Thanks Banksy

News from the Los Angeles Times that renown street artist, Banksy, is sponsoring free Mondays at MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art), The Geffen Contemporary, for the Art in the Streets show he is a part of. He quotes, "I don't think you should have to pay to look at graffiti. You should only pay if you want to get rid of it." True words that make me like him even more. Thanks Banksy. The show is running until the 8th of August, read more here.
Piece below is by: Banksy, I Hate Mondays.

Quote: The Brother's Bloom

"I don't know about 'truths.' A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells, the less you know." -Penelope (from The Brother's Bloom).

Fantastic movie by the way, the quote is from the eccentric female lead played by Rachel Weisz, and she quotes this after showing Bloom her camera made from a watermelon. Perhaps I should try making one of those, hehe.

Photographer: Allison Stewart

This semester in my color photo class, one of the teacher assistants, Allison Stewart, is a graduate student who presented her work to our class, so I thought I would share it with you too. To check out more of her work, go to Allison-Stewart.com.

What a Nice Surprise

My sister told me several months ago that my photo was hanging in one of the offices at my old high school, Orange Lutheran. I had to go check it out. And just like she said, my photo was hanging in the administration office I believe. Wow, even after I already graduated, it was a pretty cool feeling knowing I had a photo still hanging up at my old school.

One of my sister's friends also said another one of my pics was in the graphic design/photo classroom. That is another visit I'll have to do.

Color Theory Project 1: Saturation

I realized I have not put up any of my work from my Color Theory class this last semester. It certainly was one of my favorite classes and was very interesting to me how colors work together and how our brain perceives them.

We did a lot of exercises this semester to help prepare us for these projects. This first project was fairly easy, what was mainly difficult was deciding what to do. We needed to basically create a poster, but one using all fully saturated colors. My teacher for this class, Jeff Atherton, is pretty awesome. He helped me out a lot picking colors and whatnot. I chose to do my posters on sea monsters just because they're cool and like destroying stuff. And I really wanted to go with yellows and turquoisey blues, but with sea monsters that wasn't going to work. I needed angry, menacing colors. That's where the red comes in and it was fun.

All our projects this semester needed to be painted. I had painted with acrylics before, and they are temperamental and difficult to deal with, but I started to get the hang of it and enjoyed actually painting with acrylic, I did surprise myself a lot this semester. One goal I had was to do my best and stick with doing what I wanted, and it worked for me.

This project, I kept it graphic. So I painted giant swatches of a single color, then drew my own stencil, traced it over the colors, cut them out, and glued them together. Simple.

During the critique, when it came to my picture, I saw that the boat I had in the middle looked like a shark fin because of my last minute decision where I had decided to paint it gray. Everything else I like and my teacher did as well, and we mutually agreed that the middle (where the boat was) needed to be fixed. So instead of going through and repainting everything, I just scanned it and edited it on the computer in Photoshop. Voila! The final product is much better. :)

Color Photo Project 3: Simulacra

Simulacra: the constructed image.
1. slight, unreal, superficial likeness or semblance
2. effigy, image, or representation
3. re-creation, fabrication, counterfeit, fake

This was the third assignment of my semester. I'll briefly mention right now that I am behind on blogging yet again, but I've been enjoying my summer thus far. I've done well this semester with getting my projects turned in on time, which was one of my goals. I feel that sometimes when given a photo project, I need more time than what is given. So it is coming up with the best of what I got at the time.
This project I plan to work on a make stronger during the summer. My teacher likes the ideas I am developing with this project and finds them interesting, it is just a matter of working with it more. I feel I'm close though.

This project works with appropriated images, which is basically me taking pictures of pictures and turning it into my own work. By re-creating these images of open-mouthed sexy women in advertisements, the original picture becomes distorted and pixelated creating this strangeness and fakeness to the image. I also printed the pictures very large to enhance this distortion.

I went through lots of editing such as doing different sets of pictures that all still correlated with each other, but money and time subtracted that from the equation. I ended up printing six pictures in a grid format, something that is already laid out for you like a magazine spread, where I originally got my pictures from. Even though I shot hundreds of pics, I narrowed it down to six to keep it simpler, and less overwhelming.