Gideon's Full Portfolio

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My complete portfolio can be viewed at rebeccazerby.com

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"I only care to live to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness"

John Muir

Final Portfolio

1: Wallpaper

2: Mixed Media

3: Propaganda

4: Final Project (Mixed media wallpaper)

Limited Edition Print inspiration

A yearbook, also known as an annual, is a book to record, highlight, and commemorate the past year of a school or a book published annually.

"When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world" - John Muir

Echinacea

Invasive plants are a major problem in the United States, our native landscape is slowly being overtaken. One of the main problems is that many people don.t know which plants are native and invasive. By creating a poster with the native plants, gardeners are aware of the native plants that are ok to plant in their garden.

For my final Limited Edition print Im creating a poster that illustrated the native hardy perennial species. I have done simple line drawings and colored them with a light wash of watered down acrylic paints. I scanned them and used photoshop to arrange them on the page.

This is Echinacea purpurea, the purple cone flower, which is my all time favorite plant.

limited edition print inspiration

some inspiration for my yearbook "montage that doesnt look like a montage" idea...

Save the Rainforest

I am very pleased at how my recycled chandeliers came out. I wasn't expecting the shadows to be so prominent on the walls. Im upset I wasn't able to project an image of the rainforest on the walls but since it wouldn't have covered the entire room, it wouldn't have looked as good as it did in my head. With the rainforest the shadows wouldn't be visible, so it worked out for the better.

Waking Up Early

I'm seriously considering doing this: http://the99percent.com/tips/6954/the-1-step-plan-for-super-productivity

When I interview creatives, I often ask them what advice they would give to the next generation, the up-and-comers. Curiously, there’s one incredibly important habit that nearly all of them possess that is almost never mentioned. So what is the secret ingredient in their productivity regime? It’s simple: They get up early.

I feel like i have a lot more time when I get up early and try to work.

3D Project Inspiration

For my 3D Propaganda project, I am creating a series of paper dolls to promote eating disorder awareness. This image is my an artist named Lisa Perrin, who creates a lot of paper dolls and recently commissioned these for a museum gift shop.

mixed media project

This is an image of my final mixed media project. For this project, I was inspired by vintage beach photos. I began with a bunch of found imagery and compiled a montage in photoshop. After printing this on canvas paper, I did some illustration over top to enhance the collage idea further. I kept the illustrations in the same style and muted colors as the photos felt. I am happy with the final product. However, I think this piece could have benefited by being larger in size.

the Curtain

I present to you the Curtain of Leaves. Im really pleased how it turned out and it has inspired me for further projects to go bigger and bolder. I enjoy working with fabric and other non paper materials and will take that idea into my next project.

Wallpaper

This is a portion of my final wallpaper. The simplicity and crispness of the lines helped to achieve the look I was going for. By having a simple line drawing, the lines turn into shapes and overlap creating new shapes. It becomes less about the plants and more into an organic pattern that grows up and down the wall.

I also tried the pattern in different color combinations and each one looks really nice. Its interesting to be able to change the colors based on your mood of the day. If only there was a way for rooms to change colors based on your mood haha.

Curtain of Leaves

For the third project I drew simple line drawings of leaves, mainly tropical/ tender perennial plants, then scanned them into the computer. In Illustrator I then used live trace then copied and pasted, changes the size and orientation and printed on the pre gessoed canvas.

To make my unique mark I painted into the leaves with oil paints in greens and dyed the back of the canvas with purple dyes. I cut out all the leaves and sewed them into the curtain. This is a sneak peak, the full curtain will be revealed in crit!

Wallpaper

I just realized I never posted my finished wallpaper. It's a solar system that tiles both vertically and horizontally. I printed it 4-up on 72x24 inch paper, but I'd rather have printed it at the right size. It's an Illustrator document, so it's easy to scale.



I did have a minor problem with printing. Mars wasn't right up against the edge, so I had a very small blue line going right through its middle.

Mixed Media Artist

So for the mixed media project, I've decided to deviate from my normal (pretty colors!  illustrator vectors! etc!) aesthetic and do something a little...creepier.  In honor of the up coming halloween holiday, of course.

Here's a little taste:

Milton Glaser

Since my project for mixed media is a collage project, I thought I'd look at some collage artists. One artist that Bill Deering recommended me to was Milton Glaser. Although I was looking for torn paper collage artists, Glaser does do cut paper collage, as you can see in this image.



Even though the image is 2D, it appears to have a dimensionality to it. I have another project that I'm going to do with torn paper, and figuring out a way to give a dimensionality to it is a very important aspect of the piece, even though the final result will be digital.

Finished Wallpaper

Here's a screen shot  of what my final wallpaper turned out to look like.

I think if I could do it again I might make each tile a bit bigger, so as not to be overwhelmed by so many lines on such a large surface area.  Other than that, I'm very happy with how it came out and I'd actually love to hang it in my room.  I actually have it tiled as by desktop on my laptop.  :)

WALLPAPER SAMPLES.

Hodes' article

I really enjoyed this article, especially as someone who incorporates both analog and digital techniques in most of my work. One point I found particularly interesting was the possibility that an artist does not feel the same emotional attachment to a piece of work that is solely digital. I can understand this being the case for some people, myself included. As someone who loves hand drawing and traditional styles of working, I feel a certain connection to a piece that has that hand labor in it, even if the final outcome is a digital piece. I like the idea of seeing my hand work taken to a new form and delivered in a new way when I render it with digital capabilities.

One thing I did not necessarily agree with, however, was the statement that hand work is a work meticulous and lengthy process. Although in many cases, this may be true, I personally find a lot of digital work to be very tedious and frustrating. For me, analog work comes more naturally, so that tends to seem less meticulous than digital work which I need to spend more time and concentration on.

jochem van wetten

I was very inspired by artist Jochem Van Wetten's work. He mostly uses photography in his work but collages and edits photographic images to create interesting and surreal compositions. This particular image is a piece of his that also incorporated illustration. I am in awe of some of his pieces and how visually compelling they are.

http://www.jochemvanwetten.nl/

Carolyn Saxby

I was interested in the works of Carolyn Saxby. She works in mixed media textile art. She incorporates machine embroidery and continues with hand embroidery integrating beads and various types of threads. There is a quilted feel to some of her pieces but I am drawn to her more atmospheric pieces that are accomplished with swirls of felt. All of her inspirations and processes can be seen on her blog at

http://carolynsaxby.blogspot.com/

Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) was an artist who is most closely identified with the assemblage movement. The process of assemblage involves combining found objects. Many other artists have done similar things, such as Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, but Cornell is most well known for his glass fronted boxes. Unlike many other artists, however, Cornell didn’t use trash or other discarded objects, but previously beautiful or delicate objects he found in thrift stores. Cornell would then arrange these objects, often themed, in wooden boxes with glass fronts, sometimes even making them interactive. He also experimented with film.

Mixed Media Artist

Browsing through mixed media artists' websites, I came across one that appealed to me in particular: Cindy Couling.  I am especially interested in her altered books, which incorporate a lot of vintage photos and imagery, which I am interested in including in my own project. 

 

Click here for more of Cindy's altered books. 

Wallpaper Sample

My wallpaper for this project is based off of a sketch from over the summer.  I scanned the original into illustrator and traced it by hand using the pen tool.  I plan on tiling the image to create my wallpaper. 

wallpaper drawings

For my wallpaper design I started with simple back line drawings. I chose the plant Pachysandra because it is commonly used as a ground cover in landscapes so I thought it would be interesting to translate that to a wallpaper design. I used Illustrator to live trace the drawings then I played around with size, placement and color until a pattern was created.

Takashi Murakami

Takashi Murakami is a Japanese artist who seeks to blend current and traditional styles. His works tend to have the bright, illustrated colors often seen in Japanese pop culture and anime, yet also the flatness of traditional Japanese art. Below you can see his wallpaper work Jellyfish Eyes.

Tom Slaughter

Tom Slaughter was born in New York City in 1955 and has since had more than 30 solo exhibitions in New York, LA, Miami, Vancouver, Germany, and Japan. He has worked as a printmaker in collaboration with Durham Press for 20 years, and his editions are included in the collections of MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

"New York City Watertowers" features the silhouetted cityscape of downtown New York. In this graphic pattern, Tom Slaughter translates his signature images to designer wallpaper available in 3 colors.  

The graphic nature of his work appeals to me in that it creates a seemingly simple repeatable pattern.  However, upon closer inspection, Slaughter uses black and white to subtly play with the background/foreground and light/shadow relationships in this design. 

Michael Craig-Martin

Michael Craig-Martin isn't what you would call a wallpaper designer but his large scale mural paintings can resemble wallpapers. He doesn't use patterns that can be repeated, as seen in the lower picture, but patterns more like the top picture could potentially be repeated to continuously be repeated around the room. I love Michaels use of a simple line drawing that is transformed into a busy yet simple and not overwhelming wall. His eye for color is also very bold and unique.

Davis Reading; Art in the Digital Age

I found this article to raise interesting points and support for the on going debate on how the digital age of art will effect the idea of "original" art. Im not Davis ever really makes it clear on how he feels, as I think he himself is torn on the subject and all the different forms of technology that come into play. I personally think that the idea of "art" is ever changing and that 'traditional' forms of art are not dying out or being reproduced beyond repair, but simply that new forms of art are being born. These new forms open the doors to so many new ways of working and creating and the digital world is there to embrace in terms of these new methods. A painting will never look like the original on a computer screen but it is still a great way of circulating your art work to an audience you never would have been exposed to otherwise. I think any artist who does n0t embrace the existence of the internet is in many ways limiting themselves.

I found davis' explanation of "the world's first collaborative sentence" to be very interesting. This is a perfect example of the power of technology and the digital age can reach people in ways that were unimaginable before it's existence in our world.

Wallpaper Artist: Talia Greene

Our discussion in class today about finding artists who incorporate the idea of wallpaper patterns into their work immediately made me think of a current contemporary artist named Talia Greene. I first was introduced to her work when I was assigned a research paper assignment in my Contemporary Art class last winter session, in which we were to visit the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts in Wilmington, DE and chose an exhibition to develop a thesis about. I was very interested in Talia Greene's exhibit the minute I stepped into the room and only continued to be as I researched her work and the concepts that drive it as well as her influences. She is a great example of an artist who incorporates wallpapers and patterns into her work and her exploration of order vs chaos through nature. Here is an example:

Two signs in the installation, Entropy Filigree, at American University. Left sign: Stairway Exit. Right sign: Electics. Each 12" x 9.5", Framed Wallpaper and Silhouette Paper.

Reaction to the Davis reading

Davis' The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction is kind of confusing, because he seems almost to change his point of view halfway through. After reading through important parts again, I believe what he's trying to say is that it would take some study to find the difference between the original and a reproduction because we don't have the same ideas of originality because of digital influence. His second point, I think, is that because of this, the original art and the digital reproductions are merging in our minds.

I disagree with some of this. Digital reproductions of paintings are not the same as viewing a painting. It's hard to know the size of the painting, particularly if there's no context. Even if there is, it's not the same as experiencing it in front of you. I can Google "Mona Lisa" and see the painting in seconds, but it may be cropped, the colors may not be right, etc. But how do I know if it's seven feet wide or thirty inches? What if it's an oil painting? I can't see the dimensional quality of it.

It's not just limited to paintings. A Photoshop file may be flattened and exported as a JPG or a PNG, but you can never get an idea of HOW the file was made unless you have the layered document. The same with a RAW photograph.

I believe the ideas of originality are still in mind. You can find originality anywhere. It's true that reproduction and editing have become more popular in our digital age, but to say that the original and the reproduction are merging is silly. Marketability is also a factor. When something sells well, other people want to sell something similar. This has always been, but now, it's just easier.

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