Roy McMakin

Roy McMakin is one of my favorite artists. He currently lives up in Seattle and makes functional objects (mostly). Besides furniture and houses he makes sculpture, photographs, drawings, and landscape projects. I like the way he thinks: “I don’t know where this came from, but over the weekend I was thinking about a way to describe the stuff that sort of rises to the surface in my life and may people’s lives. The objects that you choose to want to look at and have around. And It occurred to me that a fabulous name for a vintage secondhand store would be “Cream of the Crap.” I guess I’m saying there’s always some object that gives the illusion of somehow making things better and either kind of clarifies something in my life, or feels like a treasure in a treasure hunt, where something is hidden away and lost, and then I discover and see the transcendence within the object.” His beloved Chihuahua Joan was the model for Lamp with a Bronze Joan (2008) which is a lamp coming out of a bronze cast of his dog. Another piece of his I really appreciate is Untitled (2008), which is a small chest of drawers with one drawer that sits atop of the chest because it doesn’t fit.

Thrown Bowls

In the beginning of the year Sherin said she wanted us to share our past pieces. I finally got some pictures from my other computer, so I'll share about a couple of my pieces each day. I'll explain to you my inspiration, as well as the process and design techniques used in ceramics.







A lot of my inspiration from art comes from nature and science, so I incorporate trees and plant designs into decorating my pieces. I am also fascinated by the human eye because it conveys so many feelings. I like to combine these two elements in abstract designs. I never used to plan out my designs before, but I am now learning to in FA 102.

For doing the detailed black outlining on these two bowls, I used a method call slip trailing. Slip is basically liquefied clay with color pigments mixed in. You apply it with a squeezy bottle with a very thin tip so that lines come out thin...kind of like puff paint. You do this before you fire it the first time when the clay is in its "leather" stage (hard but not completely dried out yet). When it comes out of the kiln it is not shiny, but it is cooked into the clay so that you can paint and wipe off glazes without the initial design coming off. After you fire the first time you can then apply glazes. For the bowl with the eye I decided I wanted the bowl to be a matte white, while the design of the eye was to be shiny. We had black glaze in a squeezy bottle to make designs, but for all the other colors I used a small brush to fill the designs in. It was quite a task finding all the colors I wanted as well as the test tiles to see what color the glaze would turn out, but I liked the results. If you think making color swatches with just gouche is hard, then glazes are on a whole other level. It's amazing how many different types of glazes there are. Some are transparent and can be layered, while others are opaque, while others have speckles or crystals that react in the kiln. They are a lot of fun to play with though. If you have time you should definitely take a ceramics class.

Design VS Art

Designer and Artist
Designer is not an artist.
Because, when they start a project, they have a limitation and guideline to satisfy.
They have to consider their specific audience's desires and needs.
The way artist and deisgner affect the society is different. They have different role.
Deisgner affect and decide entire life style of human. From how we dress to where we live.
However, Artist has a different role. Artist are able to express themselves in the way that they
choose to believe. Artist's main purpose in the society is to cause the people to question, to provoke the people to think in diffrent way.

Streetart: Monster

Joshua Allen Harris's inflatable bag monster.
He is a street artstist working at NYC street.
His art is sort of inflatable sculpture and street art.
For the material, he used subway air, exhaused air, shopping bag and trash bag, All looks like trash. but, they become animated by him.
The monster he made really cool. Especially to me, inflation and deflation of the bears by the exhausted air seem to express the message about the endangered polar bears caused by the pollution issue. Also, location where the sculptures are located makes me more think about the the theme of the work. In addition, I like the media what artist chose. exhausted air by the people, trash bag. all looks like trash effectively emphasize the theme of the work.

New York MOMA and the Metropolitan

It has been awhile since break, but I finally figured out how to get some pictures off my camera and onto my computer, and thought I would share some on here. I visited the New York MOMA and the Metropolitan Museums while I was in NY. The most exciting part was being able to see all the famous paintings that are so familiar in posters and in pictures but have a whole new quality when seen up close in person.

Both of these museums are huge, and unfortunately I tried to conquer both in the same day. This was ambitious --although almost everything on display is something amazing, it is simply impossible to see everything. As a result, I am pretty sure I missed a couple of the best exhibits, but I did manage to see the majority of the museums. There was a huge range of artists and styles from traditional, representational paintings to modern, more quirky displays. One artist being featured was Gabriel Orozco, who had his own dynamic range of artwork. I was a bit surprised then to see that this world-famous artist's first display was nothing but a plain white shoebox. The second? Four plastic yogurt lids, each with its own wall.

There were several miscellaneous pieces that I especially enjoyed and snapped pictures of. One artist had several "newspaper" paintings up. At first glance, they appear to be simple newspaper clippings cut out and decorated with a few lines of paint. Upon closer examination, however, you can just barely tell that the artist hand painted the words of the entire article and pictures himself. Lastly, there were a few brightly colored collages and mixed media works of art that stood out to me in particular and have posted here.

Overall, visiting these two museums in new york city made for one of the best museum-going experiences I have ever had, and I look forward to coming back to NY some day to get a second, more thorough look at both the MOMA and the Met.

MOCA - the main one

I also visited the main gallery of the MOCA, at 250 South Grand Ave in downtown, which I enjoyed much more than the Geffen Contemporary gallery. Both had security personnel standing around every corner so I wasn't able to take pictures, but I was excited to see the real life versions of paintings and works I had looked up by artist when searching for inspiration for various projects we had done in class. Some of these included Ed Moses, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Robert Rauschenburg, and Jasper Johns. It seemed a lot easier and quicker to appreciate their art and get a sense of their style when I was able to see the paintings on display in the museum than by sifting through google images. The photography being shown at this gallery was among the most memorable parts of the museum. There were tons of striking black and white images of all types of subject matter from gorgeous landscapes and still lifes, to the more raunchy sex and drug-using scenes. There were also a myriad of acrylic and oil paintings. Several paintings on display consisted of nothing but one smooth color on a canvas. The paragraphs explaining these were the most fascinating part of the art work. One artist simply put two planks leaning against the wall and described them as bridging the gap between a world of reality, represented by the tangible walls, and ourselves. I may not fully comprehend why such a simplistic piece earns its spot in a museum, but its interesting that those are the pieces that I find easiest to remember when reflecting upon past visits to art galleries.

MOCA - Geffen Contemporary

I visited the Geffen Contemporary gallery at MOCA in downtown LA. There was a wide variety of 2D and 3D artwork, including many different types of unusual media from computer parts, to dirt, to christmas trees. One of the strangest, yet interesting things on display was a white, rotating disc, installed flush with the white wall so that it was barely discernible. Although you could hear the motor running, you could not visibly see the disc rotating because there were no marks on the disc to follow it around. The security guard warned us not to touch it or it would burn your finger, so we remained skeptical as to whether the disc was actually rotating at all. Some of the contemporary art on display seemed like an even farther stretch of what might be considered art. There was a piece titled, "basket of nothing" in which there was simply an old wire basket bolted to the floor, filled with rusty tools and miscellaneous junk. Some of the exhibits showed interesting ideas with the use of unusual pairings of objects. One such display featured a regular wooden table with ordinary objects on top of it, including a vase with flowers, a place setting, etc. Such a normal looking arrangement of objects was slightly baffling to witness in the middle of a contemporary art museum, but a glance underneath the table revealed a maze of computer gadgets and microchips on the underside of the table surface. Similarly, another artist chose to take a cut out plot of land that resembled an unweeded garden, and prop it up on a laboratory-like table, as if being displayed for scientific study. There were also many more traditional media works such as photography, pencil drawings, and painted canvas, but few were as memorable as the items mentioned that I did not expect to see in an art museum.