Where My Art Comes From

One of the first influences for my today art creations was probably 'Biene Maja' ('The Bee Maja'). I presume this, because I often draw insect characters like the one below. What I am not sure about is if I draw them because my mum liked Biene Maja or because I liked Biene Maja.

Certainly a major influence for my artwork are fairy tales, which I think as inner representation of what things we have to cope with in life, which is for example becoming an individual person.

  

I also was very interested in painting with Chinese ink and here animals in particular.

Further more I am fascinated by the Manga style, especially how they paint and draw people.

  

 Altogether I painted a series of fairy tale illustrations.

I also love drawing and painting portraits in a rather realistic style. Naturally historical masters influenced me. a great deal.

Still much about portrait painting I learned from books about painting. Painting the Madonna was one of the most fascinating exercises.

.  

But again literature stirred my imagination, like for example J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the movies made from this books.

These impacts resulted in a series of portrait paintings from characters from the Harry Potter films.

Additionally I am an eager photographer, but it is nothing else than nature itself that inspires me most to take pictures and learn how to improve the quality via technology. This way I can share what I deeply feel when going through nature.


Concerning videos I am certainly influenced by the experimental film genre of my time, although it is difficult to produce similar videos after movies like "Der Himmel über Berlin" (Wings of Desire) or "Die Blechtrommel" (The Tin Drum).

|

 However I want to show you two of my recently produced little videos.

|

There are certainly more sources that influenced my art style like teachers and the adventures in life, but the above is already a pretty accurate representation of guidance I had so far.

Fading Differences

Not long ago I created a piece of land art that copes with the topic ofthe different ethnic grounds of people in most cities.

When challenged to create a photo manipulation concerning both, globalization and language games, I remembered my former creation. It was not at all about photography, but naturally I took photos to document the installation.

Apart from the topic of different people, the little squares reminded me on pieces of the scrabble game.

I presume scrabble is more a game of western industrial countries, but they may exist for other languages, that use a different character set, like keyboards do.

I have chosen the English language and its characters to symbolize globalization, because almost any citizen of the world knows English and uses it to communicate internationally. Then I looked up what globalization “looks like” in different languages, especially in languages with characters different from those of the English language.

I combined a photo of the land art piece with these characters, where the Non-english characters fade into the surrounding like the colored grounds themselves. I did this for four language. I also created a sphere from the four images, which represents the globe.

I intend to present the images via a viewmaster, where the differences became clearer while circling through the pictures. You will find many viewmasters throughout an imagined the museum with an exhibition on the topic of globalization and language games. any visitor can take the viewmaster to circle through the images.

This post is inspired by an open online art course.

Design by Programming

Processing is a script language with which it is relatively easy to generate colors, shapes and interactivity.

For a start I created shapes like rectangles, ellipses and triangles to design an abstract landscape. I took a sheet of quad-ruled paper and looked for the coordinates I needed to place the shapes on the screen. The colors I find with the help of a color selector, that is provided by the processing interface.

Now I had all the information I needed to create my first Processing sketch.

Here I imagine a landscape with a planet (moon, sun) and a triangle which moves through the landscape.

The next step in sketching with Processing was to let a shape be drawn by the program within a loop. I also added randomness for the colors and for the coordinates of the shapes.

My intention was to contrast splintering (triangles) with entirety (circles). This can be a symbol for, for example, an immigrant family contrasted to a native family.



The last step with my first experience with Processing was interactivity and by that generative design.

The interactive part of my script provides the possibility to drag the mouse button over the screen and this way to display thin bars.

The stroke and the fill color of the bar is chosen according to the position on the screen. You also can clear the screen with any key and by that generate a new background color, again depending on the mouse position.

This way you can partly control the process, but because of the complexity of the procedure most people may try to generate a stripe design by "playing around". Look the following examples,

I intended to give the possibility to create playfully ones own space, but you can also use it to design a nice pattern of stripes.


and here the genesis of the last example.



Blogger does not provide the possibility of running Processing within this post, but here is the example I used as a basis for creating my sketch.



This post was inspired by an art online course:

Introduction to Computational Arts   

The Discovery

This is about part two of a digital painting. The first part was about finding a painting with atmospheric lighting, switching human heads with animal heads and exploring the colors for my version of the painting.

I got a comment for the first part,

 

toddconawayAugust 28, 2013 at 8:44 AM

Say, do I see a wicked witch on a broom there? Nice challenging project to learn about Gimp!

 

and according to this comment I've made slight changes to my basic idea. A huddled figure in the foreground and a witch instead of a housewife in the background.

Naturally I was interested what Todd may say now:

@StefanieJ2 Witches, Lambs, and Iguanas, serving biscuits! Perfect combination.
— Todd Conaway (@Todd_Conaway) September 3, 2013

A new challenge and I loved the idea, anyway! Although I was not particularly sure how serious Todd was. I did not mind.

I again tweeted to Todd:

@StefanieJ2 watching these iterations of the piece I am wondering about the "finality" of "art" and the value of the evolution of it.
— Todd Conaway (@Todd_Conaway) September 10, 2013

This time Todd was a bit unpatient, but I was grateful for his statement, which lead me to realize how different people perceive art. I presume Todd finds peace in more traditional paintings, rather than in one that  turns everything topsy-turvy.

                                                                Todd's "Calm in Chaos"

However, I have to find my way and proceeded after Todd's beautiful imagination, and finally I found a close where I thought it is not necessary to do further changes.

The following is the picture with which  all began:



Rembrandt & Me



Confronted with Rembrandt as a master of painting when starting a digital painting assignment, I thought it appropriate to choose a painting by Rembrandt, where he depicts the resurrected Jesus and two people who realize this astonishing and frightening fact.

http://www.kunstkopie.de/a/rembrandt/der-auferstandene-christu.html

The assignment was to take a painting with interesting lighting and by using a special painting technique making four color compositions. It was meant to start each of the  four compositions anew, still I decided to make one painting and altered the colors via the color options of my photo editing softsare, which is Gimp.

I am a completely new digital painter and needed many hours to accomplish the color compositions and half of the time I needed to understand how my software can help me with this. This meant to learn shortcuts and using the lasso tool to select a rather exact shape, or using the gradient tool by choosing the direction and color, or navigating through the painting, or ...
I thought this may be enough for my first digital painting and I can always improve in the following assignments.

As I understood it I have to choose one of the compositions to proceed painting on it, still, I like all four of them. I may decide for the green one to convey the notion the setting appears in the middle of nature. It is still an intuition and I am excited to learn where it will lead me.

I have started the assignment by making some drawings, which was part of it and which you needed as a guidance through your painting. I also had to put a head of a fancy animal onto the bodies of the painting. This way I drew some little lambs to got a feeling how I can put them into the painting. I also drew the feet of little lambs, because I wanted to change the hands of the people into 'hands' of little lambs.



If you are interested in Chris Oatley's digital painting course, just click here.

Dream Dig

There once was a time I had time. I thought out what I still can do in this world, like travelling, cooking exotic meals and doing artwork or handicraft. Then I got a job, where I had to communicate about how magnificent people are when they are young or at least male. I tried to oppose but was overwhelmed by the unity of my colleagues. I retreated into a world where not even I was aware anymore of what is important to me.
Now I have lost the mentioned job, et voilà, my dreams are back; not just like that, but I have found online possibilities of sharing, where people think differently from the ones around me. Maybe they are just not so aware of my gender or age, because online these details blur. People here are occupied with my artwork and blog posts rather than with thinking about my biological reality.

This process of having lost my dreams for my future and finding them again I have displayed in form of a collection of spices and handicraft materials. These materials symbolize some of the activities I am rather dreaming about than doing them: cooking, travelling, doing things with my hands. Still, I do not give up having time and money for them one day. I also would like to have a piano or jumping from a diving board, but this is more difficult to create a collection from.

I folded boxes from origami paper. Then I stuck the materials on little cardboard squares, together with a mixture from sand and charcoal . It was exciting and mysterious when I had to use a brush to clean the spices or beads from charcoal dust and sand. I put the so prepared squares into the boxes and used scotch tape to partly close the box to protect the content from being touched. This symbolizes shielding, but also isolation. I stuck the little boxes into a bigger box and gave written descriptions underneath or above, like it is done in a collection of a museum.

For this artwork I was deeply inspired by the videos about Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol and Mark Dion, which are provided by an online art course.
Joseph Cornell created little worlds, which often appear isolated from the world around, Andy Warhol stored his past in boxes and Mark Dion pretends to be an archaeologist while creating his artwork. This is what I took out of the videos and what influenced my work.