Thursday, September 27, 2012

Day 2 - ATPP camp

trainer asked us to be curators and decide how should the 27 pictures of artwork be displayed ...our target audience was preschoolers.... 

and immediately, michelle, who is a mother of a 3 year old and a 8 month princess, took charge .... telling us how to use a preschooler mind set to curate the artworks..... 



A few piece of the artworks caught my special attention so went home to google about it.... info all cut and paste from the net de... too lazy to re-phrase...=P 


Lang Kacang – Bayu Utomo

It is a sculpture of an armless tribal warrior screaming into the void. The expression on face is contorted by his roar of frustration and anger. Warrior is the symbol of the spirit who becomes a source of protection and support throughout his life’s journey. 


However, in the sculpture the warrior seemly caught in the midst of confusion and seeking direction. Through the expression of the face, the sculpture may describe the emasculation of the modern man, who are soulless and empty within. The armless warrior is useless, appearing as something weakened and unable to fight back. It may hint on the impracticality of culture and tradition beside the rise of modernity. 

However, elaborated headdress symbolizes rich culture and tradition. The upright tilt of the head suggests a sense of defiance and pride and resolve. Also, his head is thrown back with the force of his roar of frustration and anger. The facial expression is contorted in emotion and yet the torso stands stiff and rigid, bound by bandages of metal. In contrast to the constricting armour of metal, the feathers of the headdress stand defiant and proud, symbolic of rich traditional culture and evocative of traditions past that are slowly being abandoned. 

Though the body of the warrior is slightly bent to the front while the torso stay stiff to the ground, it seems as there is a force pulling the warrior forward and the warrior is trying to resist it with all his might. And the metal armour and chains may symbolize suffering and the misery that the warrior is going under.





Guitar (1912) - Picasso
It shows Picasso’s reification of the negative space of the guitar’s hole as a cone and his use of the space within the body of the instrument as the core of his sculptural form. The fact that a guitar’s body is bounded by parallel planes must have been particularly suggestive to Picasso, who peeled off the instrument’s front and varied the depth of the sides, which he retained. He scooped out the guitar’s neck and defined the plane of its face with frets, indicated by crudely-knotted strings. The first guitar of 1912, made of paperboard, paper, string and wire, is so simple in its means of construction that it might be a recent children’s school project.

It was shown hanging above a varying group of drawings and collages in a series of photographs of 1912, but when published in1913 the guitar rested upon the sliver of a cardboard tabletop which cantilevered from the wall, as it did, surrounded by further elements, in a still later photograph of the artist’s studio. The cardboard construction functioned, then, as did the works on paper that Picasso pinned and re-pinned to the wall around it – as a means of working through variants of ideas.

Picasso disassembled the cardboard Guitar and tabletop and packed them away in 1913, not to be seen again until after his death. The artist left the work to MoMA, to whom he had already donated the sheet metal version; the Museum considered the cardboard Guitar a maquette for the metal version. When MoMA reassembled and publicly exhibited it, in 1980, it was the instrument alone.




the little 14 year old dancer - Edgar Degas
It is a sculpture of a young student of the Paris Opera Ballet dance school named Marie van Goethem. The sculpture is two-thirds life size and was originally sculpted in wax, an unusual choice of medium for the time. It is tinted to stimulate flesh, was clothed in a read bodice, tutu and ballet slippers and topped by a horsehair wig tied with a silk ribbon.  28 bronze repetitions were cast after Degas’ death and appear in museums and galleries around the world today. The tutus worn by the bronzes vary from museum to museum.

The exact relationship between Marie van Goethem and Edgar Degas is a matter of debate. It was usual in 1880 for the "Petits Rats" of the Paris Opera to seek protectors from among the wealthy visitors at the back door of the opera.





 Metal Cows by Miina Akkijyrkka
 Miina Äkkijyrkkä, a controversial Finnish sculptor, is known for her love of the Finncattle, the native Finnish dairy breed. She mixes visual arts with cattle-raising.

She assembled massive scrap metal car parts into sculptures of cows that are both colorful and expressive within a woodland landscape. These cows raised many debates as they were bringing agriculture as a theme to the Finnish contemporary art scene. 



 Monogram - Robert Rauschenberg
 A stuffed Angora goat standing atop a platform consisting of a collaged painting and amid objects such as a police barrier, a shoe heel and a tennis ball. The goat has a used automobile tire wrapped around the middle of its body. Robert is primarily known for his “combines” – a combination of 3D objects and paint. He uses everyday waste, thrown away objects to create his work. 




Fountain - Duchamp
It is considered by many to be the most influential piece of modern art. It is one of the pieces which were called readymades (also known as found art).

“Whether Mr. Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.”



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Love how the trainer used the question on what is the similarity between all the artworks to lead us to the focus of the day on






our first challenge: create a 3D figure from a 2D paper in less than 3 minutes
title: searching for his head
wahahaha.... no time to paste the head on the figurine

came up with this idea cos din wanna copy my course mates' ideas of crushing the paper or folding it into origami



second challenge: we were given about an hour to create a sculpture to represent someone who made an impact in our art career.... 




  

it's a special person who has a tattoo on her ankle 

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course mates' work 
her hubby as a super owl with a cape

family portrait
blue heart (with red outline) - hubby
red heart (with blue outline) - wifey
small blue heart - son
small red heart - daughter
yellow heart - mother who's holding the family together 



depicting the fragility of life
 see.... with a swipe of the scarf and this is what it became


each of the flower represents the level of the pupils she taught 



depicting the watchful eye of her mother




super cool hubby who plays the saxophone combines with her who does art   


daughter & father


course mate's son who's a professional rock climber  


course mate said that his wife's concerned voice (nagging) is as sweet as the music produced by the harp..... how I wish Mr Ang thinks so too.... =S
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next up - installation 

the difference between sculpture and installation: 

Sculptures are designed to be viewed from the outside as a self-contained arrangement of forms whereas installations often envelop the viewer or the user in the space of the work. Viewers enter a controlled environment where it sometimes features objects as well as lights, sound and projected imagery. The most important is the effect towards the viewer’s spatial and cultural expectations and experience as well as giving the viewer critical thoughts.


my group's 

web of obstacles



 other groups' installation 


Sunday, September 23, 2012

Day 1 - ATPP camp

I fought very hard for this and it took me 2 years to finally be able to go for this program... =D... 


it was held at STAR (Singapore Teachers' Academy for the aRts)

had fun knowing my course mates in the friendship carousel ice-breaking game.... michelle and i acting as if we just knew each other.... wahahaha

looking for materials that could be used as drawing tools.... i found some leaves, part of a husk, a broken tile etc


playing the game - if i'm a seed
most of us were wind dispersed seeds floating in the wind....heee
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then we had a drawing activity
we drew a tree to represent ourselves with the items picked up previously
this is me in tree form.... used the husk which i picked up to create the 'soil' with watercolour paint.... leaves were created with fingerprints ....tore up the leaves i picked and pasted the bits and pieces super randomly to create duo layers and just used coloured pencils to draw the trunk and pasted strands of husk over it.... pasted a tiny pod seed at the extreme right to symbolise me yearning for freedom and the need for space

i wish to be the seed though....forever alone.... oopx.... 
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my course mates....all looking good and artistic.... =) 







jaw dropped right???


isnt this course for ppl who din do O-level art??? then i got it.... din do O-level art dosen mean they dun like art....neither does it mean that they cant do art.... in fact, all of them love art and can do art, it's just that they did not have any formal training in art.... 

i thought this was rather stressful liao but no.... the rest of the day was worse.... 

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can you see the 'fish' in the picture below??? trainer asked us to create a picture with the 'fish' within 2 minutes ... i just drew that curly line and called it art...=P 



and another one within the next 5 minutes

followed by a quick group sharing on both our drawings before doing a 3rd one in the next 5 minutes



was rather upset with myself.... i am super rigid....a 'fish' is always a fish.... my coursemates turned their 'fish' into an eye mask for Donatello (ninja turtle), into flowers, into birds and butterfly etc etc.... 


was still thinking about it when i went to bed that night but absolutely no idea at all.... =S 
then this idea just popped into my head the next morning when i woke up....though not very fanciful but i'm happy....cos my 'fish' is finally part of something bigger ... =) 

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our trainer then played some music and asked us to draw or make some markings on the huge piece of paper with our eyes closed.... so i listened and i drew this with a marker 


and my course mates did these 


trainer was very impressed with their work due to the different strokes used and also how they used their material in a variety of ways.... 

i was like.... was that what we were supposed to do???? aren't we supposed to just doodle and enjoy the music????  wahahahaha.... totally catch no ball.... 


it was after watching this video below that i sort of got it (a little)



so i tried to do another one with this song (Piss and Vinegar) and tatatatata....
got improvement....who say one???....i say one!!!!! heeeee.... i can really FEEL this music..... wahahahaha.... bet i could do a even better one when i m drunk.... 

that's like the only time i m not so conscious about everything around me.... 
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another drawing time - with charcoal....my first time.... draw what??? no no no...i was not drawing michelle's prada bag that was placed in front of me.... 


i was drawing the floor... 
i thought it was quite good.... abit small la... all my course mates managed to draw their 'floor' onto the whole piece of paper la....  were we told to fill up the whole paper???? wahahahaha....i'm a super low ability pupil in this art course...somehow i kept missing out on all the instructions.... =S....either that or they knew what the trainer wanted 

 i was so tensed during the whole 30 minutes of drawing the floor that i developed a headache ... =S


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then we played the game - complete the doodle
where we were told to just draw anything on a big piece of paper and then when the trainer said "change", we had to move to the next seat and continue drawing on the next piece of paper....so after making 21 changes..... these were what we got....... each piece of 'drawing' were done by all 22 of us.... =D



my favourite.... =D....everyone of us added things to make her more beautiful.... heee.... i added the 须须 of her earrings... 

i started on this piece with just a few pathetic lines right at the bottom....some of the lines are so faint that it cant be seen in this photo lo

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second charcoal drawing..... i used a just do it attitude this time....but is the anyhow do it kind (i'm sorry)....cos my headache was really bad.... i just wanted to get it over and done with ... my focus was so off that i din notice the word (ITALY) 'printed' on the tile until i saw the photo that night... =S 




my favourite...





 



very powderful right???? so how not to stress??? especially when i have to put up an exhibition with 4 pieces of drawing and 2 three-D work next jan/feb + go for an interview to qualify for the advance diploma + complete the advance diploma before i can be qualified to teach more classes of art.... is really 先 super 苦 then 后甜 lo..... 

and if i cant qualify for the course, how am i suppose to 对 lina and P and everyone in the art department 交待 leh??? and if i cant qualify, i wun be able to teach art from 2015 onwards then the last 4 years of effort which will be 7 years of effort by 2015 will just be gone with the wind la.... 

wonder if holistic department wants me..... i think i can plan P1 english and math rather well too.....wahahahha.... just kidding.... must persevere!!!! kambate!!!