Final Reflection

I think that my most successful pieces from the year are my artist emulation painting and my landscape drawing, but I am going to talk about my artist emulation.With this assignment I had to learn and develop many new techniques. My favorite of the new techniques was spreading paint across the panel with "drum seats," which are basically blocks of some material that I could spread and scrape paint across my panel with. Also I really liked getting to work with the power tools to build the aforementioned wood panel that I painted on. I think that my final artist emulation painting was very formally beautiful, but I can accept now that there was not much meaning behind the intentions. I did not think about what emotions I wanted to convey to the viewer thoroughly because I was caught up in the action of spreading the paint, and lost some of the meaning that Gerhard Richter probably had in mind behind. Even though I did not have intentions to invoke emotional reactions from a viewer, I think that this is one of my most formally beautiful and grand pieces from the year.  

I think my most challenging project from this year was the printing project because I felt very uncomfortable with the printing process and I did not understand what makes a good print and how to make a good print until the very end of the project. I started out the project with no inspiration and no ideas for what I wanted to print, and began to make random drawings. One of these drawings happened to be of the lorax, and I realized that the lorax is a great subject for a symbolism based project because the lorax is a symbol for environmental protection. From that point, my ideas developed and I experimented with backgrounds and different surroundings that would help me convey a point. One problem that I encountered in this project was that I did not pay attention when we learned how to print and so I had no idea what to do when it came to start the printing process. Luckily, many of my friends were in the same boat as I was and we learned it together through trial and error. 

A formal strength I developed this year is spending lots of time planning out how I was going to approach my work. The first project we did I jumped right into the process, and produced probably a worse painting than I have ever made throughout preschool and elementary. I have learned each project to slow further and plot/plan my projects before I do them. This is most evident with my landscape drawing which I spent a lot of time planning out. 

A technical strength I developed this year is printing on a printing press. As I mentioned before, printing on a press is very unnatural to me and I struggled to figure out how to use the press to print and produce a solid piece of art. Throughout the process with trial and error, I learned what looks good and bad on a final print and I think that a am a competent printer now.

A conceptual strength I developed this year is envisioning a piece. At the beginning of the year I dove into my work without an idea of what I was going to do, which is great in sketching . . . but I produced my worst final projects that way. My last couple projects I really thought about what I wanted them to look like before I began my process and the turned out great. Also my ideas that I envisioned were a lot better towards the end because I have learned a ton about composition, texture, color, and much more throughout the year.