Plans are changing

I've decided that I'm going to paint. No more fake religion. 6 ft x 4 ft, vertical paintings. The digital art approach just isn't going to have the impact in the end that I want. There can be something a bit cheap about prints. I'm going to still stay on the same general subject matter, and still do stickers, but mainly I'm going to make oil paintings. I think. Still up in the air. Don't really have to decide for a few weeks. Just wanted to get some words down right now.

The main reason for my change of approach comes from a late night drawing session last night. I came up with this:

I can see that on a big canvas, with a white border and really vibrant colors. I'll do 4-6 of these paintings of symbols, and then maybe do some smaller drawings too. I still want some narrative elements to them, and if I do these straightforward paintings, that'll be difficult to fit in. That's why I'd do the drawings.

What I like about the drawing above is that its simple and has a lot of impact, yet it retains the decorative and rhythmic elements that I like about folk art and religious art. Its also still very iconographic.

Dinosaurs instead of Horses

Horses have always been important symbols of power and wealth and stuff. If I'm going to make some art about the stuff I want to make art about, I need to use the horse symbol. Horses are boring though, so I just now decided that instead of depicting people riding horses, all my people will ride dinosaurs and maybe tigers(like some dudes do in Tibetan Buddhist art).

Ninja Turtle Guardian Angel

Quick sketch, but this is vaguely in the direction I want to take things.

Images from a 1950's children's Bible:




Via Golden Gems . There's a huge pile of these. The style is very reminiscent of medieval European folk art. I like the flatness and the decorative character of these.

Symbols

All religious art has its set of symbols right? The neo-classical artists had a wide range of symbols based on ancient roman and greek mythology: cherubs, arrows, fruit, even many characters would exist solely as symbols. All types of Christian iconographic art used angels, crosses, halos, books, and other objects to express particular ideas. The Mayan, Egyptian, and many cultures had glyph-based communication systems. These glyphs existed somewhere between art and language and used consistent set of symbols.

I tend to use a lot of symbols in my work. Most of these symbols don't have well defined meanings, but they show up over and over and start to develop a life of their own with specific associations.

Some drawings are actually made up entirely of symbols, so they share a bit in common with ancient glyph based artwork. For example:

We've got basic stuff like triangle and squares, but also trees, TV's, clouds, bolts, eyes, thought and speech bubbles, "guardian" characters(the shrouded figues with circles for faces), and pipes. I need to work on giving these symbols definite characteristics. Part of how I'll do that is by looking at what associations these symbols already have. That's the first step towards creating my own iconography to go with the fake religion.

Most religions probably begin with the theology and the art follows. With this project I'll undertake the opposite: manufacturing a religion out of symbols that already exist.

Art History Professor Quote

"I argue western art has a PREJUDICE towards order". Hence all the squares.

It's interesting that so much art in the grand scheme of things, especially when looking back through time, is about forcing order onto the world, when it could have as easily been about turning orderly things on their heads.

Maybe these days it does quite a bit of both though, ever since Rauschenberg or something.

Hey There, Here's What I'm Going to Do Here

My last chance at art in college is coming up fast. Next semester, the rest of the senior art majors and I will have our senior shows in May. The show is part of a required class at St. Olaf simply called Senior Studies. Since I'm not sure what I want to do, but know that I want it to be very involved and well researched, I'm going to start now. This blog will become a place where I brainstorm. I'll still try to periodically post other stuff here as well, but I hope next semester I'll be able to focus all my creative energy on this one project.

Very rough list of some things I want to do for Senior Studies:
-Turn the stuff I think about and draw about in my sketchbook into a fake religion. This is the core of the project.
-Focus on developing my vocabulary of characters, objects, and symbols rather than do something completely new
-Spend time looking at the aesthetics of religious art from all over the world. I hope to in some cases directly reference religious and iconographic art in my project.
-Learn about the current and past relationship between these three things: religion, marketing, and art. Anyone have book suggestions?
-Make the final project a spectacle, not just a set of drawings or prints.
-Stickers
-T-shirts
-Digital Prints
-Drawings
-The work will be personal, about my own experiences with religion
-The work will be about video games
-The work will be about religion
-The work will be about politics
-The work will be about mass media

That's all for now. I gotta hit up the art supply store right now and grab a fresh sketchbook.