Monthly Archive for April, 2005

Doug Aitken’s Interiors Revisited

Published
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bre pettis
on 4/28/2005
in I Make Things
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Interiors

I returned to the Henry to see Doug Aitken’s Interiors again. Revisiting the show gave me a chance to see it, reconnect with it and be enveloped by the experience. There is a really nice orchestration that happens visually and with sound that is very well organized. While watching it, I had the visceral feeling that I was running faster and faster and faster and then I stopped and was quiet, but could still feel the blood rushing through my veins. The experience builds intensity and then is followed by an immediate release that is really well orchestrated. I want to go back and map out the whole thing. It is still foggy for me, but I feel that I can see the shape of the structure of the whole thing. Elements of the 4th wall, diagonals, inertia, rhythm, and energy are all in play in this piece. The story-telling that is in being told by the editing of this video is structurally very pretty. Going back fueled my need to go experience it more.

Read This Weblog on Your Mobile Device

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on 4/28/2005
in I Make Things
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winksite

You can now read this weblog on your mobile device thanks to winksite. You can see what it looks like on your browser at this link.
To visit my weblog on your mobile phone or pda, launch your mobile Web Browser and enter the URL “winksite.com”. Once at winksite, click “Direct Access”, then enter the winksite ID #8830 for “I Make Things.”

I don’t have a mobile device, so if someone could try it out and give me a report, that would be great!

Neil Goldberg at the NWFF

Published
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bre pettis
on 4/26/2005
in I Make Things
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Neil Goldberg\'s Dad from \"A System for Writing Thank You Notes\"

Neil Goldberg’s Dad from “A System for Writing Thank You Notes.”

Jennifer and I had a great evening at the NWFF seeing Neil Goldberg’s single channel video artwork. Neil Goldberg was a friendly speaker, sharing his stories and the experiences he has had making top notch conceptual video art. One thing that he said was that he is most influenced by dance. The dance-like elements of repetition and gesture were consistent through the whole body of his work. He said, “Something gets revealed by seeing similar movements over different bodies.”

His early work focuses heavily on repetition with the subjects in “Hallelujah Anyway,” rolling up storefront security gates. In “Describing the Cyclone,” the repeated subjects use their hands to describe a roller coaster ride with their hands.

In later collaborations with his parents, Neil gets more intimate. In “My Parents Read Dreams I’ve Had About Them,” he shows his parents reading his dreams. Even though the video points at his parents, I could feel the experience he was having behind the lens.

The evening of video was wonderful. I don’t think I’ve ever said this about any art show, but I liked every single piece of work and he showed us some works-in-progress that I can’t wait to see.

There is an article about the night over at The Stranger.

There is also a nice interview from 1997 over at thirteen.org.

Make sure you click on the comments link below to read Jennifer’s reflective and thoughtful comment.

Make Magazine

Published
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bre pettis
on 4/25/2005
in I Make Things
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make magazine

I got my Make Magazine last week and I have devoured it. I love DIY stuff. As a kid, I would go to the library and go plop myself down in the 700 section and learn how to do things. I love to make things and I love to know how to make things. At first I thought I would just like it for the aerial kite photography and $14 steadycam plans and instructions, but I have read the entire thing cover to cover. It is really well laid out and is obviously by people who love to make things because they have found some really good ways to make instructions. I just love to read all the little details like stories from the early apple years. I was getting a little sad that Make comes out quarterly and I would have to wait a while to get my next issue, when they came to the rescue by coming out with a half hour mp3 Make DIYcast. I’m listening to it right now and it is awsome!

Update: I called in last week after listening to the first Make DIYcast to ask about the cost difference between digital and darkroom photography for big prints. I am listening to myself as I am typing this! They took my question and played it and then answered it at the 24:39 mark on the cast.

What I want to do is make big prints of the collages of plastic horses that I make. Since I called in, I went down to the PCNW and I’ve put up a note and I’m looking to find someone that can help me make c-prints. I could probably figure out how to do it since I’ve done a bunch of b&w photography, but I’d rather have someone walk me through it, since the next class doesn’t start till June.

Bloglines and Gallerydriver

Published
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bre pettis
on 4/25/2005
in I Make Things
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I just found out about bloglines and I like it. It organizes all the weblogs I read in an online format. Now I can go see if all my friends have new posts on their blogs without having to download another application.

Update: I just found a bloglines tutorial.

Another shoutout to the RSS aggregator over at gallerydriver. It organizes weblog content by artists and gallerists.

I also like Technorati because it makes it easy to track weblog content.

Switcheroo

Published
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bre pettis
on 4/24/2005
in I Make Things
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I’ve switched my weblog address to imakethings.com. I will still have my archive of work over at brepettis.com, but I just got tired of telling people my blog was at brepettis.com/wordpress. It’s just too much to remember, especially if you don’t know how to spell my unique name. It is much easier to remember imakethings.com.

Don’t worry though, I url forwarded the main page and all the rss feeds so that you can still get to me with your old bookmarks and stuff.

Seattle Weblogger Controversy

Published
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bre pettis
on 4/24/2005
in I Make Things
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Anita Rowland organizes the Seattle Meetup group. Recently meetup decided to start charging the organizers for their service and then then someone from their company made a put-down about how Seattle Webloggers were “belly-aching” about it. You can read about the controversy on Anita’s site here. I’ve always wanted to go to a Seattle meetup, and now with all the controversy, I can’t wait to go to the next one!

Drawing Lesson: Contour Drawing

Published
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on 4/17/2005
in Artwork
. 3 Comments

drawing lesson contour tools

I teach art at a middle school. I’m teaching drawing for the next few weeks. I want to get my students comfortable making contour drawings and then take them to the next level by adding value with shading and washes. I made up this drawing to get ready and have a “demo model” for them to see where they are going. I’m bringing my toolbox with lots of tools to choose from and I’m going to have to count it all after every period and lock it up in the closet every night.

We’ve already done contour drawings of hands and plastic dinosaurs, but I am still going to go over the basics of contour drawing.

Choose an object you want to draw. Refer to the object as your “beloved.” Drawing builds a bond between the artist and the object. If your going to bond to something, you should have an attraction to it. If you draw a wrench, you will never look at it the same way again. I have a pair of vise-grips that I have both drawn and painted. I know those vise grips. In my class I am bringing tools. If you are not in my class and don’t have tools then fruits and vegetables, flowers, and anything with lines are good candidates. For straight contour drawings don’t choose things that don’t have lines like an egg. It might be good practice, but there is only one line on an egg. Also, there are no overlapping shapes to show depth. I would be more impressed with a broken eggshell drawing than a perfect contour of an egg shape.

Spend as much time looking at the object as possible when you draw. Follow the contours with your eyes and make your hand move in the same direction as your eyes. Before you even begin, line up your paper so that you only have to look up and down.

Constantly move your eyes back and forth between the object and the drawing. (A few months ago, my students counted how many times I looked at my hand as I drew a contour drawing of it. I looked at my hand and back to the drawing between 175-200 times in the 10 minutes it took me to draw it.)

Draw with intention. Don’t scratch back and forth. Make a bold line. If you screw up and start going in the wrong direction, go back to where you messed up and begin again. Leave the lost line like a loose thread, don’t erase anything. This will make you much better at drawing in the long run.

Update: I taught this lesson and it went great. I started by talking about the process of choosing a tool and the clean-up procedure. (I like to talk about this first to make sure it makes it into the students’ heads.) Then I gave them my advice: look back and forth from the drawing to the tool, put the object right in front of the paper, work silently to turn off the verbal part of your brain and let the visual part take over, enjoy the process, breathe, draw lightly with the felt tip pens, and let wrong lines hang off the drawings like stray threads. Students added ideas and their own wisdom at the end of each period. The most profound thing they said was that it helped them to look at the object for a bit before drawing it and to plan out what parts to draw first.