Campfire song

I began this class wanting to create artworks that reflected the places we would study in the hopes that what I gleaned from the course would allow me to make work the illustrated my past summer abroad in Europe. 

Sitting around the camp fire each week 

listening to fantastical stories told by Tony 

about far away (yet very close!) lands 

with people who at first were just faces

and have now turned into friends 

whose art I've seen grow 

and evolve 

and blossom. 

The semester has been an inspiration. 

I am now, at the end of the semester, seeing that creating art about a place and time is not all about replicating the facts about that place. While this is important, weaving in a part of my artistic style and experiences into these stories makes for art that is more meaningful to me and allows me to have a deeper and more personal connection to a place that I have never visited. Making art is not about replication or copying, but rather, creating ideas that undulate in and out of what I feels and what actually exists. 

Greenland Whale Fishery

I was mesmerized by this song when I first listened to it --it drew me into a new and fantastical world that seemed so far away, yet extremely tangible in my imagination. The life of the sailors was fascinating and alluring to me in that it seemed that all the sailors made a definitive decision to get on a ship and catch this huge whale. When do we make definitive decisions like this anymore? The idea of catching this huge whale with a minuscule ship seems wholly improbable to me. But the idea of dedicating a lifetime to trying to attain this enormous (physically and metaphorically) goal is commendable.  

Honey bee

Muddy Waters' honey bee seems to drift in and out of his life, much like the buzz of a honey bee when it is flying around you. He sings about coming and going, travel, and movement, but it seems like in the end when his honey bee is through with buzzing around, she comes home. 

Cornbread & Molasses

Take This Hammer
Leadbelly
Work song
Raw edges
Railroads
Labor
Brick yards
Hammering
Rebellion 
Corn bread and molasses 

Cornbread and Molasses 

Clay and thread 

Louis shot by a water gun?

I was tired of making depressing art about murder ballads so I opted for a more cheerful approach to the project this week. Louis Collin is a song written by Mississippi John Hurt after a conversation he overheard about a man, Louis, who is murdered. I figured that if Hurt overheard the conversation, their must have been some discrepancies --in light of this thought, I included a half naked man with a water gun, and a lumberjack with deflective laser beam eyes. These images are all strung together on wire frame glasses so viewers can watch the action unfold before their eyes. 

Barbary Allen

This weeks piece is an homage to Gustave Klimt, and Austrian painted and one of my favorite artists. These characters come from some of his most prominent works, namely The Three Stages of Women and The Women Friends. I was interested in displacing these characters from their original environment and creating a new place for them on the wooden panel where they could have a new dialogue. I have been playing with the idea of presenting a narrative, or scenes from multiple points in time, on one surface. This is easily achieved with film or music, but chronology, in my opinion, is difficult on a two-dimensional surface. The collage style lends to this idea because if allow you to overlap parts and explore different subjects' relationships with one another. 

The story of Barbary Allen is illustrated in this circular motif. Towards the left side of the panel stands cruel and composed Barbary. In the middle is Young William Green, weeping over his rejection and eventual death. Laying on the bottom is Barbary again --this time in her death bed caring the burden of William Green's death from heartbreak. 

Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

Ralph Stanley's instrumental style is captivating. Each note is percussive and pointed --each its own entity, strung together by what seems like an obvious beat for a folk song. In his version of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, he uses this distinct and quite charming style of playing to suggests that death is not something that should be mourned, but rather a celebration of life. This notion pairs well with the song, which sings about a circle being broken when a loved one that has recently passed. 

What I got from the song is that we form a bunch of circles, circles of friends, friends that are into food, friends that listen to you cry, friends that you get wasted with.

It's not just people though --you create circles of ideas -- your connection to the world. 

Those connections, those circles of ideas, circles of friends are broken when a person passes 

--but these ideas and people will eventually meet you in heaven. 

A circle to me means movement and change. In life, a forward trajectory isn't linear but rather organic like a circle overlapping on top of itself.