Emma Abercrombie

I find that blogs are a great way for me to get inspired and to find new artist. Here are the links and descriptions to four blogs that I really like.

Jonathan Adler: I love Jonathan Adler’s aesthetic and his blog is a great resource if you are looking for ideas on good design. He is an interior designer, sculptor, and the partner of another creative: Simon Doonan was the creative director of Barney’s for many years and is responsible for the funky, high art window displays at Barney’s in NYC. My major is painting, but good design is good design and I take a lot inspiration from interiors.

http://www.jonathanadler.com/blog/?p=670 

Art 21: Art 21 is a show on PBS that examines the work and lives artists in the 21st century. If you haven’t checked out the series I highly recommend you do so. It gives wonderful insight into the lives of contemporary artist: highlighting their process, background, and the concept behind their works. The Art 21 blog is a great resource for keeping me up to date about the happenings going on in contemporary art around the world.

http://blog.art21.org/

Art Fag City: Art Fag City is a fun blog that is a little bit cheeky and serves to highlight the work of underexposed artists, critiques of exhibits, and cover art happenings all over NYC, the US, and abroad.

http://artfcity.com/

Painter NYC: Painter NYC is a blog that I recently discovered and absolutely love. It isn’t updated as regularly as I would like in fact it hasn’t been updated since 2010, but maybe that’s a good thing. There is a fine line between going to blogs for inspiration and actually using that inspiration to create your own work. I love this blog because each post is just a picture of painting- some I immediately respond to and some I don’t, but this blog is wonderful if you want to be introduced to new painters.

http://painternyc.blogspot.com

The Black Square Problem: In class we were asked, using only flat black squares, to graphically represent each of the following terms: Order, Increase, Bold, Congestion, Playful, and Tension. The two I thought I was most successful at representing were Bold and Congestion.

Bold

Order

Congestion

Playful

Increase

Tension

 

In our third assignment for Design I we were asked to create a design utilizing the principles of form and repetition on a grid. We were then required to ink the design on a 10 x 10″ illustration board. The frist part of the assignment we were asked to explore creating a motif by drawing one shape and then cutting into that shape with a second one. This is the way were supposed to come up with our individual motifs. Below is my exploration:

The motif I eventually chose is not shown above, but below you can see the motif. I chose a 2 x 2″ box grid and then experimented with different compositional possibilities.

Design I

Design II

Design III

Design IV

Design V

I felt that Design V was my strongest design because it was so graphic. I felt that I utilized my motif well and had achieved the best economy for the design. After choosing our strongest design we were then asked to explore five inking options as seen below:

Design I

Design II

Design III

Design IV

Design V

My two favorite inkings were Design III and Design V. I ultimately chose Design V because it was the most graphic and attention grabbng. I also liked Design III because it seemed like a very Rococoesque design and I really like the feminine nature of it.

Final Composition

It’s difficult to see here, but I could have definitely used another coast of ink, it seemed that no matter how many times I went over certain areas they never got a black as I would have wanted. The ones I enjoyed the most during critic were the compositions that employed the 1″ cell structure and were inked in a complex, but symmetrical design. The simultaneous weakness and strength of my composition are it’s graphic simplicity and bold symmetrical patter. I believe it could be seen as weak because of it’s seeming simplicity, but I think it is an effective and bold composition. There seemed to be a million ways to interpret this assignment and it was so nice to see the varied compositions during class.