A Dangerous Path High School Art

Studio Art had two weeks to create a drawing dealing with the theme, "A Dangerous Path". I showed them video game stills, some sci/fi fantasy images, photos of booby-traps, and I can't remember what else. This was by far the most successful project of this year.

Text Art High School Art

This was a two week assignment in Art Theory 2. I did a presentation of artists that use text such as Ruscha, Kruger, Pettibon, etc. They have to mix a realistic image with a text of their choice in a medium of their choice although I should have asked them to use just india ink. They shouldn't have too many choices to make. Too much freedom and they become paralyzed.

AP Studio Art Concentration High School Art

I have six AP Studio Art students this year up from four last year which was my first year teaching the class. We had a 50% passing rate last year and hope to do a little better this year. Pinewood is a small college-prep school where most kids are in multiple AP classes, sports, clubs, service groups, etc. So this group has a particular difficulty with putting in the time needed to make a great AP portfolio. That aside, the kids are fantastic and are working their butts off. Here are a few photos from their concentrations. Much like I did when I was in high school, they love Surrealism. They have two weeks to finish each piece in their concentration sections. Click on the image to get a bigger view.

Painting Non-Objective Abstraction High School Art

Highschoolart is back. Our school scanner wasn't working, but I have found another means to bring you the best of Pinewood's High Schoolers. For these photos, the Art Theory 2 class stretched and gessoed their canvases and are starting to create non-objective abstractions. I did a power point on Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, Post-Painterly Abstraction, and contemporary abstraction. I used images from Pollock, Kline, De Kooning, Rothko, Newman, Louis, Frankenthaler, Stella, and Todd Chilton for the contemporary painter. The kids have two weeks to mess around with squeegees, palette knifes, masking tape, and brush.

Aurel Schmidt

Normally artists that primarily do drawings as their main art practice seem to fly under the art world radar. Not so with Aurel Schmidt. She is only 27 yrs old (about) and has already had solo shows at Deitch Projects in NYC and Peres Projects in LA. She draws tiny abject objects like flies, maggots, rats, used contraceptives, and cigarette butts, and patterns them into grinning faces, "zombie" forms, witty phrases, and gobs of hair that look like they've been pulled out of a bathroom drain. She is a master draftswoman and has the patience and work ethic to construct highly complex writhing forms. Her content seems to reflect a bleak world view that everything is not only dying, but rotting on the inside. Schmidt is from Vancouver and grew up with organic eating hippy parents. I can picture her standing in front of the families compost pile getting ideas. Now that she has moved to New York, she seems to be channeling the detritus of a burnout hipster lifestyle through the lens of high modern art in De Kooning and Louis Morris. As her drawings look more towards art history I would hope they don't get sucked too far in. I am sure that if anyone were to appreciate the fox eating his own intestines from the recent film Antichrist (which I have not seen), it would be Aurel Schmidt.

Robyn O'neil

Robyn O'neil's wall size graphite drawings evoke a traditional sense of the sublime. Massive waves, mountains, and storm clouds drawn in exagerated dark values envelope tiny humans. A great definition I heard of the sublime is looking out safely over the ocean at the edge of a cliff. Fear is being in that ocean. In O'neil's work, the viewer is able to feel a bit of that dread while the figures in the drawings fight for their lives. My favorite blockbuster movies are those with overwhelming natural disasters. Mother nature on steroids would be a proper blockbuster phrase to use. The movie 2012 seems to be one more of these films showing in November. If you watch a trailer for the movie, make sure and watch the first one that came out.

Emma Kunz

At first glance Emma Kunz's drawings reminded me of my first hour with graph paper and a ruler. At second glance they remind of the same, although she took more time and has a more sophisticated palette. That's ok. Her process is simple and the final product is beautiful, especially when viewed in a grid as seen on her website. They look like a kind of spiritual geometry that is a blueprint for the soul. The drawings are meant to have an
"encoded immeasurable knowledge". The NYC based artist Fred Loomis has probably been influenced by this work. Kunz was known as a healer in her time and the drawings were possibly intended to heal the viewer. Her biography is as interesting as her drawings are.

Matt Furie

I remember seeing Matt Furie's work in a postcard show at The Lab in San Francisco several years ago. He filled the box with postcard sized color pencil drawings of unique human/monster/alien beings that could have worked well as either Pokemon or Magic playing cards. His cartoon style wasn't completely polished yet but the draftsmanship and sheer number of original creations was impressive. He now seems to have a small army of defined characters that he uses to play out small narratives of everyday life. Some of these characters are appropriated from 80's pop culture such as a Terminator, Skeletor from the He-Man cartoon, or Falcor the flying luck dragon from The Never Ending Story. The role of the character is changed in Furie's narratives. Falcor becomes a ravenous flesh-eating monster, Freddy is a loving father, and Skeletor just wants to kick-it with his buds and ride BMX bikes with well-designed pads and pegs. The actions of a grade-schooler in the 80's are played out by his heroes from TV in a paralell universe. Sometimes these characters dabble in the actions of adults (mostly sexual). Furie's creatures are not limited to pop-culture associations though. He has countless creatures that are loosely based on any variety of animal/human/robot/plant life mixture. Cartoon characters are made with more detail and characters from life are drawn more simply, creating an in-between physiology. It seems that the characters more interesting to him make returns in his drawings and begin to form lives and personalities of their own. Overall, his work mirrors a human population that loves having fun, being with family, copulation, and the occasional person that literally wants to rip your head off and eat it with a smile. Furie shows with Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco. He has exhibited at the Cartoon Network studios, New Image Art Gallery in LA, Adobe Books in San Francisco, and Giant Robot in NYC. Matt is from Columbus Ohio went to the Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio.

Frank Magnotta

In June of this year, my wife and I were in NYC to set up a show and spent a day hitting the Chelsea galleries. Although we didn't come out of that experience like we usually do (commiserating over the end-of-days) we did feel again let down by the art world and it's predictable glut of text-heavy, anti-beauty, anti-meaning art. There are always exceptions though, and that's why we return.

I have always had a good experience in Derek Eller Gallery and this time was no exception. Hanging was a solo exhibition by Frank Magnotta. Frank hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn. My first introduction to Frank's work happened in the Phaidon Press book, Vitamin D. His work stood out in a group of very strong artists. I think that what immediately strikes me about his work is his complete control over the medium of graphite, his ambitiousness in scale, and how there doesn't seem to be a lazy square inch on any drawing. This used to be the rule and now it is the exception. Seeing his large-scale drawings in person affirmed what I had seen in Vitamin D. , but like always, the drawings in person are far more impressive. The works on view consisted of complex structures made up of American low-culture and consumer kitsch signage with amorphous forms, sitting in surrealistic planescapes. They are huge and a little overwhelming. Frank also makes portraits but there were none in this show. The Artforum critic's picks review compares Frank's work to Paul Noble because I think there just isn't another drawer that makes such monumental graphite drawings that are this tight. If you ever have a chance, don't miss seeing these in person.

Animated gif High School Art

For about the last week of school, the Photoshop class made these animated gifs using Photoshop. Thanks to Chris Coy for helping to get them animated in blogspot.

AP Studio Art Assignment #1

Thank you to those that sent me their images. Thank you to those that sent me your image on time. Thank you mostly to those who sent me their image on time and only sent one image that they deemed was the highest quality image.

On to grading. I am not going to give these a letter grade yet. I'll do that when you guys come in the first week. I will however grade them on the AP scale of 1-5 and tell you why. Please give me feedback on my feedback if you have any. Continue having a dope summer and I look forward to seeing your next assignment.


3 This drawing is missing some midtones. There are plenty of darks and lights, but not quite enough in the middle. Sometimes this is a good thing in art when you want to exaggerate, but not in a strict representational assignment. Maybe the photo wasn't great. That's why I won't grade these until I see them in person. The guitar is placed square on the golden section on the right which works. But you have to many interesting objects that are too far off of those edges. A good composition plays with the edges without jumping over. More detail. Again, on seeing the real thing, I might change my mind on that. But more detail is something that can always be done and it will always help your case.



4 The detail is great. Several of the objects are very difficult to draw and the temptation is draw a symbol of the thing rather than the actual object. This drawer did not give in to temptation. I would like to see a bit more of the midtones. Not much. The composition isn't dynamic. It's static. You could do to have something going off the page. The top of that frame should probably be poking over the edge. The space behind your objects isn't completely defined. The objects seem to float a little. Nit picking. This is an excellent drawing.



2 Every inch is covered in graphite. That's good. Lot's of midtones. Good. Composition is good. Where there seems to be trouble is in your rendering of the objects. You seem to be doing what I talked about earlier. You aren't drawing the actual binding to those books, you are drawing a symbol, cartoon, simplification of a binding. To get away from this you need to spend a significant amount of time looking at the binding and not be afraid of the work it will take to get the letters perfectly straight and draw that little curve where the binding moves to the cover where the page bends. There is plenty of detail, but it needs to be detail that exists and that will help define the object as a 3-Dimensional object in space. Also, not the best photo. Don't use an iphone.



2.5 A late drawing loses 10% credit after one day, 20% credit after that. The composition is great. Maybe too many midtones. Many of the objects begin to lose their form and blend in with other objects. It's difficult to see what the items are. That kind of ambiguity is great in art sometimes, but again, not in this assignment and generally speaking, not in the AP Portfolio. Some objects looked hurried. The patterns that emerge from the cast shadows from the objects look great.

AP Studio Art Summer Assignment Examples

Hello AP Studio Art students! I hope you are all having dope summer thus far. I know I am. I just got over a cold. I draw and play XBox every day. I just finished Fallout 3 and bought the expansions. I'll put an image of what I'm doing later in the summer. So, You have some drawings due in a couple of days. I hope you all look at this post. All of the drawings I put up are the quality and have the amount of finish that I want to see in your drawings. I hope they help. Email me if you are having troubles. Later, Mr. Smith