Artist Lecture #2: UNH Chamber Singers

On December 8th I attended my 2nd artist lecture for the semester. This one was extremely different than my experience at the previous one. This one was a short concert given by the UNH Chamber Singers. The group is consisted of around 15-20 students that study and perform sacred and secular works from the Renaissance to the present. In this performance they focused on the Renaissance period. It was definitely very different than what I had expected and had heard before.
I actually got there a little late since I was coming from class, which meant that they had already started and since I didn't want to disturb anyone I ended up watching the performance from the balcony above them. I'm actually kind of glad that that happened because I enjoyed the above perspective and the ability to watch the performers as well as many of the audience members, which again was mainly an older audience this time containing about 30 people.
The singing itself was extremely good and well practiced/rehearsed. All of the singers seemed pretty relaxed and comfortable, only a few seemed nervous. The voices blended well together and had a nice tone (to my untrained ears). The sound also carried well throughout the building. I think the layout of the museum helped this, and benefited the singers. It was definitely not my type of music, and I couldn't actually understand them due to the different language, but I think they put on a really good performance

Artist Lecture #1: Shape of Color: Carol Aronson-Shore

So, on December 1st I finally had the opportunity to attend my first artist lecture of the semester. It was called the Shape of Color, exhibiting paintings done by Carol Aronson-Shore. There were two collections being shown containing somewhere around 50+ paintings of Strawberry Banke (Portsmouth, NH) and Mohegan Island (Maine). About twenty people were present, the majority being an older audience who seemed to be familiar and enthusiastic about Mrs. Aronson-Shore's works.
The lecture was actually given by Kimberly Alexander, the curator on Strawberry Banke, which I thought was interesting and a little weird. I guess I assumed that the actual artist would lecture about her own works rather than having someone else lecture about their own interpretation. It was also weird since the artist was actually among the audience and was asked to speak about her own works in the end anyways. Mrs. Alexander focused on the Strawberry Banke series and presented some interesting points about the works and the techniques that the artist had used. One of the things she mentioned that was not something that I had thought of when first wandering around looking at the works was the artists' used of walls, boundaries and hard horizontals to control the perspective of the viewer. She mentioned that by doing this, the artist was constructing a view that she wanted you to see and then "step inside" the picture to try and see what was around the corner or be trapped and wonder "where do I go now?". I thought this was kind of interesting because I hadn't felt that or seen that when first observing the pictures. I had just assumed that that was the way that the village was set up with closely built buildings and a more formal layout since it is a historic village. But after having this pointed out to me, I could she what she meant.
Another point that Mrs. Alexander pointed out was the use of color and stripped down detail of the paintings. The artist used strong breaking lines to define shadow and light areas, which were then portray in solid colors (very saturated colors) with little shading or gradient of colors. The most buildings lacked detail as well. This was actually something that I didn't really like about the artist style. She was extremely precise, clean and accurate with her painting, which I appreciated since I know how difficult it is to accomplish that, but I was not very fond of how stripped down her work was. I didn't like the use of solid colors and minimal detail. I have a tendency to prefer more detail and tonal range in paintings that are more realistic. Especially in something that is so historic. I would like to have seen all the detail that is often found in buildings built "back then". If the paintings had been abstract then the lack of detail and use of solid colors would have been great. But that is just a personal opinion, the artist is very good at what she does and I can appreciate her take on the village.
The last thing that really stood out to me was when Mrs. Aronson-Shore spoke, she mentioned the understanding of art history and by painting something that had been around for a long time and had been part of another previous artists' work you are joining a continuum and adding your own piece to the story of that place. I thought that was a really cool perspective to being an artist.

Here is the link to the artist website: http://www.carolaronsonshore.com/index.html

Homework #10: Final Project

So, for my final project I ended up shooting the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, I kind of stumbled across it while I was out shooting other locations, and when I found it the sun was starting to set and lit the shipyard perfectly. It was awesome but the sun was setting so fast. I ended up choosing this location out of the three that I shot because of the lighting, I think its what actually makes these photo, so it was kind of cool to stumble across the "perfect" situation.

Other Favorites From My Final Shooting

So, I ended up shooting a lot over the weekend for my final project and at three different locations, and ended up with three possible final projects. I decided to go with the pictures from the Naval Shipyard, but I figured I would post some of my favorites from the other two locations, the first set being at the Fort Constitution located at the Coast Guard near New Castle, and the second being from the beach next to the Coast Guard...

In Class: Manipulation

So in class we were supposed to create a photo using other photos and this is what I managed in the time we had, definitely not done, but I ran out of time....

Homework #9: Narritive Social Landscape (Final)

For this assignment we had to go out and define Narrative Social Landscape, pretty much how humans have influenced the landscape in some way. I was going home to Syracuse, NY for the weekend so I decided to shoot Project Destiny USA, the major building addition to the Carousel Mall. This project will make Carousel the 2nd largest mall in the United States, as well as one of the greenest malls. It was proposed around 2000, but due to disagreements between the the project builders and the city of Syracuse, construction was delayed until 2007. Construction began and the first phase of building began. Now, in 2010, 400 million dollars invested, the construction has been put on hold again, and the building that had begun was finished enough so the weather couldn't destroy what was already started. I had originally planned to document the construction that was going on, since it was a major construction site when I had left for school this fall, but going back and finding the construction put on hold changed my focus. I started to look around and see the effects of Carousel and the stopped construction had on the surrounding areas of the city. There are advertisements all over the place promoting Destiny,  while if you look right next to the mall and its parking lots there are "abandoned" construction vehicles and sites, as well as the one time train that used to bring people to the mall. The mall also sits on the edge of Onondaga Lake (to be incorporated into Destiny), and if you visit any of the parks around the lake you look out and see the natural beauty of Syracuse, as well as the buildings and lights and smoke of the city and Carousel...

http://www.destinyusa.com/index.php

Contact Sheets:

Homework #9: Narrative Social Landscape Works In Progress

Here are the ones that I plan on printing for this project. Still in the process of editing so these are the unedited versions....

In Class: Creating A Shadow In Photoshop

So, in class we learned how to create a shadow for an image that we placed into another image, here are the originals, and then my manipulation...pretty cool and crazy that we are able to do this


Image Source: Julee Holcombe

In Class: Face Morph

So, in class we took portraits of almost everyone in class (some people, like myself, were missing) and then we had to morph all of the faces together using photoshop to create a face. This is what resulted from my morph...1st is the original, 2nd is the color corrected

Not Homework....

So, I thought we had to do the homework assignment, but apparently its not due til the 18th and is totally different that what I took pictures of, so pretty much this is a random day where I went out to shoot and resulted in some good pictures....