The One That Got Away

I did some research on Sergei Eisenstein's montage theory. 

Zee basics: 

• It relies heavily on editing
• it violates the "180 degree rules" (a guideline which deals with the spacial relationship between a character and another character or thing in the same scene) 
• Creation of impossible spacial features 
• a "montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent thoughts" "each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other"

Methods of Montage: (examples are available by clicking the name of the method) 

Metric- cutting to the next shot no matter what is happening with in the image 

Rhythmic- cutting based on continuity 

Tonal- emotional meaning of shots (used to provoke a reaction or emotion from the audience) 

Overtonal- a montage that combines the methods seen above

Intellectual- shots combined to have an intellectual meaning 

My theme for my montage is "old." I kind of have an idea where I want to go with it. I want to do something that's related to the civil rights movement. I have an image in my mind of what I want it to look like. I can also give it an old look with some editing to make it black and white and overall more "antique" looking. I have a shot list in progress. 

Blah, blah, and blah

I wrote a blogpost this weekend and it didn't save for some stupid reason. I would retype it now but I have an insane amount of work to do for school. I also have a SAT diag later and I won't be back until 10:30 P.M. Hopefully I can blog a bit more thoroughly tomorrow. There is just not enough time for everything. Is it just awful...

Soy Un Perdedor

I was really glad that we got to appreciate Beck today. I mean, who doesn't love Beck? So I went home and listened to him. I watched the music video for Girl, and I truly forgot how amazing it is. For those who are interested: 

I liked the idea of having a piece of art that can act as two completely different pieces by folding it up. Maybe we can incorporate this into something for the New Hyde Park Inn dinner? Just a thought.

Documenting Thirty Days

This weekend has been hectic. Besides having to be in a hospital for an unpleasant amount of time, I was able to have an artistic adventure. My cousin is a photographer (it's mainly a hobby of his) and he is really great. He travels as often as he can and has been to Iceland, Ireland, Croatia, numerous states and national parks, just to name a few. He shoots mostly nature landscapes. When I was looking through his photos, I noticed that he had quite a few of long exposure nature landscapes, which are my favorite! I really wish I could share some of his pictures, but he doesn't have any work online which is too bad. When I went to visit him, he gave me a tour of all of his equipment and showed me hundreds of his prints. I asked him for any advice he had for gigs and what not, but he doesn't do gigs whatsoever. I do respect that though, as he is making art for himself.

Here's some of his equipment (my phone's camera is awful).

He has five cameras, all of which are Nikon. He also has some nice lenses such as a 300mm f/4 and a 80-200mm. He has a few other ones, but those were my favorites in the bunch. Most of his equipment is from before 2000, but everything is built so well so it would really be a waste of money to upgrade to any newer models of what he has. The only somewhat new piece of equipment that he has is his Nikon D300m, and even that is six years old now. He still uses film, but unfortunately it's a bit of a hassle and is a thing of the past. I personally love it, but there is no doubt that it is inconvenient to a certain. I think film will always be number one in my heart because it is more personal in a sense. When you shoot digital, I feel that you can mess up more because you have the liberty to; you can just look at the screen and see what you need to fix about the photo. With film, you want to think a little bit more about what you're doing because you won't be able to see what you shot until the film is developed, so you want to make it worthwhile. That's my personal feel for it, of course everyone has a different opinion and comfortability.

'Twas a great art adventure, and one that definitely inspired me.

La Vie En Rose

Marion Cotillard is so brilliant and is definitely one of my biggest inspirations. If you aren't too familiar with her, she was in The Dark Knight Rises, Inception, Love Me If You Dare, La Vie En Rose, Public Enemies, and Midnight in Paris, just to name a few.  Not only is she a spectacular actress, she's an amazing singer (once she sang a snippet from Can't Help Falling In Love in an interview and it made me melt). To top it all off, she's so charming and pleasant and not to mention she's also insanely beautiful. I guess the reason why I'm so inspired by her is due to the fact that she's incredibly passionate and always wants to be pushed beyond her limits. She mad a transition to American Cinema and had to learn English in order to do so. Obviously this was a challenge, but because she loved the English language she had no problem doing so. She still has to work hard to speak in American films and even feels that she could've worked harder in some instances. But as she says, if you love something, it makes it easier to learn. In addition to everything that is so great about her, she perceives filmmaking and acting in such an intellectual way that I could listen to her speak about it for hours.

Little Talks

Follow me on Pinterest. I'll follow anyone who has one, just let me know your url.

Yousuf Karsh

Luke has a book of portraits that Yousuf Karsh took and they are beautiful. I looked further into his work on the internet. It amazes me how great the work is despite the drastic difference in technology from 50 years ago to today.

One of my favorites by him is a piece titled "Elixir."

Karsh said that he enjoyed experimenting with optics and surrealism during the 1930s. 

I told Mr. Pasquier about Karsh and as I was showing him some photos, I wondered how many pictures he must've taken and how many negatives he must of produced. For his portrait era of his career, he had 15,312 sittings and produced over 150,000 negatives. That is insane. And of course that's a major reason as to why he's an amazing photographer. He spent countless hours taking pictures and working with them as well.

If you look through his portraits, you'll notice that artificial lighting is his trademark. He learned about artificial lighting while studying techniques used at the Little Theater (I have no idea how to insert a footnote in a blogpost, but the citation will be found down below). Since he worked at the Little Theater, he created many connections through meeting the governor general of Canada. This then led to ties with other Canadian politicians, and eventually that would led to Karsh meeting Winston Churchill. 

Before Karsh photographed anyone, he would thoroughly research them and learn as much about them as he could. He would even try to get to know people who knew about his subjects to learn more about them. It's not just about taking a picture, it's also about building relationships/connections with people because it changes the experience of photography. It also can be useful for future connections because it creates a good first impression (that you even bothered to know something besides their name and position). 

"Yousuf Karsh." Newsmakers. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Gale Student Resources In Context. Web. 14 Feb. 2013.

Eat That Up, It's Good For You

I read a few essays in the book Luke gave me and they are really marvelous. The first essay is summed up by the line "Not everything is design. But design is about everything. So do yourself a favor: be ready for anything." It just makes so much sense. If you stop worrying about art being about art, it will be easier to make art. I mean... you could make art about art. But you rarely see artists make art about art; they make art about war, love, death, relationships, disease, music, etc... The less you limit yourself, the more you can create. It's really that simple. Of course you may be given projects in which you must create something based on an idea, and which in that case you must do it (even then you can have some creative leeway). Michael Bierut says that graphic designers are lucky because they can "vicariously partake of as many fields of interest as [they] have clients." Since graphic designers have clients, they have a better scope of the field of the client. A lot of artists don't work for clients so they don't always get to explore fields, but this doesn't mean they can't. I guess it's the fact that graphic designers can design something for a corporation one day and a coffee shop the next.

Bierut has an essay entitled "How to Become Famous" and it's quite informative. And not even if you want to be famous, just if you want to be great. "Fame is relative" and that's something that should be understood if you do in fact want to be famous. Beyonce is clearly famous, but most people don't have an idea of just how famous a graphic designer might be- but another graphic designer will be able to understand how "famous" this person is. Again, it's all relative.

Unfortunately, you can only do so much with the talent you have. You might have to do trivial things in order to obtain fame such as entering competitions or giving speeches. When you enter a competition, enter pieces that win in competitions (this was targeted towards design, but I think it's a pretty universal rule), don't enter things that are complicated to unwrap, enter bigger pieces (it's an advantage), and don't enter anything that you think wouldn't be shown. Those are some basic tips that are really quite useful.

Now when it comes to giving a speech, you should follow some follows.

• Show two trays of 80 slides each. One tray first, and then the other one. Don't show over 160 slides. 
• Don't ever tell people about the slide they're looking at. It should have a dramatic rhythm. Bierut suggests that you should "describe the design problem you were asked to solve." Hopefully the audience will think about what they would do given that problem. It wouldn't hurt to add some humor in this process. 
• Also, never read a speech word for word. If necessary, use notes instead. 
• You should avoid displaying anything with annual reports, it will leave the audience uninterested
• Choose the last slide of the first tray carefully- it should be great, surprising, or funny so that it keeps the audience satisfied 

Last in this, Bierut writes about how to do great design work. 

1. Make lots of work. This is something Luke has taught me. Just keep making more and more work. You will only improve. Design whenever you can, even for the simple projects such as a birthday card. This counts as practice!
2. Make a lot of posters. Posters are really cool and look awesome. Do it. 
3. Make a lot of freebies. Do projects for their own merits and not to win prizes- perhaps make something for a local group
4. Make work that you sell the best it can be- don't do bad work for money. It's just obnoxious. 
5. Have something that looks cool that you can fall back on if everything fails, it can't hurt. 
6. "When in doubt, make it big. If still in doubt, make it red."  This had me laughing, but it's something everyone can pretty much agree on. Bigger work tends to have a really intriguing quality to it. 
7. Last but not least, in the words of Bierut's mother, "It's nice to be important, but it's important to be nice." Wise words.

Communist Daughter

Today I spent most of my day playing in the snow. It was quite wonderful. I jumped into a pile of snow and it was heavenly. If I died in that very moment, I would've been happy. I've been in a really weird mood lately. I don't know what it is.

I saw the middle school play this weekend, and it was really awesome. All the people in the play were just great, and the pit orchestra was fantastic (Katherine and John, excellent work). I was really impressed by the show that was put on. You could tell how hard those kids worked, and that was the best part of it all.

I was browsing some photos on Flickr and one was a picture of a quote from a gallery that said "it's not just a gallery, it's a destination." It's really true and I don't think about it like that as much as I should. When you go to a museum and visit an artist's gallery, it didn't just appear from anywhere. It was probably months or years of work. A gallery displays the sum total of an artists work, energy, and passion.

I want to work on a project that involves nature and math. I want to photograph nature landscapes and explore the math within it. Perhaps it could be a function of some sort (vector, trigonometric, integral) or something along the lines of Fibonacci numbers. This, like many of my ideas, is a work in process. I think I need to sit down and organize what I have so far and see where it will take me.

Soco Amaretto Lime

Today Luke took me to the community center and he took the cast picture for the middle school play. I learned quite a lot in the little time we were together. Not only photography wise, but practical information about gigs and what to bring with you. Always bring two cameras and three/four lenses. Also, I learned about bracketing which was foreign to me. It's not really necessary, but I think it's good to know. Even if I might not need most of the stuff I do end up learning, it still is important to have that knowledge. You can never know too much.

I've thought of what I want to do for my inquiry. I want to do a series of... a series of photos. Example: perhaps I can work on a series of photographs which involve Photoshop. Another series can involve "symmetrical photographs" (I was just researching some, and I really think that would be interesting to explore). More series will be added of course. This is still in the works, but my plan is to find a few different ways to explore photography and then interconnect them somehow.

Skip Town

Today's discussion about possible art installations was really inspiring and motivational. It makes me want to create work, and tons of it (and not even for the installation). I researched some art installations and found so many great and creative ones. Some artist did 3D pixel art on the street, and I thought that was just fantastic. I found an Inception inspired installation called Batiment which can be found here. It is nuts. I love it. Our ideas thus far are incredible though. I'm hoping that it gets approved. What we plan on doing isn't that necessarily complex (and I'm not saying that it has to be), but it is intriguing. I think the reason why this is is due to the fact that there will be a large quantity of work that is fun and interactive. If you can get people to be apart of the art, it creates an unforgettable experience.  I may go to a museum and forget a painting I saw, but I will never forget the balloon room in the MoMA or Ann Hamilton's installation at the Armory. In both cases I was somehow involved with the art, and I think that's really important.

Megumi Matsubara had a really interesting installation at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. It's called Tremors were Forever: Remember Le Corbusier. Here's a video of it. 

And here's a picture of it. Pretty neat stuff. 

Everything's Blue

I think I want my artist inquiry to involve photography, music, or writing. I'm not sure what I want to do yet. I might want to explore something out of my terrain. That would most likely be painting. Maybe I can combine painting with photography. Perhaps I can incorporate my knowledge of lighting from photography into paintings. I'm not sure where I'm going to take my inquiry just yet.