REFLECTION

Where do I even start?? First off, I just want to thank Ms. Kiick for an AMAZING experience and for all of the very hard work that she does for our school's art community. Even though the budget cuts took away all but one art course, the arts at HTHS have survived and thrived all thanks to Ms. Kiick and her incredible dedication as an art teacher. Secondly, I can't believe I'm graduating high school next week!! I also can't believe that this will be my last HTHS art blog post! I will be attending Bucknell University next year, and will continue my journey as an artist, with a Major in Studio Art. My three years of art in high school have aided me in discovering many new forms of art and countless new ways of looking at the world. These are years that I shall never forget, and will no doubt affect me for the rest of my life.

SLIDESHOW 2012-2013

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X-boK2J5dU

short story

Sleeping With Spiders

By Alec Rogers

He lived in a house unlike any other. It was a two-story home fabricated entirely out of glass of every color a person could imagine. Mountains upon mountains surrounded the little house. He was 15 years old and loved to explore and always wondered what lay beyond the monstrous mountains that enveloped his family’s house. He was very tall for his age. He had short black hair and eyes as green as the moss that grew on the tree he could see from his bedroom. He and his family had acquired acute hunting skills over the years. They had to in order to survive in their harsh environment. They feasted only on the occasional wild creature that would pass though their area. But despite their living conditions, as a family, they were content with living in the mountains. He had no siblings. Only the boy and his two parents lived in the house and he had yet to tell his parents his secret.

         
Every night a spider would come to him in his dreams. This spider would take him on adventures over the wall of mountains he so wished to climb every day of his existence. His parents always told him that the mountains were too dangerous to climb but the spider obviously had a very different opinion on the subject. It was the same spider in every dream. The spider was massive. Its legs were very skinny and long and were as sharp as daggers at the ends. The spider’s eyes were like two very deep pools of blood. Unbeknownst to him, this would be his last night with the spider.

          
This time the dream didn’t start out in his bedroom, where it had always started before. This time they didn’t travel over the mountains. Each experience was always different, but never this different. This time the dream started off at the foot of a dark and rather forbidding forest full of twisting black trees that came together to create a walkway into the forest. As always, he willingly followed the spider into the woods, trusting the spider’s judgment as he always did. The boy heard a screeching noise in the distance. It was the most terrible sound he had ever heard in his life and it only built in intensity as they made their way farther into the forest. The noise became so unbearable at one point that the boy had to stop in his tracks before the spider saw and forced the boy to push onward. They finally reached the spider’s destination. At the dead end of the forest, there was what appeared to be a well. It was constructed of little red bricks and looked as if it had been there for a very long time. The noise vanished as they started to approach the well and a deafening silence enveloped the two of them. The spider had never had the ability of talking so he only motioned toward the boy and then towards the well as if asking him to go into the well. The boy then hastily replied to the spider’s request with a shake of his head. The spider had always been very convincing but had never asked him do something like this before. It was clear that the spider wouldn’t take no for an answer. The spider took the boy and tossed him down the well. It seemed like forever before he heard the deafening sound of his head crashing against water. And that was the last time the spider visited the boy in his sleep.

BLIND CONTOUR

A few weeks ago we started making blind contour self portraits. I haven't finished mine, but you can see the work in progress below. So far, I have dyed the background, outlined the original blind portraits with a different pen, and used a special pencil along with the help of a little water to bring out the lines in the drawings. I haven't decided what to write on it yet and I'm hoping to do something else with it after finishing up with the pencil.

EMPTY BOWLS

I loved getting back into clay and making bowls for the Empty Bowls Dinner. This year I wanted to create special looking bowls as opposed to the usual small bowls that I made last year for the event. I tried a different design for each bowl/tray and experimented with different glazes that I didn't use last year. Below are some pictures of a few bowls that I created and glazed.

PAPER LANTERNS

I really enjoyed making lanterns this marking period. I have completed 3 (two of which I gave to family members for Christmas) so far and I'm currently finishing another one. My main lantern (above) was inspired by the season of fall. The barren trees suggest winter but I was thinking more of the wind and the motions that the trees make when the wind blows against them, especially in the fall season. My original lantern's color was not altered from its original white while my other three lanterns were colored before cutting out each of their respective patterns.

Artist Research Post

- ROY LICHTENSTEIN -

Roy Lichtenstein, born October 27, 1923 in Manhattan, was a pop-artist who, starting in the 60's, transformed people's overall perception of art. Today, Lichtenstein is best known for his blown-up comic book portraits of girls & other cartoon-ish images. Lichtenstein used Ben-Day dots in his art in order to give his pieces a comic book-like feeling. Lichtenstein's new style of pop art was anti-everything, including the previous style he used and the most popular style of the time, Abstract Expressionism. Lichtenstein wanted to see "the difference between commercial drawing and fine art drawing". Lichtenstein differed from the other "king" of pop art, Andy Warhol, in that he had a different style of painting and lacked the celebrity persona that Warhol had. Lichtenstein was against the "pop machine" and opposed to much of what Warhol was doing at the time. Lichtenstein took the concept of commercial art and flipped it upside down. 

I really like Lichtenstein because he proved that he wasn't afraid to mess with what the public felt comfortable with. He turned the art world upside down when he first arrived on the scene and many were wondering if the pieces he was creating were even qualified as works of art. He wasn't afraid to do something that nobody else was doing, and I really respect him for that.

I love this painting a lot because it differs greatly from some of his other earlier paintings which strictly feature the three primary colors and the color black. Girl In Window (above) uses brighter hues of all three primaries plus a dark green for the window. I also love all of the energy that was put into in the painting.

 

I saw this piece, Perforated Seascape #1, when I visited Lichtenstein: A Retrospective in D.C. this past December. I loved how different this one was from all of the other landscape paintings he did. It consisted of two panels (about 8 inches apart) which were either covered in blue dots or red dots. When you got closer or farther away, these giant spots (visible above) would start to form and change shape/disappear.

 

I've always really enjoyed his Brushstroke paintings but the one above has to be my favorite. I love that the brushstrokes are painted to look almost like the hair of the girls he also paints.