Artist of the Week (5th Week of Feb 25)

Ezequiel Galasso

Ezequiel Galasso is an Argentine industrial designer and luthier who designs electric guitars.  He collaborated with professional skateboarder Gianfranco de Gennaro Gilmour to create his newest line of guitars.  Each guitar in this collection is made out of the wood of old skateboard decks (the deck is the actual board itself).  Both the body and neck of the guitars use the layered maple that comes from the decks.  For the guitar features, buyers can choose from guitars with single volume knobs, whammy bars, and humbucking pickups.  The boards are handmade in Galasso's workshop located in Buenos Aires.  Below are a few of his "skate guitars."

Front view of the guitars

Posterior view of the guitar

Guitar neck detail

Source:

http://www.designboom.com/design/reclaimed-skateboard-decks-transformed-into-electric-guitars/

Weekly Quotation 5:

"You must have chaos within 

you to give birth to a dancing star." 

-Friedrich Nietzsche: German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Friedrich Nietzsche is known for many memorable quotations such as "that which does not kill us makes us stronger" or "without music life would be a mistake."  However, I chose to focus on this quotation which I feel relates to potential creativity that people possess inside them.  What I believe Nietzsche is trying to say is that the chaos (or ugly, unwanted emotions) that people deal with should not be ignored, but utilized.  Negative emotions that can cause people to feel and react strongly can be used as inspiration for pieces of art.  I personally find myself creating my best pieces of art when I am experiencing emotions lacking in optimism such as sadness, regret, grief, longing, hurt, or a mixture of useless or hopelessness.  These emotions make me want to explore the other side of myself that I rarely let anyone see and express this other side in my art through the use of symbolization, metaphor, and surrealism.  Nietzsche understood that art can be inspired by all spectrums of emotion.

Sampling of Nietzsche's work:
The Birth of Tragedy From the Spirit of Music (1872)
Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits (1879)
The Gay Science (1882)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book For All and a Book For None (1885)
Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886)
The Antichrist (1888)

3 Art Pieces (4th Week of Feb 18)

This week I decided to focus on hanging light fixtures.  Light fixtures, such as chandeliers, are practical designs that can be classified as usable art.  Personally, I think that usable art is one of the best kinds of art because it has a dual purpose: its purpose as an object and its purpose to be aesthetically pleasing.  When I'm older and have a house of my own (and hopefully make enough money), I plan to incorporate usable art such as the first and third chandeliers within my house.

Pani Jurek, Test-Tube Chandelier, glass tubes. 2011.

Full View

Detail

Cristina Parreño, Paper Chandeliers, paper tubes.  Madrid, Spain, 2013.

Full View

Detail

Gino Sarfatti Design by FLOS, Replica MOD Chandelier 2097. Original design 1957.

Full view

Detail

Weekly Quotation 4:

"In painting you must give the idea 

of the true by the means of the false." 

-Edgar Degas: French painter, sculptor, and printmaker (also considered founder of impressionism)

I'm going to analyze this quotation by replacing the "painting" with "art." What I believe Degas is saying is that in art you are expressing a solidified fact or opinion through a mean that is unrealistic or contrasting to the truth of said expression.  For instance, in cubism, artists take subject matter and simplify them into basic lines and shapes.  In doing this, the artist is taking the truth (the subject matter that really exists) and turning it into an abstraction which represents the "means of the false."  Artists use abstraction, mood, color, mark-making, line, light, texture, shape, and a multitude of other techniques to make an expression of a truth.

Sampling of Degas' work:

Stage Rehearsal, oil on canvas. 1878-79.

Biomorphic Sketches for Maquettes (Day 4 on Feb 18)

These are my biomorphic designs for the small maquette projects from my sketchbook as well as notes that I wrote about each of the five designs I thought were the most successful in terms of balance, shape, and aesthetics.

I found for my biomorphic designs the most successful ones had shapes where there were little to no concave parts of the inner shape.  I think I'm going to use either sketch #4 or #6.

Notes:

• Sketch 2 derives from the core portion of a Fleur De Lis
• Sketch 4 derives from examining Trefoil symbols and equilateral triangles
• Sketch 5 derives from studying different webs of spiders
• Sketch 6 derives from looking at clovers (especially four leaf ones)
• Sketch 9 derives from perusing different types of playing cards (this is a classic French set)

3 Art Pieces (3rd Week of Feb 11)

This week I decided to focus on pavilion design.  These are a few different designs I found while searching through articles on my Flipboard app.  Personally, I feel like there is something extremely intriguing about pavilion design.  It may be because while the structure is not an actual building, it is interactive to the viewer in the sense that they can walk through it.

Martin Saarinen, Lignum Pavilion, wood. 2010.

Full View

Interior View

MATSYS, Shellstar Pavilion, Coroplast. Hong-Kong, China, 2013.

Full View

Interior View

SHSH Firm, Beer Crate Pavilion, recycled beer crates. Brussels, Belgium, 2008.

Full View

Interior View

Weekly Quotation 3:

"Of course I make mistakes.  I'm human.  If I didn't make mistakes, 
I'd never learn.  You can only go forward by making mistakes." 

-Alexander McQueen: British fashion designer and couturier

This quotation is not only relative to art, but to living life as well.  McQueen shows an optimistic outlook on life with this statement that focuses on seeing the positive in one's negative actions.  It is a given as an artist that one needs to immediately accept the possibility of failure.  What art comes down to is problem-solving and with problem-solving the chance of failure is existent.  However, what McQueen is saying is that when you make a mistake, if you can keep the memory of failure in your mind you can recognize not to do it again, therefore learning from it.  I personally believe people learn by practice and ultimately failure, not finished results or success.  Sure, success is obviously a wonderful thing, but one can only succeed so many times without any failure and still be successful.  But failure is what makes somebody grow because it helps make the brain remember a particular instance and how the instance must be approached differently. 

Sampling of McQueen's work:

Savage Beauty Collection, mixed materials. 2010-2011.

Guidelines For Blog (Day 3 on Feb 11)

Weekly Blog Requirements (Homework)

• One quotation (paragraph analyzation)
• One small article on an artist (small summary)
• Three images of design artwork (list artist name, title, material used)
• Post one progress picture of project

Weekly Blog Requirements (Classwork/Work Process)

• Post progress of in class work (small description included)
• Talk about ideas, difficulties with project, anything used for inspiration

Miscellaneous Notes

• Make comments on other classmates' blogs

Weekly Quotation 2:

"Only put off until tomorrow what 

you are willing to die having left undone."

-Pablo Picasso: Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and stage designer (part of cubism movement)

I interpret this quotation to be Picasso speaking of procrastination.  I personally suffer from procrastination myself, tending to put things off until the very last minute until I'm forced to work on an assignment.  This usually happens with pieces I'm uninterested in, such as school assignments that are technical pieces, void of emotion.  What Picasso is saying is that procrastination is not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes you put your life in perspective because it forces you to see what you are not accomplishing in your life that you may have wanted to.  With his statement, Picasso is saying that you need to accomplish as much as you can in your lifetime and what you leave untouched has to be what you're willing to accept that you can die with not having done.

Sampling of Picasso's work:

Guernica, oil on canvas. 1937.

Work Progress (Day 2 on Feb 4)

Today my partner, Brittany Madara, and I worked on folding the white boxes for the base of our chess set.  In total, we need to make 72 white boxes (and 72 black boxes as well) that are each folded from 8 x 8 inch paper.  When laying on its back, each box has a width of 3 inches, a length/height of 1.5 inches, and a depth of 3 inches.

Bone folders are a godsend.  We're using extremely thick card stock paper for our boxes and making the fourth final fold is a NIGHTMARE without a bone folder.  They're nifty tools and I was lucky to have one left over from high school AP Art.

Research for Module Project (Day 1 on Jan 28)

This is the instructions we are using to fold the origami squares (we added our own variations to create perfect cubes):
"Easy Origami Box Instructions"

This is the blog we found which inspired much of our ideas for our final project idea:
"Original Design - Unique and Bizarre Chess Sets"

A few of the pictures we favored that provided much inspiration: