For my RVA Art Talk interview I had to the chance to talk to the well respected Caesar McGann (known as 1500 studios). I've seen his murals and signs all over Virginia and it was an honor to get to talk to him about his career and history as an artist. Click here for the link to the video!
0 Comments
I absolutely fell in love with Keith M Ramsey's personality from this interview. His outlook on life and art is amazing and one that many people should follow. For a little background, he went to VCU and ended up getting a job in graphic design (more to make money and keep making art but not really what he wanted to do). Eventually he was fired from the job and took that as the chance to make what he wanted to. He started producing practical work, such as railings. Now, he gets clients that trust his vision and he gets to make whatever he wants. The one thing I loved most about his approach to art is his 'why not me' mindset. He works with so many different mediums and materials because when approaching a new project or assignment he says 'why not me?' Why can't he be the one to make it? He said his girlfriend says he has "creative ADD" because there are so many things he can do, which I thought was a really accurate way to describe his work. He approaches all of these materials because he loves trying different things, says 'why not me', and also has so many things he wants to say and he wants to express them. I love how he takes every opportunity that comes to him and just tries to see if he can do it, without much planning ahead of time. I also loved his enthusiasm for objects like a rusty nail, saying that you can never find something with that texture, age, and color. Hearing him describe his found objects was truly refreshing. I learned a lot from his outlook on art and opportunities.
And these are all the pieces I made! I've been off my game and forgot to take progress pictures for two of them, but I will be better about it next time. I love the texture and mark making I have going on in the first two, and the second two I'm not a huge fan of. I want to work bigger and accentuate the texture with my mark making (like adding acrylic medium). I also think I'm gonna go to a hardware store to see if I can find something to use as a big palette knife because I already own the biggest one plaza has. Overall I feel like I was pretty successful with my goals of adding more color and creating interesting compositions and I hope my next piece is even better.
The lighting on these pieces do not do them justice, but I will go into my process. For the first class of the week I worked on the other canvases that are not at my house, and as I am writing this I do not have them with me but I will make more posts before our critique to go over the process with those pieces. On the second class of the week I spent some time mixing colors and holding them up to the canvas to see what I wanted. I like doing this because then I'm left with a lot of colors that I can put on my knife all at once to make things for interesting. I settling on reds and blues for the white piece, trying to bring some of that blue back up to the top. The picture does not do it justice, but there are a lot more blues going on than it looks like it. However I HATE the way the white is looking, and I'm gonna try to solve that with some cool grays mixed with some other colors (yet to be determined). I added some hints of a light green at the end to mix with the rest of the colors just to add some character. On the other piece I just started with some small strokes of red and brining that center color back up to the top.
So I started with one blank canvas, and one gray canvas that had a started but incompleted piece. The incompleted one was just plain gray so I decided to not work with it and just go over it. The colors I put on it were a lot of blues and greens that I mixed that ended up way brighter than I intended, so I layered white on top. I think I was hoping that the white would mix more with the blues and it would be less of a stark white, but it kind of failed so I know I'm going to be layering over that one a lot more. The other piece (pictured on the left) I painted with browns and whites as a worked layer to start with. I then mixed a few different colors (sage green, navy blue, dark blue, still some browns) and wanted to make the shape that I normally start with. I remember Coach Hall telling me to try to make that figure but used the wet paint and multiple colors on my palette knife to make everything more interesting. This is what I have going for these two pieces and disclaimer!!!! I have two more pieces that are not pictured because I accidentally left them at my Dad's house (: So I will have at least four canvases to turn in, maybe more, we will see! I'm just working on as many as I can at once and then revisiting to see what happens.
|
Julianne
|