Cut Above

I've had these for a few weeks and have wanted to post them... i have a horrid website that I use as a teacher, and tried to use this as a project to fine tune my skills manipulating photos in a blog. Clearly that didn't happen, I will have to revisit and tweak a bit.

These are stencils and resulting images from a World History class I teach at New School for the Arts in Tempe. There is a push for projects that blur the lines between classes in the curriculum, so I asked the young artists in my class to choose images that interested them from a culture, modern or otherwise, that had inhabited the new world. Some of them clearly have visual arts experience. Others claim to not be visual artists but patiently and methodically worked through the steps involved in projecting, tracing, cutting, and painting a stencil. Additionally they kind of accidentally were forced into learning to be patient and adapt to a very breezy Spring day that was selected  as painting day!

this is a small selection  of the images that were produced. They appear on a wall that runs alongside a sidewalk that acesses the rear of the main building at the school.

Today as i post this I am listening to crushing, almost non-melodic noise and experimental music courtesy of Nonpop.com.

The stencils were all done by tracing projections on craft paper... either from jpg files or from acetate overhead projections. then cut in class with a terrible collection of box cutters and rusty exacto knives.

Ghost Story

http://tmblr.co/ZJ3izuhP1QB2

I spent part of the time that I was doing my previous post listening to a video from a psychologist named Bruce Hood about how we construct our image of self. It's reposted from a newer blog by the authoress of a blog I've followed for years, Triffid.org. I have adored an anime called Ghost in the Shell for a couple decades because it calls into question this very concept...a "ghost," or the quantification of one's consciousness, being separate from the raw data that makes up memories and genetic info and sensation...

Paint it Black

 This weekend, in addition to playing with steel for purely useless creative pursuits, I had to build a section of fencing to replace some broken tortured and aging fencing at the High School where I teach. Things like this are a bit devoid of creativity but of course my craftsmanship needs to be right on. That way I can get the job of repairing the remainder of the fence, which, although less damaged and therefore less critical, is still in sad shape.

Aren't my pickets straight?

immortality

Still stenciling, wishing that I had a larger cutting mat to use than my little a4 version. But I like doing it, my idea is a bit limiting but I think I need to see it through rather than doing my habitual mutation of an idea halfway through because I've gone past it in my head. That feedback loop has historically simply killed projects midway through for me, rather than creating better work. One of my favorite mentors used to repeatedly remind me that every work is a point on the finite line of work you will produce in your lifetime, but each work has its lessons that can only be learned by seeing the process through.


Tonight I'm listening to Maschinengeist.org whilst working.



Working with this image and thinking those thoughts confronts me with how limited time itself is. The time we have to ourselves, the time we have to spend with people, to work, to make, to dream...there is only a given quantity.


I hate television. What an intellectual holding pattern.

How to overthink stuff in 379 easy steps

So I'm working on a painting. For me this involves listening to hours of Quadrivium radio, watching hours of youtube tutorials, learning new things about photoshop, and of course drinking some really wonderful coffee. It will be a stencil piece about my favorite face. It will be my third painting shown, maybe the seventh one i've made and the second one of two that survive. I think I need to make lots more before I have any faith in the result being worthwhile, but every journey has a starting point.