the materiality of books. This course will focus on the history and culture of paper and books and the artistic development of collage. This course is offered in the spring.

On to our inspiration from fellow sketchers:

Some great images have been coming in. Let me share a few more with you:

Ahmed's mandala

Abby's symbols through the eyes of her mother

Sandra's tribute to the woman
who introduced her to the beauty of seaweed

Lauren's acknowledgement's page

Megi's found collage

Lauren's improvised inspirations

Kayla's word of inspiration

Joe's symbol through the eyes of his inspiration

On to today's challenge:

In anticipation of our visit with Rob Dunlavey on Wednesday, and his plans to have us work on a sketch that has a "story" or narrative to it, we will work on doing some writing/sketching in the next few days.

Our goal will be to move from the visual representation of a community we participate in (made visible in our symbols) to the stories that are a part of that community--stories that have already been told, are yet to be told, and will be told by us!

One of the most compelling quotes I have ever read is by Oliver Wendall Holmes, Sr.:

Most of us go to the grave with our music still inside us.

Richard Pimentel, a disabilities rights activist, used this quote in a commencement address he delivered in 2008. I include the link below (for you to read at your leisure). Pimentel questions what it means for your particular post 9/11 generation, which has inherited a whole mess of a world, to reflect on this concept of making your own music. 

Richard Pimental Commencement Address 2008

On a personal note, this quote by Holmes got me to finally sit down and write the novel that was bottled up in my body. I wanted to sing those words, even if no one cared to listen. I did not want to take them to my grave.

Let's sing the stories of our life and our community:

• Using construction paper, cut out 4 squares of a size that they could all fit comfortably on your sketchbook page. They can overlap or not. They can be whatever colors you choose.
• Square one, using pen or pencil write down a word or brief phrase that captures a story of your community. This should be an EVENT. For example, if you are a Boston fan, you might write Boston Strong. If your community has overcome obstacles, as many have, you could put down moments in time--Stonewall, Ferguson. These could be happy events, troubling moments, etc. This event may be more intimate if your chosen community is your family--the death or birth of someone.
• Square two, again with words, write down the players in the story of your community. This is about CHARACTERS. Who are the people who are a part of this story--living and dead, and, perhaps, yet to be born? Who is in your version of this story? This isn't about historical accuracy, this is about narrative truthfulness. 
• Square three, again with words, write down your part in this story. This is about you as an INDIVIDUAL who is a PROTAGONIST in the story of your community. Your community's story has not just happened to you or around you: you are stepping in and seeing the part you have played or are yet to play.
• Square four, again in words, explain your PROXIMITY to this narrative you are starting. Are you very close to this story, separated by time and location? You might use words like "So far away in space" or "As close as my breath to my body," something that captures your proximity to the event and characters you are thinking about for now.

You can go elaborate and beautiful with your words, or simple and clear. Your choice. Like the symbol, we are going to start building on this idea over the next week--telling narratives with words, collage, and other visuals.

As with the symbol, do not feel you are locked into any one thing. If you want to change the focus of your narrative as we go along, please feel free to do so.

Keep the pictures coming! thassele@bryant.edu

Challenge #18: October 19 Challenge

A Technique Challenge:

Reminding ourselves that this is a place to experiment

Your sketches are absolutely amazing. I have a number of revised symbols and such to post, though I have not seen many versions of the acknowledgement entry.  Maybe a few more sketchers might send examples along, and I can post a bunch of those, too?

For today's sketch, I want to suggest that we take a moment to lower the bar, make more mistakes, play messier.  Your examples have been brilliant and beautiful. And I want to make sure we keep the freedom and flow of possibilities humming along without pressuring ourselves to have perfect masterpieces every time. So let's have a (hopefully) easy one, and see what happens there.

What we will work on is a common collage technique of using "found" objects. 

Here we go:

• Cut your construction paper into three different shapes and colors. Your shapes, your colors.
• Glue them in random places on the page. Don't over think it.
• Let this sit as it is. Ideally, you'd do this at the start of the day so the shapes and colors stick in your thoughts throughout your daily travels. But it is not absolutely crucial to separate the construction paper part from the next part, which is about "found" items.
• Throughout your day, pick up "found" items that you see on your travels: an interesting leaf, a wrapper that you find, a stick, a funky pencil left on the ground. (My son and I go on these found adventures all the time, and we discover the most amazing things just laying around.)
• Return to your initial collage at some later point and place several of the items that you found in some arrangement on the page that has your cut out shapes.
• That's it. Don't overthink it. Just put some shapes on the page. Have those shapes/colors floating in your head as you go about your business for the day. Pick up stuff you find throughout your daily adventures and paste them onto your page.

What happened in this process? 

One common sense rule: don't pick up anything too skeevy that you find. Ick. Leave that stuff on the ground. I had an artist friend who used to work with road kill. Yes, road kill. When I would go biking, I would look for the best flattened frogs for her work. You shouldn't do that!!  Please!

Please share your images--especially making a pitch for you to send along pictures of your inspirations/acknowledgement pieces.

Challenge #17: October 18 Challenge

Integrating our Inspiration:

Martha's symbol via Matisse as inspiration.
KEEP THIS EXAMPLE IN MIND FOR TODAY'S CHALLENGE

Taking Inspiration, Adapting to a Visual Medium

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. 

 T. S. Eliot  “The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism"

The thought that good artists copy and that great artists steal is often attributed to Picasso, most famously by Steve Jobs.  The debate about the origins of this quote or thought or truism (as it has become) are fun to follow. Just google it, and see where it might take you.

Follow the link below to see one way to map the progression of the history of the quote:

The Quote Investigator

 

Nevertheless, in the words of T.S. Eliot, we are about to steal from our inspirations with the humble hope that we can turn our symbols into "at least something different."

Emily's collage.

For today's activity, I want you to channel one of your inspirations -- whether it is a type of music, a philosophical thought, an actual artist, etc.

This may not be one of the easier challenges, but what I am asking you to think about doing is not just an imitation of an inspiration, but a theft that is transformed into a gift: a new something born from the inspiration of artists or ideas that have inspired you. A new creation that was born out of your "theft."

Here's what to do:

• Look at your chosen inspirations from the previous activity.
• Choose one you want to spend some time thinking about--an artist, musician, theorist, book, song, idea, etc. It is probably easier (though not required) to work with an actual artist or musician, whose work you know well.
• Use that inspiration/inspirer to reconfigure your symbol. What would the musician you have chosen do with your symbol? What colors might s/he work with, shapes, ideas? This might get a lot harder if you work with a concept: How would this challenge work if your inspiration were a concept--like justice?  or freedom? What would "justice" do with your symbol? 
• Taking this idea--think as complexly as you can about your symbols--from shapes to lines, from value (black&white) to color, from abstractness to representational, from constructed to deconstructed. Which version(s) of your symbol would speak to the aesthetic (style/manner) of your inspiration?
• Think a lot about placement on the page for this one. Where would the elements of your symbol happen to fall?
• The goal is not to create something that someone would look at and immediately say--Oh yeah, that's got Van Gogh all over it, though that is not a bad thing. So remember you are not solely IMITATING, but TAKING, and creating something different.
• For an example of what this might look like in actuality, take a look at Martha's at the top of the page. Henri Matisse becomes the inspiration for her cut-outs. What would Matisse have done with the olive branch? Martha suggests a possibility with her piece. 

A word (or two of advice) if you happen to be working with more abstract inspirations: 

How would justice revise your symbol? Huh? This is probably weird to think about, but what better way to stretch our creativity and our thinking than taking something from one system and translating it to another. We do this all the time (almost naturally). Think about the sounds we might associate with an elephant. If we put an elephant in a film and needed our background music (nondiegetic sound) to be commiserate with the elephant, we would likely use a deep sounding instrument, like a tuba. We would not likely use a flute or piccolo--that is unless we were trying to make it funny. 

In film-making this idea is especially important because the sound director would more often than not search for commiserate sounds or elements to convey something to the audience. We think loud and heavy equals elephant. Not soft and sweet.  Film theorists such as Dudley Andrew and Brian McFarlane talk about these adaptations that happen across genres--when a written word has to be transposed into a picture. Or when a visual picture needs sound to accompany the image.  Film is one of the artistic mediums that spends a lot of time thinking about these questions of adaptation and transformation.

If you are working abstractly, you may have to think in an adaptive manner--what would justice want my symbol to look like?

Remember this is a sketchbook, so your response does not have to be a mini-masterpiece!!!!!!! It just has to be sketched out to convey a possibility.

More inspiration:

Krystin's mandala.

Christine's key symbol integrated into her mandala.

Michael's deconstructed symbol.

Dan's deconstructed symbol.

Sandra's transformed rainbow.

Megi's mandala.

Joe's mandala.

Sarah's mandala.

Nick's symbols.

Challenge #16: October 17 Challenge

The Acknowledgements Page

Oscar Wilde
In Gratitude for your Genius
Terri

I have been wanting to put this challenge on the docket for a few days now, a challenge which will give us a chance to reflect on the inspirations that surround us.

But we have had so much great stuff going on in terms of the creative ways you have been approaching the symbols and mandalas. We will bring these symbols and such back into the mix very soon, but let's take a day away from them. 

As a side note, I will be posting the deconstructed images I am receiving, starting tomorrow

Just to give you a heads up on where we are journeying in this third week, which we have started, we will move into more cut and paste and integration of multi-media--encouraging us to use differing mediums together (like cut/paste with color pencils, etc.) 

Moreover, to get our collage practice revved up, we will also do some work with image transfers. So in anticipation of that, now would be a good time to start finding some of those photos of people and "things" that are a part of a community you participate in--maybe family or a found community of likeminded thinkers or a sports community or a community of artists or writers. 

Start collecting those images and make photocopies of them using a xerox or photocopying machine. Don't use an inkjet or laser printer/photocopier. Just a standard photocopy machine. Those images will transfer the easiest to start with. We can get into more elaborate transfers as we go along.

For today, at our midway point, let's reflect on some of the influences on our CREATIVE life. 

You are going to create an Acknowledgements Page that shows gratitude to those who have inspired you, pushed you, encouraged you to press on with your creative life. Above, I share a picture of Oscar Wilde, someone who has inspired and influenced me throughout my entire academic career--at times I was enthralled with his writing, at other times I did not understand him, but always, his thinking, vision, humor, and biting intelligence have inspired me.

Below is a picture of a group of students, who have also really inspired me. They were seniors in last spring semester's LCS 491, Senior Practicum.

LCS 491 seniors at their REDay display in April 2014.

I want to share some of their work as we go along. Today, I am sharing examples of a way to construct a visual acknowledgements page.  One activity we completed in the course was a construction of an accordion book--a tiny one--and students were asked to put images and such that inspired them into the pages.

Josh's example. Josh created mini renditions of art work by artists who have influenced him. He used torn/cut paper to create meditations on these works. He worked with paper and liquid adhesive.

Van Gogh's Starry Night

Klimt's The Kiss

Mondrian's Composition II in Red, Blue and Yello

Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earing

Dana's example. Dana has always been inspired by horror stories and film, and during the course, she was in the process of writing a horror novel. She drew her inspiration from these past great writers and films and created mini reflections, using several different media: pencil, cut/paste, paint.

Sweeney Todd and Mama

Silence of the Lambs

Edgar Allen Poe, The Ring and Dexter

Here is your turn:

• We won't be creating mini-books but I would like you to divide your sketch page into mini-segments. Maybe 3, maybe 4, maybe 5. Think about how we divided the page into three squares when we set up our 3 step progression. Keep in mind that we had these squares overlapping. You don't have to overlap these segments, but don't be afraid of that option. Think about what works best for you.
• Choose a shape to work with for each mini-segment. The collage books above used small squares because of the nature of the page. You can create a series of circles or ovals, that might remind you of a wall in a home that has family pictures hung on it. You may work with squares or triangles or another shape of your choosing (hearts, or maybe the symbol you are currently working with.) You can mix and match different shapes.
• Arrange these mini-segments on the page as you wish. Try not to do more than 5 because it may get to be overwhelming and make the page a little cluttered. 
• Put into these shapes/your mini-segments a reflection on someone who has creatively inspired you--perhaps a musician (known or unknown), a writer, a theorist, a painter, an architect, a family member . . . . 
• You can use whatever medium you wish, and you can work with a mixture of word and image. You can work solely with lettering if you wish, too.
• Before you begin !!!!! consider putting a wash on the back to hold the segments together--either in water color or another medium (like pencil). Or establish a cut/paste background.

Good luck! Keep the images coming: thassele@bryant.edu

ANNOUNCEMENT: VISITING ARTIST

Rob Dunlavey

Children’s Book Illustrator and Fine Artist

The Creativity Sketchbook Challenge

Wednesday, October 22, 5:30-6:30

Gulski (Open to the Public)

Rob and his crystal cities.

Rob Dunlavey studied painting and printmaking as an undergraduate at Southern Illinois University, later receiving an MFA in sculpture from Claremont Graduate University. He has been a free-lance illustrator for the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor and Business Week. His digitally created images have been published in textbooks and electronic media, including computer games.

He has created murals for children’s museums and hospitals in several locations. His published children’s books include Bonne Nuit Petit Ours, The Dandelion’s Tale, and Counting Crows.

Dunlavey’s latest work is "sophisticated and humorous, simple, graphic, sincere with attitude, casually oblique and direct.” A prolific diarist, Dunlavey has filled nearly one hundred black sketchbooks at an increasingly alarming rate with designs of his own invention. This material is now, with the help of many people, finding its way into stories for children. 

Rob will speak about his sketchbook practice and its impact on his work. He will lead the audience in a sketch based on "never giving up on an image" and using visuals to tell stories.

 Rob Dunlavey lives in suburban Boston with his wife Stephanie, two daughters, two cats and Bruce, a humor-impaired tropical fish.

Sponsored by the Center for Program Innovation, The College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of English and Cultural Studies.

Challenge #15: October 16 Challenge

Back to our Symbols: 

With Today's Sketch you are Half Way through the Challenge

Bravo!!!!

Alexandra and Miss Moffat.

I hope you enjoyed working with the mandalas. This is a style of work that you can return to as many times as you want. The images I have seen are really quite extra-ordinary.

Tori's mandala.

Martha's mandala.

Laura's mandala.

With today's challenge, we return to do some work with our symbols. Let's see what others having been doing so far--creating both black & white and color renditions.

Sante's Nike flame.

Gabriela's colorful Om.

Andrew's powerful fire dancer.

Ali's yin yang in color.

And in B&W.

Let's work to further abstract our symbols. So far we have done so through value (working in B&W) and through color (playing with color possibilities for our symbols).

Now, we can think about composition or placement of the pieces of our symbol on the picture plane:

• Take your symbol and start to deconstruct it.  What lines and shapes do you see? For instance, in Ali's yin yang, we can find circles and tear drops shapes. Also, she added some creative stripes to the colorful U.S. flag version of her symbol. I ask you to imagine taking all those pieces and tossing them into the air. Where might they fall? How might they overlap each other? What space would they take up on the page, or off the page, and what tension among the shapes would be created by the proximity of the shapes/lines to each other on the page.
•  Sketch out an option (or if you feel adventurous) two.
• Looking at that abstraction/deconstruction of your original symbol, how are you now inspired to color it?  What seems appropriate? What might be fun or compelling? 
• This deconstructed, colored symbol is your sketch for today--for the midway part of the challenge.
• Your choice of medium--color pencils, water color, cut/paste. You decide.

Keep the images coming.  thassele@bryant.edu

Isabel's collage.