The past weekish

Last weekend, David came to visit and I took him to see the farce, Noises Off.  It's a play within a play and that play inside of it is called Nothing On.  Confusing?  Yes, but it was hilarious and I am and always have been such a fan of the acting/music theatre department here.  I couldn't even begin to describe it if I wanted to.  Anyone I tried describing the play to just looked pained afterwards.  So, a youtube video will do more than suffice in this blog.  The guy on the video does a good job explaining it:

So, this week has been very, very  busy.  Ceramics is coming to a close and we have until tomorrow to get everything onto the shelves to be fired.  This means that nothing can be wet, everything has to be trimmed and we definitely cannot throw anything on the wheel tomorrow.  Frantically, I've been trying to bring everything to a finished and clean state but, honestly, it's taken its toll on me.  I haven't been getting enough sleep and there are nice bags, the size of carry-on-luggage pieces, underneath my eyes.  See, I've spent at least 5 hours every evening/night in the ceramics room and then all the hours in between and left over on any other homework I couldn't bear to leave unfinished.  This is a drawing project I completed mere hours before class (while Seinfeld serenaded me in the background):

Yet another example of how scary I came make myself look.

On Wednesday, my week was made a little bearable when the department chair and LM Wood with camera in hand came waltzing into the ceramics room.  Everyone in the class was on a wheel and it was really noisy between us and the blasting radio.  Then, Mike told everyone to turn off their wheels because the department chair, Shawn, had an announcement.  A second later Shawn said, "Is there a Monica Huang in the room?"  The rest is history.  He asked me to come up and accept a scholarship for rising seniors in the art major and then took my picture multiple times.  I was flabbergasted because I had not applied to anything that even remotely resembled a scholarship.  Apparently this particular scholarship was new this year and because they didn't give students a chance to apply, the faculty members had a meeting to choose candidates and winners.  My friend Jim, who is also doing a ceramics concentration, got a scholarship too!  In Mike's words, two "claydogs" had been recognized.

money money money money

I <3 free stuff!

Today my Professor gave me a very used, but lovely, easel from the drawing studio.  

"We gift you this easel!" said Anne and I think I might have blushed.  The thing looked huge.  "But it's your job to get it out of here."

"Thank you, thank you!  This is amazing.  Do I need to get it out by a certain time?" I said.

"You have a week."  And the thing began to look even huger.

So, I drive a mazda miata and have no friends with big cars or trucks.  This afternoon I rolled it out of the art building and looked up at the sky.  It was dark and menacing.  The wheels were rickety and I realized I wouldn't be able to roll it the entire way back to the apartment.  I folded it up and, flattened, it was about the length of a sudan but not the weight of one, luckily.  On the walk home, I swear I could feel my gymnastic calluses growing back in.  And then it began to rain.

Thankfully, I wasn't far away from the building.  I got in somehow and, too large to fit in the elevator, I had to carry it up three flights of stairs.  The stairs were the easy part.  The doors were the things giving me trouble.  I couldn't actually hold any door open for myself because the easel was too far in front of me.  Needless to say, friendly neighbors assisted me when they saw how I was struggling.  It was an embarrassing sight.  

Now it's sitting in the living room and hopefully not to the great dislike of my roommates.  I'd like to keep it here, but if there isn't a good place, I don't know what I'll do.  In the meantime, I have a place to rest my art:

Close up of the art using the easel:

The exercise was to use warm and cool colors to bring forward and push backward forms.

Semi-self-portrait, maybe?

This is my homework for Drawing II.  We had to use different colors to indicate variations in depth/protrusion and the presence of light: