Art Proposal

Thesis Statement: Experiences of a stranger to a new land

Why:  The inspiration for this work is the emotions I felt when I arrived in the United States for the first time and subsequent changes in these emotions.   I hope to express these emotional stages through this art project. 

Subject matter: Initial isolation and eventual acceptance of life in a new land.

The first painting in this series of six paintings will reflect my first impressions of the States—dark clouds and buildings far away.  Shortly after I flew to Iowa to start a graduate school, I went to a local shopping mall.  When I came out of the mall, I saw a huge sky with thick gray clouds moving right above my head very fast.  That moment I felt I was all alone in the United States.  I still remember a small me feeling pressured by the huge sky and wondering anxiously what was going to happen to me in the “dream” world of the Midwest. 

The final painting in the series will seek to capture a recent related experience.  A month ago, I visited my Iowa host mother, who now lives in Minnesota.  While driving from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to St. James, Minnesota, I experienced this huge sky hitting my heart as if I was finally accepted by the big sky.  I enjoyed seeing the corn and soybean fields, cows and horses under the sky, and the wind turbines embracing the sky.   I definitely felt I was accepted by the sky in the States.  This time I didn’t feel pressured by the sky and the clouds.

The four middle paintings will reflect the emotional transition from the first to the sixth painting (see below).

Description: Three panels, six paintings in total.  I plan to use 22 x 30, 140 or 300 pound cold press watercolor paper.

The first painting in the series will feature dark clouds, mall, and open space.  The clouds are going to become lighter as the artwork progresses ending with blue sky, cosmos (flowers) forefront, and buildings far away in the last painting.  The four paintings in between will include, sky with various types of clouds, morning/afternoon/sunset, and cornfield.

The tentative titles of the drawings are

1.         Alone

2.         Sunrise

3.         Road

4.         Awe

5.         Sunset

6.         Cosmos

Group critique

I was absolutely lost in yesterday's critique and felt alienated in class.  I wondered why I felt this way and came up with several reasons though some might take my reasons as excuses.

First I felt anachronistic.  The only time I saw a real barn closeby was decades ago in Iowa. I did ride the combine and again felt vastness of the corn field.  So I have this sentimental memory of a barn made of wood surrounded by hay, flat and huge field, cows, cow smell, and vegetable and flower gardens around a big farm house and a barn.  I have seen plenty of barns while driving, but none of them looked as modern as I saw yesterday in the picture; they looked often forlorn standing alone in the big field.  This is my stereotypical impression of barns.

Second I felt old (ha, it is true) and out of place.  When I saw the etching on the TV screens, I didn't know who they were.  The second man reminded me of an old man because of the gray hair, gray eye brows, and wrinkles on the head.  While everybody enjoyed talking about him, I was wondering who he was; when his picture was placed right next to him, I recognized him.  The only time I'd watch his show is when my son is home.  My son introduces me to the world of "young people."  I don't mean I don't watch TV.  I do watch TV news, but not the talk shows.  I do watch CNN to catch up with the world news, but it is often much faster to get the world news when I read Japanese news on the Internet.  The Japanese news are very concise and tells the essence of the news 5 W 1 H, whereas CNN news often confuses me with a lot of debates and comments.  I turn off TV when the commentators start talking over loud interrupting each other.  Anyway, what I want to say here is I am not familiar with the characters etched on TV. 

Third I am not up to date with all the things happened in the States.  I need more explanations of the portrayal of the execution of a wrong person through the drawing.  So much information in the work, I got lost and didn't know how to respond.

Fourth I am not grasping what I am supposed to.  I enjoyed looking at the headless driver with a helmet on; I was contemplating why he was headless till I was told he has a head but because of the angle of the camera, he became headless.

Fifth cultural background is hard to convey in any kind of art form.  The Critical Handbook deals with more of negative sides of comments based on ethnic differences, but I have more trouble with American reality such as barns, TV characters, medieval vs. modern times (this is not American, but the main character comes back to the present USA). It is my hope that I can display all of my feelings as a foreigner in the watercolor, but my second thought is they are just my feelings, and again just like I felt lost in my classmates' presentations, they might be lost what I am trying to convey in watercolor.

In the previous four semesters, we worked on different topics with the same medium.  This semester everybody has different project with different medium.  I still would like to challenge watercolor to pursue my project in spite of my handicap in watercolor techniques and anachronistic mentality.

I take my hat off to all these young artists for their originality to pursue their projects in this class.  I wish I had this originality!

The Art of Living: Japanese American Creative Experience at Rohwer

During the World War II, there were ten internment camps where 110,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast were shipped to.  Two of them were located in Rohwer and Jerome in Arkansas.  8,000 Japanese Americans were detained in the Rohwer Relocation Center; 7,000 more were sent to Jerome.

These Japanese Americans worked to clear the swamp, among other things, to receive an income.  The administration encouraged them to participate in activities in their leisure time.  Ms. Jamie Vogel, an art teacher, saved the pieces of art created by her students.  Vogel willed the collention to her friend, Rosalie Gould.  Gould donated all the collection to the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies.  The collection is on display from September 9 to November 26, 2011. http://www.butlercenter.org/

The art varies from camp scenes in watercolor, found-objects arts and crafts (The Japanese American at Rohwer camp converted anything they saw to arts and crafts), wood carving, furniture, bird pins, murals to portraits and posters.  Some internees used Eastern artistic techniques such as brush strokes.

What amazed me most was in spite of their dire situations, the colors they used were beautiful reflecting four seasons.  Some pictures depicted my favorite "big sky."

I was tickled by the comment on page 80, The Critical Handbook: "If you were to travel back in time to 1950 and land in a critique at most any art school . . . . The nude would b taken for granted, most of the students and faculty would be well-dressed males of European heritage . . . .  The model would typically be female."  The brochure of "The Art of Living: Japanese American Creative Experience at Rowher" has a picture of "artisits working at Rohwer".  The picture was taken between 1942 and 1945.  A casually clad male model is sitting on a little stage, and mostly female Japanese are sketching with a pencil.  I have become a fan of Ms. Jamie Vogel.

Blue vs. Green

According to the Wikipedia in Japanese, in ancient Japan there were only four colors: red, black, white, and blue. The word green (midori) was introduced to Japan more than 1,000 years ago from China, but it was not really classified as a color. Blue (ao) is still used to describe green leaves, green vegetables, green rock, green mountains, and even green rice field.  Blue (ao) is written in at least four different kanji (Chinese characters), and each character means slightly different blue, some bluish, and some greenish.  One character implies the color of face when somebody is sick, one character means greenish sea blue, and one character means real blue (western blue).  They are all pronounced as "ao."  In English when a person is inexperienced, they call him/her "green," but in Japanese we say he/she is blue.

If you check blue in a Japanese dictionary, it includes green, indigo, as its meaning; therefore, blue is still widely used to mean green.

What would you call the traffic light color in the picture on the right?  I see the same color in the States, too.  Do you call this green light or blue light?  Japanese people used to call this blue because blue (ao) still includes green.  I still call this ao (green) if I am not alert.  Parents calls this blue, so will their children.  Even though the Japanese government officially changed the name of this color to green, most people still call it blue.

How about this rice field?    When I call it "bluish rice field" in Japanese, I feel the rice plants are growing vigorously; whereas if I call this green rice field, it tells me only the color green.

I know the differences between blue and green, but I catch myself saying blue when I mean green.  Though I live in the 21st century, I carry 1500 years of my culture on my back, and it is an important part of my life.  When someone asks me where my home is, I almost instantly say "Japan."  Hopefully I can reflect it in my project.  The deep seeded cultural background stays where it is.  When I was in Iowa, everybody in class was asked which (foreign) country they were from; one man proudly said, "I am from Texas."

Portrait vs.Landscape

I have a different notion about "general impressions" about portrait/landscape described in The Critique Handbook.  If a landscape is drawn in a landscape format, the nature looks wide (of course!) and gives us the impression it is embracing the earth, people, buildings, and nature underneath it.  Sometimes, just like I felt when I first came to the States, landscape format gives the impression of the pressure from the widely spread sky with stormy and ominous clouds. 

I am used to the portrait format when landscape is portrayed.  My parents always have/had a scrawl or two in the alcove.  Every time I visited museums, art shops, and friends' and relatives' in Japan, I enjoyed seeing scrawls and block prints in "portrait" format which shows sky much higher than landscape format.  I have had several scrawls and block prints in our house wherever we lived in the States.  Most landscapes includes tall mountains, precipices, and/or cliffs with steep roads, ocean, lakes, and/or river below them.  But I have a couple of block prints with different colors of high blue sky over a horizon.  The portrait landscape gives me feelings of awe and respect for the nature.  The sky is far above beyond our reach but it watches and protects us.  On September 11, 2011 during the 10th anniversary of 9-11.David Muir on ABC said, "we can final retake the sky," while looking at the new World Trace Center.  I do not believe human beings can even take the sky.  He might have been talking figuratively, but we cannot even take a portion of sky; instead we should appreciate what is given by the nature.

One of my favorite Hokusai drawings is "A Dragon over Mount. Fuji."  Different from Mt. Fuji described in his famous block prints, this Fuji is elongated.  A dragon, an imaginary creature who is supposed to control clouds and rain, is going up to the sky.  Very simple sumi-e (brush painting), and the sky is light brown, but I feel the movement of clouds behind the black smoke.  If this is drawn in portrait, it is not to going to give us the feelings of awe and respect to the high sky.

My conclusion is I am going to include sky with/without clouds in portrait format.
 

Sketch with watercolor

I am still not sure my plan works as I want it to, but at least I tried to make six sketches as I proposed.  I started at 10 this morning; it is 5:30 and one more to go.  I didn't work on painting constantly; I have to take a lot of short breaks while watercolor dries. I do not have large watercolor paper (hopefully 300 lbs) yet; even if I had some, I wouldn't experiment the trial on the expensive paper!  I still have Rives paper, so I tried on it, too, but the masking fluid tore the paper.  I like the way watercolors settle on the Rives paper, though.  Checking Turner and other painters have helped me to pursue my project. 

Turner

Yesterday I started practicing watercolor.  It was my first try on this project with almost no experiences of watercolor, so naturally I was disappointed with the result.  I needed some directions in addition to my small collections of watercolor books, so I decided to check out Turner book today.  I always thought his works were all oil on canvas; however, I found in this book more than 20 works in watercolor with mix media such as graphite, ink, and body color.  I don't know what body color is, but these works have given me some directions.  Hopefully I will have a little better result in watercolor this weekend.

By the way, when I was in junior high school (long, long time ago), my art teacher introduced students many western artists.  I think Turner's work was one of them, and he became my favorite.  Every time I go to a museum, I try to find his works.  I am very excited I have found him again in pursuing my project.

Acrylic painting

I took a 'Palette Knife Painting' workshop by Cathy Demko www.cathydemko.com yesterday at theBatesville Area Arts Council.  This was my first time to use acrylic.  I thought acrylic is much easier than oil painting.  I couldn't handle palette knife well, so I painted mostly with my brush.  I learned I could use oil painting on acrylic.  I could use this mix medium for my project sometime.

I spent all afternoon today to select about 100 photos from my picture files to use for my project.  I realized I took a lot of pictures of sky wherever I went.  I am fascinated by the formation of clouds.  While trying to select appropriate pictures, I started getting some idea of what kind of theme I should have between the first and the last paintings.  I went to Wal-mart to have them developed, but it was too late; they were about to close.  I will have them developed tomorrow.

Ordering materials is a pain!

I feel I am getting out of fog about what I'd like to accomplish this semester.  I had the concepts from the beginning, but I am still struggling with how to construct the process.  Early morning walk gives me a lot of constructive idea, and best of all I get to see the "beautiful sky" that I'd like to work on.  When I was writing the proposal, I finally decided to try only watercolor.  I gathered what I have and talked to Dustyn today.  He gave me a lot of good idea.  Then I started checking the materials that I could order online.  I visited Daniel Smith and Dick Blick.  It took three hours to order just watercolors, brushes, and watercolor pencils; there are too many brands and too many colors to choose from.  I wanted natural brushes, but they are way too expensive for a beginner.  I wanted primary colors and white, but I couldn't find just white in Holbein brand.  Holbein?? I thought it was German, but it was Japanese.   I selected Holbein just because one of the artists I admire used Holbein.  I could have checked Cheap Joe and other online companies, but after checking two, I didn't want to try any other online stores.  How much I wished I were at one of the stores.  I wanted to feel the brushed before I ordered.  Oh, well, not much of academic blog today.  I will experiment some watercolor techniques this weekend with what I have.

Andy Warhol Live

Before I went to Nashville this weekend, I checked if there were any art exhibits, and there was http://fristcenter.org/calendar-exhibitions/detail/warhol-live  I have seen his works in New York many years ago, but this time I had some knowledge of printmaking (!), so I really enjoyed looking at his work at the Frisk Center for the Visual Arts.  I didn't know he had a great interest in classical music and was a subscriber to the Metropolitan Opera.  His work of "toe shoes" are so lively and lovely.  You will get to see all those Hollywood stars in prints, illustrations for almost fifty record covers, works from the Silver Factory such as Heinz Boxes and soup cans, and portraits of Mick Jagger and other famous people.  I have learned to appreciate modern art more.  His works will be at Frist Center till September 11, so if you have a chance to go to Nashville, visit there!

Maureen Gallace

Maureen Gallace is one of the 55 artists selected for the 2010 Whitney Biennial.  Among all the contemporary works, I became bery drawn to this artist.  Her themes are very limited - "windowless sheds or houeses, seascapes, winter bridges and lakefronts of New England." (Maureen Gallace: New Paintings).  The colors are also limited; she often uses white and other light colors.  Houses seem to be floating, but it is centered in the middle of the canvas and gives us the impression that the the houses are not going to float away.  Surrounding trees are done with very simple brush strokes.  The only thing I can observe to be real is "sky".  Her works reminded me of Japanese artists, Azechi Umetaro and Kawase Hasui for their simplicy in painting a large scale of landscape.  Details will be discussed in class!


Maureen Gallace

Azechi Umetaro

Kawase Hasui