Also

I recently added some photos to the "thesis/current work" page on my website, as well as two new pages called "life drawing" and "printmaking".  Just for fun.

-Mon

India Ink

I will never look at a container of India ink in the same way, ever again.  Now when I look at India Ink, hours and hours of tortuous, painstaking doodles will flash themselves before my eyes.  Anyway, here is the project timeline and finished product (that has a considerable likeness, if I do say so myself):

in progress...

close up

the end

I did it!

Today I found out that I made it through round 1 of Teach for America.  This means I've been invited to a phone interview which will happen early next week.  I'm so excited, but so nervous too.  I can't wait to tell them more about myself beyond what my resume says and I'm going to do everything I can to do my very best.  

In other news, school is going very well.  It's weird, but one of my favorite parts of my short week (classes only on Mondays and Wednesdays) is when I get to help the boy sitting infront of me with Statistics.  You gotta enjoy that group work and peer frustration over math.  And I absolutely LOVE watching the teacher's calculator demos via the overhead.  Yes.  I did say overhead.  You probably thought they stopped making those things when I stopped attending high school.  Thankfully, though, there are still a few of them in existence in colleges across the country that like to keep it old school.

Also, I'm having such a blast working on my thesis this semester.  I'm working on a ceramic garden of sorts right now, sculpting tree forms that have reached my personal high of 33 inches.  Mike and I will have to modify the kiln to get this plant life fired.  And since I finally got my camera battery charged the other day, I'll start posting pictures of stuff again.  And by stuff, I mean my art work!  

Now I've got to go back to my homework.  I'm working on a project for Fundamentals of Design.  The goal is to make a self-portrait that is larger than life using a small grid where each square expresses the image by way of a different pattern.  If that wording was confusing, then know that I am basically making a giant mosaic of my face.  I'll have that picture here too.

Love,

Monica

Done with junior year forever

Everything (and more) is in the living room now.

I had my last exam today.  It was my ceramics final and my classmates and I had a group critique.  It lasted for a while, but the worst part was that at the end I had to transport all of my ceramics/pottery back to my apartment (all 3 hundred tons of it).  

Need I remind you about my tiny, tiny car? 

Anyway, now everything is awkwardly on the coffee table in the living room.  I've also got stuff on the end tables and next to the TV.  Hope the roomies don't mind too much.  Signing off now.  Here's a painting I did on the last day of Drawing II: 

Where are my clothes?

I finally assembled that series of sharpie drawings into a "book".  Using scraps of cardboard, random construction paper I found in the drawing room, string to match and ink on stamps we have:

The s in clothes is under the e in clothes, hidden by a piece of string.

Classic accordion-fold shot

The title was inspired by a classmate who did a series of drawings on a friend looking for a cellphone.  The title was "Where is my phone?" and, since we had just come out of a conversation about how I've drawn myself naked a few times, I decided that it would be funny to name my book "Where are my clothes?".

After I finished the book, I went over to the ceramics studio to take photos of some of my work that came out of the kiln firing recently.  I'm always posting pictures of random drawings but never any sculptures or pottery so, I thought it would be nice to get some variety going in this blog: 

Flip-book in the making

For homework we had to draw, in gestural line or continuous line/contour, a series of bodies in motion.  Today in class, we're making them into books of the accordion-fold style.  Here's mine so far:

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.

Procrastination - drapery

I got this Drawing II assignment last Tuesday and have been avoiding it ever since.  This includes today, the day before its due date.  During these past seven days I simply have not been inspired to draw clothing (who ever has been?).  I'm okay with, and maybe even enjoy, drawing clothing folds and ruffles when they are being worn by people.  I don't, however, get a kick out of drawing heaps of blankets or curtains or dresses pinned up on walls.  Because of all this, even though I had set aside a good four or five hour chunk for the project this afternoon/evening, when Stephanie called asking if I wanted to get Japanese I quickly said "hai!" and offered to drive. 

Little known fact: I don't actually like Japanese food.

After about an hour or two picking at Miso soup and a plate of rolls (seaweed wrapping tampura, apples and salmon) we decided to get tissues, makeup, toothpaste and floss from Target.  At checkout, DVDs were being advertised for $4.75 and I picked up Milo and Otis. When we got home we watched Milo and Otis and wondered how difficult it must have been for the makers to make the movie.  Did they film these animals endlessly until their movements coincided with the narrative?

Anyway, this went on until about 11:00 pm, at which point I panicked and began my homework.  This is the result, which I am happy about given the amount of time I did it in (I just hope my professor won't be able to tell that it was a last minute thing.  I mean, it's not great, but it's not terrible either):

This is a dress, that I ordered from the delias catalogue online, pinned to our living room wall.

That's it for now.  I think I'm starting to feel the effects of that raw salmon...

Finally Frida and Unibrow Close-up

She's done, even though the hands seem a little big to me sometimes.

Frida update

Progress so far:

close up

The eyes are bothering me...something about them.

Lovely Frida

Frida Kahlo, photographed around 1938/39 by her lover, Nickolas Muray.

For Drawing II we have to pick an art historical portrait that we would enjoy putting ourselves into.  My teacher said that when she had this assignment in college, she put herself into the Mona Lisa.  I've decided to put myself into this photograph of Frida Kahlo.  

We had to do a loose sketch of ourselves to bring to class so that we could begin transferring:

Kinda looks like me, I guess.

Oh, I almost forgot

to tell what happened in Life Drawing today. 

We have only been using the two female models (the old runner and the young dancer).  Today, though, Tom, a rotund, over-the-hill, man modeled for us with a giant walking stick and a lot of character.  He looked like this guy, kind of:

Taken from here

But, it was also like looking at this:

Which I've seen in person at the Hirshhorn in D.C. before

Struggling with foreshortening

 I'm having trouble with this foreshortening project.  I don't seem to have any arms.  But I swear, that's exactly what I look like lying down from that angle!

No model

Drawing II today.  So far we've been exposed to (or exposed by, depending on how you think of it) two models.  One is a trim older woman who I adore.  She's always in a good mood and very friendly, talking to the students during break.  The other is a woman who is probably a little older than the average Elon student.  She's a dancer and when I found this out at the beginning of the year, I thought that she was going to be able to pose in very elegant ways and with the strength of an ox or something.  However, she doesn't really seem to know how to model.  Not to be mean or anything, but she can't hold her poses for very long and needs inspiration/direction about what types of poses are appropriate.  She's probably trying her hardest, though, and that's what matters.  I actually haven't had that much of a problem with her until recently.  

Recently she started arriving very late to class.  My professor likes to start the class right on time with the model (I've walked into class before with the model already posing naked on the podium!).  But my professor can't always start class because this model is late.  One time she was twenty minutes late until she called to tell us that she was sick and wasn't going to make it.  Today, though, she was scheduled to come again and was late (or so we thought) as usual.  We're learning how to really exaggerate foreshortening so we started using our own images in the mirror to do this while we waited for her (we put our arms and hands out infront of ourselves so that our hands looked bigger than our heads for an effect like this, this or even this).  

As you can probably guess, she never showed up.  No phone call, no nothing.  She was a no-show.  Because of this, my classmates became the models (clothed of course)!  Four of my classmates got to take a nap while laying down in the center of the class on a podium covered with eggshell foam padding.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous.  My class is from 1 - 4 p.m. and this is prime nap-time.  It's really hard to sit still and draw for three hours and sometimes all I want to do is take a nap (I've often fantasied about switching places with the models).  There is a nice heater that my professor points at the models so that they don't get cold, so it wouldn't be that bad. 

In other news, Stephanie has been cooking a lot and tonight she made a delicious meal of Salmon with brown sugar, yellow rice, salad and herb bread.  It was yummy!

Love,

Monica

It's done!

Bubbles!

Work in progress

Eventually I'll be blowing bubbles.

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:

Possible nudity

My Drawing II class is going to be fun.  There are only nine people and we will have a live model to observe from each class.  Tuesday, we didn't have a human model available to draw from so my teacher brought in her dog.  It was just a little bit awesome.  She said that tomorrow we need to be on time for sure because we have our first live model.  She's modeled for classes before and is a fifty-some female bodybuilder.  Interesting, no?  Oh, and did I mention that there is a man in his sixties that is a student in my class?