Criticism

Mrs. Rose showed us a video in class about an art teacher who had no background information on his students' art work, but he would still explain the meaning of the art as if it were his own. It was really interesting to see the descriptions he came up with.

What does this tell us about the importance of context?

This tells us that it is important to have some knowledge or background of the context to be able to fully understand. Otherwise, we would just be judging the artwork only on appearance alone, which would make it hard to appreciate the true art piece.

How would you feel if Gabriel discussed one of your artworks using the Mirror Crit?

I think it would be really interesting to see Gabriel criticize one of my art works because his opinions were very genuine and honest. Although his criticism could be offensive at times, I would also use it as constructive criticism, and apply it to my next art work. I don't think I would like for someone else to interpret my art work because I would want people to know the true meaning behind my art, and not base it on what someone else thinks.

Do you understand your own work well enough to have it criticized? 

I believe I understand my own work very well, because I normally don't paint or draw anything with a deep meaning behind it. Most of the inspiration for my artworks come from things that I already saw, such as an outdoor scenery at camp. 

What would you learn by having your work criticized?

By having my artwork criticized, I would get to hear other people's opinions on what part of my artwork they liked the most and what they liked the least. This would help because I would use this constructive criticism to improve my future artworks. 

 

Pottery

This year in art class, I decided I wanted to try working with new materials. The first thing that came to mind was pottery since I have never experimented with it before. After kneading the clay, I went to straight to the wheel and started on my project. I knew what I wanted to create, because Christmas was soon approaching, and I wanted to make something for my grandma that would be useful. Since my grandma is a smoker, I thought I would make her an ash tray, because not only could she use it everyday, but it was also something fairly easy that I could make. This is how the ash tray turned out after it was put in the kiln and glazed.

Japan Art Mile

In our class, we are doing a collaborative project with Japan. The theme of this project is to paint half of a mural with what we want to leave as our legacy while Japan does the other half. When Japan sent the mural, they also sent a box full of treats and other goodies. Many of the treats were green tea flavoured which I thought was super cool because Canada doesn't have those types of candy. My favourite treat in particular was the green tea Pocky sticks. They were delicious.

For the start of the project, we had to sketch ideas of what we thought would look good on the mural. For my sketches, I chose to draw outdoor sceneries and Canadian wildlife.

Since I chose not to work on the mural, I decided I would work with Somre on a painting of our own. We started with brainstorming ideas of what we thought we should paint. Since we liked the totem pole in one of her sketches, we thought it should be in our painting. 

We did a quick sketch of a sunset, teepee, bear, totem pole, and bird.

Next, we painted a rough copy of our idea. I painted the background and teepee while Somre sketched the totem pole and bird. We didn't end up painting the bear, because we thought the painting would look too cluttered.

Finally, we did our good copy of the painting. We went with an aboriginal theme for this paining by adding a teepee, totem pole, and eagle, since that is part of our legacy. I am very pleased with how our painting turned out.

Cross Curricular

For our cross curricular art assignment, we had to pick another class that we are in, (other than art, obviously) and create a piece of art work that represents the class we chose. For me, I decided to pick biology because it's one of my favourite subjects in school. I had to brainstorm different ideas of what I wanted to do, and I ultimately came up with the idea of drawing a basic illustration of how the cardiovascular system works. I started off by drawing a character that looked like it would be in a children's book, then drew a simple diagram of the heart and labeled it. 

I like how the finished look turned out.