Young sailor coming home from WWII. (Source.)
Style
Artist Statement 5-16
I work very well within a set of rules and guidelines.
I enjoy making work that is useful within my fitness practice.
I have created a set of guidelines which ensure that I am healthy, active, and working hard. The data gathered from my actions within these parameters has allowed me to change the way that I live and the way that I think towards a more proactive life.
The process of becoming healthier has spawned a whole series of artworks that not only document the process, but also enrich it. The books I have created show what I’ve been preoccupied with for the past year, but they also serve as a reflective tool for me to identify strategies that work, and provide inspiration for future endeavors. Making work about boxing allows me to further my excitement about a new sport, while also serving to analyze my punching combinations and form.
In my boxing prints my off-hand is not defending my head against counter-punches.
There are still technical issues to be worked out when printing large scale.
As the artwork inevitably improves, so too does the workout.
Anonymous asked:
the person that did the graffiti was involved in the kony 2012 cover the night event that happened on the 20th. while the campaign urged people to literally cover their neighborhoods with kony related things, they were told not to permanently damage or mark structures but instead use the presskit posters and stickers.
I know that there was an event, but I’m saying that I highly doubt that someone actually involved with it actually spraypainted that. More likely it was a vandal or troll who knew that they could have someone else blamed for it.
Really, Boston? Really?
Come now, children.
I’m glad someone made a post with a photo of this, I saw it while I was in the city today.
For those of you who don’t live in Boston, someone spray painted ”Kony 2012” on a memorial to the victims of the Boston Massacre.
Social activism at its finest.
there are not enough facepalms in the universe.
All of my hate. This isn’t quite as bad as the cockmongler who spray painted “FUCK STEAM BOATS” on the James Rumsey memorial in my town, though.
He’s not even in fucking Uganda.
Also, whoever did this is really bad at graffiti.
I highly doubt that anyone involved with the Kony 2012 campaign did this, it’s most likely a troll, and everyone’s falling for it.
SPORTS
life:
United States pentathlon champion John Borican leaps a hurdle in 1941. (Gjon Mili—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Here, a selection of technically brilliant photographs, stroboscopic and otherwise, by the great Gjon Mili.
The red light brought us to a dead halt on the sidewalk and when it looked like enough of us had piled up, the guy from the Everything Ten Dollars store took it as his cue to saunter up with news of a desperate, late afternoon sale.
“For the next two hours, everything’s five ninety-nine!” he screamed. “Everything in the store!”
I rolled my eyes and in my most sarcastic tone, replied, “Five ninety-nine?! I wasn’t interested when the stuff was TEN dollars!”
Almost as soon as I said it, I realized I had it backwards: The higher price of ten dollars was actually LESS enticing to a consumer than a lower price. My comment was both inaccurate and stupid.
“Come on traffic light! Change already! These greedy idiots have had enough time to drive! Give the other side a chance!”
On the bus ride home I realized that I knew from the start that I had the insult backwards, but I had gone on and said it anyway.
“Probably just some kind of semi-conscious effort at self-sabotage,” I said to the baby resting in the little carrying case thingy. “Love and hate are like two inverse and ever-turning radio dials that control a single signal resting on a single plane.”
I started to tell the baby about a homeless man I saw leaning against a newspaper stand and tuning a plastic, toy ukulele and how at first I felt relieved that nothing that I had done that day was that stupid.
“But if I replace “stupid” with “futile,” I said to the baby. I sighed, not yet ready to bring the second half of that nightmare to life with words.
“She’s sleeping,” said the baby’s mom.
I smiled. The verdict was in: I was officially at war with myself and though it was beyond me to predict the outcome, I did know with certainty that the winner, whoever he was, would be rewarded with a jar of applesauce that I had stolen from that careless baby.
THE END.
I am speechless.
Artist Statement Draft
Being healthy was my subjective goal.
Losing 35 pounds was one of my objective goals.
In order to deconstruct and make sense of something as subjective as “being healthy,” I found it necessary to turn this goal into something objective: something that I could measure. These measurements included weight loss, single-mile run times, pushups, and other goals.
On February 26th I achieved my subjective goal when I stepped on the scale and found that I was truly happy with how I felt and how I looked. The objective goals had mostly not been reached, but I realized that what needed to change was not the time it took me to run 1 mile, or what the scale said, but was the way I live— more specifically the way I think about nutrition and fitness. I do not record what I eat anymore, nor do I record my workouts. The work of meticulously recording all the minutiae of my efforts has instilled habits in me that ensure I will continue to live healthy. I know what foods work for me, what workouts I need to do, and what things I need to keep my focus on. Perhaps the most important thing is that I enjoy being active and eating healthy— it is not a chore, nor is it an art project to be completed.
I am using the lessons I have learned from this process to create a series of books that serve as a key to understanding what exactly happened, and how it happened, over the past year. The works are evolving in a similar way to how my fitness/nutrition practice and my notation evolved over the course of time. The end goal is to create an accessible, informative, and living document.
This process has given me a visual language that continues to help me organize and analyze my life. In order to further my studio work along its previous trajectory, I am extracting information from my boxing workouts and using that to create prints that bridge the gap between the mostly visual and the mostly informational. I am using the stamina and discipline I have earned to push my drawing and printmaking practice even further, hoping to create works as rich visually as they are informationally.
———
It’s kind of long but I just achieved a massive goal so I felt like I needed to articulate that a little bit.
October 17, 1946
D’Arline,
I adore you, sweetheart.
I know how much you like to hear that — but I don’t only write it because you like it — I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.
It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you — almost two years but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing.
But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you.
I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead — but I still want to comfort and take care of you — and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you — I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together — or learn Chinese — or getting a movie projector. Can’t I do something now? No. I am alone without you and you were the “idea-woman” and general instigator of all our wild adventures.
When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn’t have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true — you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else — but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.
I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don’t want to be in my way. I’ll bet you are surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I — I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don’t want to remain alone — but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.
My darling wife, I do adore you.
I love my wife. My wife is dead.
Rich.
PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don’t know your new address.
In June of 1945, Arline Feynman — high-school sweetheart and wife of the hugely influential physicist, Richard Feynman — passed away after succumbing to tuberculosis. She was 25-years-old. 16 months later, in October of 1946, Richard wrote his late wife the following love letter and sealed it in an envelope. It remained unopened until after his death in 1988. (source)
—
There are only two people that I am sad that I never will have the chance to meet, and Richard Feynman is one of them. He is truly one of the most interesting and magnificent human beings to ever live.
(Source: kaitlinmaud)
The idea behind these pieces is to create dinnerware that directly relates to my fitness practice. Basically these are all images that either motivate me, inspire me, or make me mad. I surround myself with imagery that helps me to attain my fitness goals. So far it’s going well!
Whoa!
Some more pottery!
Here are some of the things I made in pottery!
These are the actual places I engage in exercise- my room, the gym and track at Brown, and Newport, where I surf. Creating these images in CMYK allowed the imagery to resonate with the artmaking process.
The idea behind CMYK is that each letter corresponds to a kind of workout— it’s not entirely evident in these piece, but C is stretching, M is lifting, Y is calisthenics, and K is cardio.
The overlaid circles on the last print allude to the graphic styles that came about due to my notation process. When I did a workout, I would write out the sets with circles for each one, and then fill them in as I went. This image is essentially a finished workout, and thus, a finished image.
I was spending a lot of time in the gym and a lot of time in the studio, and I wanted to combine the two practices to further help in my weight loss and fitness goals. In the end, I was able to combine the imagery associated with my fitness notation (the circles), and the scenery of my workouts, with my artmaking practices. I used CMYK because they are the “process” colors, and my fitness work had a certain process that really resonated.
These help to unify the imagery but the actual acts of both (working out and making artwork) have not yet been intertwined. That is what I am working on this coming semester.
The first image has all of the CMYK colors, with numbers that are usually associated with those kinds of workouts— for cyan (stretching), I would hold stretches for 30, 60, or 90 seconds, and for lifting (magenta), I would often do 8 or 10 reps.
The second image is a visual representation of an actual workout, where C, M, Y, and K all symbolize types of workouts. The action is written above the circle, colored in the assigned color, and the amount of reps/laps/etc are inside of the circle.
The 3rd image is an image of myself stretching done in relief block printing (only in Cyan), overlaid with all of the types of stretching I do— Dynamic, Static, and specialized stretches for Physical Therapy.
The fourth image is a pixelated relief stamp print of myself stretching, only in cyan.
The last image is of the water at Newport, the three circles represent the 3 hours that most surfing sessions last, and they’re done with gold leaf because surfing is so important to me.
Here are 4 of the works I did about Erwin Rommel last semester.
These were ultimately unsuccessful, as the concepts I was working with were only understandable to those familiar with certain aspects of military history. The end goal was to create work that showed Rommel as a person, and to examine his role in WWII as a figure that existed somewhere in the gray area. The first one is the most successful.
The first is an etching, the second two are gouache and colored pencil, and the last one is monotype, etching, and gouache.
