HONEYBEAR

name

oh, childhood.

So in this post I'm attaching my most recent photography project. It's funny because a lot of my other projects have been kind of leading up to this one. They're big prints (20x30 inches) or relatively large anyway.

They are supposed to go in a row, horizontally, but I couldn't get them to sit all on one line so I'm showing them to you like this instead.
Something I've been really interested in the past few months is this sort of edgy, borderline age we're are at. Us lucky twenty-somethings. I wanted to create images that had a type of cut/copy aesthetic in a sense, that were very much composited and both reflected it and didn't. So there are seamless composites in addition to areas of these photographs that one would immediately recognize as being photoshopped (spell?). I like the tension these people create, just by doing things & playing games that society recognizes as childplay. That in combination with the upside-down skies, the friction between city & nature, as well as between beauty and grim, creates some interesting dichotomies throughout the pictures.
Enjoy. Obviously they don't look as good here as printed, but oh well, what can you do.

difference?

Since it came up in class today and since I'm not very articulate whenever I talk in front of my classes, I thought I'd try and explain the differences between the specifics of Production Designer & an Art Director again for anyone who's interested.
In the real world (aka not at USC because here there are many more responsibilities thrown onto the PDs), a Production Designer is someone who is in charge of creating the overall look of a film, designing its aesthetics and planning the way its visuals will look in the end. They work directly with the director to come up with locations and settings for the story to take place and the style that it will all happen in. They also work with the DP to establish the visual look. Production Design, as a department, is in charge of a ton of things, such as the Art Direction (which I will explain in a second), Production Illustrators (concept artists, storyboard artists), set decoration, the prop crew, set dressing, and working closely with the costume designers. Art Direction is the specific section of the crew that supervises set construction (anything from building to painting, greenspeople, sign painters, prop makers, various tradespeople, etc etc). The Art Director works directly under the Production Designer as liaisons to other departments, an authoritative figure dealing with administrative aspects as well as anything and everything to help the Production Design team to create their (and the director's!) vision.

Here are some images from Blade Runner, one of my all time favorite films, as well as a (groundbreaking) masterpiece in terms of production design. (including the still at the top of the entry!)

Namaste

Even though I grew up in a very liberal town full of granola and meditation, for whatever reason I've always been skeptical of yoga. I'm the first to admit it.
The strangest thing has happened to me over the past few months. All of a sudden I'm 100% addicted to yoga. And I can't believe it! After all those years of poking fun, calling it boring, shrugging it off immediately. Somehow the idea of bikram yoga, aka hot yoga (a specific form of Hatha Yoga (worshipful poses)), was becoming more and more appealing to me. I was very nervous the first time I went (who hasn't heard horror stories of people throwing up or passing out their first time in the 112 degree room...) but I made it through the entire class! And I loved it!
To cut a long story short, over the past few months I've become mildly obsessed with bikram yoga. I feel healthier, both physically as well as much more mentally & emotionally stable since I began practicing. It's great because there is never a point when it stops being challenging (not that I'm anywhere near good at it yet! haha) and especially when I'm stressed about work or school or anything, I definitely is like a form of meditation - and never fails to put things in perspective and calm me down.
It's funny to me that as i'm getting older I'm becoming more and more interested in things that I thought were ridiculous when I was younger. But I guess that's how life works.



Check out the Bikram Yoga Downtown LA link on my sidebar. That's where I go. It's a great studio. Very LA, but very practical and plain at the same time. A good combination.

Dinosaurs & Alien Heads

One of my friends when I was younger used to be so scared of this Jester-toy that hung in my closet. Jesters weren’t scary to me. What was frightening to me was our basement filled with buckets of entrails and monster feet and Godzilla’s eyes staring out of the dark corners of the often-flooded cellar basement. What was scary to me were the alien heads that would suddenly be living in our wooden armoire that also was home to our television or the Velociraptor that was frozen running in place on the top shelf of our cabinet. But at the same time, these things were not unexpected to me. When I was more of a child than I am today, I didn’t realize that my life wasn’t completely normal. After all, kids don’t think about those kinds of things, and when they do, the last thing they want to think is that there’s something wrong with them. Not that there was anything wrong with my childhood in the slightest. I grew up in a world where there were no limits, imagination was a reality and creativity was life. Only when I got a little older, did my friends’ shocked faces upon entering out home or opening a cupboard clue me into the fact that my life was unusual.

Around this time, I also realized that no one in my immediate family (apart from my Uncle Larry who became a banker) has ever had a traditional, or rather, non-creative vocation. My dad created both two & three-dimensional characters for films (hence all of the characters scattered about our home) and my mom had always been a painter. My grandma still sells her homemade clothing to this day and my brother became a storyboard artist. No one seemed to doubt that I would eventually find myself enthralled with everything creative and wake up to realize I was an artist. And after a roundabout way of coming to understand this about myself, that’s exactly what did happen. But of course there were several stages of rebellion in my journey. Part of what was frustrating to me was the fact that everyone in my family and everyone around me was creative. It was intimidating to be a young girl surrounded by artists when I wanted to become one. Even now it is difficult to talk about myself as a child because it was so hard to find a unique creative identity at that age while constantly being bombarded by art in all forms. It seems silly thinking back, but honestly, I was just scared.

To make matters worse, everyone was so supportive of me! So to suppress my instinct to indulge myself in artistic pursuits, I decided when I was eight years old that art just wasn’t going to be my thing. Since I was by nature a good child (I got good grades in school and was always well behaved), I guess this was my form of an uprising against my family of artists and craftsmen. I decided that I wanted to be a scientist and ended up concentrating the most on wanting to be a Marine Biologist. In some ways, I, yet again, owed my parents for this idea because apart from art being emphasized as one of the most important facets of life, nature (and in particular, the ocean) was emphasized as another. A few years later I went to a birthday party that featured a palm reader, who told me that I would most likely grow up to be a Sociologist. At the time, I was really into these sorts of things (astrology, tarot, palm reading) and so of course I had committed the idea of me becoming a sociologist to memory before the words had even finished coming out of this woman’s mouth. These phases went on for a few years until it came time for me to apply to colleges.

With my future being forced upon me I realized that I actually did not want to spend the rest of my life counting plankton samples or charting red algae growth and that I didn’t even really know what sociology meant. Fortunately, I hadn’t successfully evaded the art world throughout my teenage years, so jumping back into it was no trouble at all. I had even been called Best Artist in my eighth grade yearbook, despite my efforts to insist that I hated art. As electives, I had continued to take art courses all through high school and during my senior year I really got back into creating art and being an artist. At that point in my life, I was very much interested in drawing & painting and was focusing mainly on watercolor and ink works. I was slowly accepting myself as a budding artist and immediately ran into another problem. I suppose artistic genes ran in the family, because I found myself being recognized right away for my natural talents. So, also naturally, this meant my art teachers assumed there was nothing left for me to learn and would only praise my work and teach me nothing. I was finally doing something I was passionate about, something I actually wanted to be doing everyday, but it was frustrating because I was stuck at what I felt was such a basic level. And once again, I found my parents right there supporting me in my endeavors. (Finally, they were so happy that it was art I was after!) They began giving me official lessons in drawing and painting on the weekends, setting up still-lifes and teaching me formal aspects that all my other teachers assumed I knew, like perspective.

In my family, art has always been emphasized as the most important aspect of life, right up there with those morals and values such as love, peace and happiness. By the time I was five, I was the only child still living at home; I basically received the attention of an only child in general, but even more so when it came to art. Once I became comfortable enough in my own skin that receiving art lessons from the very people whose style and art I was trying to break away from was okay was when I truly became an artist. And now, years later, I am most attracted to two-dimensional artwork and am pursuing a life revolving around it. These ceramics and three-dimensional art classes, however frustrating it may be to me now, did play an important role in my path to becoming an artist.
When I was seven years old, we had the assignment in my ceramics class to create a coil pot based off the style of another artist. This was towards the end of my ceramics career; I was burning out after tri-weekly lessons and camps in the summertime. However, I wasn’t just going to let this very exciting project go without putting my heart into it. While my classmates took the easy route by choosing Georgia O’Keefe or Vincent Van Gogh to emulate, my little (probably clay-covered) hands searched through stacks of art books until I found the perfect artist, who turned out to be Gustav Klimt. I soon had a funky, golden little coil pot with The Tree of Life growing up its edges. The significance of this coil pot, which still is on a shelf in my parent’s bedroom, is that Klimt is still the artist who has affected my artwork the most to this day.
Having other artists that inspire you and that you look up to is incredibly important as a creative person. While both my mother and my father are probably the two artists that I have the most respect for and whose styles my artwork reflects the most, Klimt has always been a icon to me. I think his work, along with many other artists who I have since discovered, both concerning the same genre and not, is perfect. It is what gives me motivation and stimulation for my own works. I think one of the best parts of being an artist is that you are automatically a part of an inventive and encouraging community. Today, it is important that artists respect and support each other, especially in our world that so very badly needs art as a part of its life. I argue that culture and creativity are one of the most important aspects of human society. It is what separates us, what makes us different than the other animals on this planet. Art has the ability to reflect the social condition of the time and it is our responsibility, as artists, to portray it.

I’m only a year and a few months away from completing my undergraduate degree at the University of Southern California. It’s often said that your college years are the best of your life and I can say that’s true, partially because they have been some of the most creative, and therefore rewarding, of my life so far. I winded up here, in the School of Cinematic Arts as a Production major and in the School of Fine Arts as a Two-Dimensional Studies minor. Oddly enough, I even ended up taking a basic Sociology course my freshman year to fulfill a general education requirement and even liked it quite a bit. But it was not art.

I think part of the reason it was hard for me to accept myself as an artist growing up was that it meant being compared to and, in whatever way, competing with the rest of my family. I was scared. Now that I’ve been following in their footsteps for a few years, I’ve realized how to find my own voice and I’ve realized how lucky I’ve been to have their support and their amazing insight on the path I’m headed down. Now that I am able to accept myself as a creative person, I am thankful for my family’s guidance and inspiration to become an artist. So what if the brushstrokes on my paintings look similar to my mother’s? What’s wrong with following down a career path that my father went down thirty years ago? I’ve completed seven short films since I first came to USC. I have never been so inspired, excited or energized by anything as much as working on a film. I feel that I am at a point of tremendous personal and artistic growth and see art and film as ways to share and express views to my generation, as well as others. Filmmaking as an art is attractive to me because I feel it provides me with a kind of stimulation and a resourceful creative outlet. I love the cooperative nature of it; I love the amount of ingenuity and the vision that must go into it. Since I’m only in my early twenties, a lot of the foresight and ideas that go into my art has a lot to do with my childhood. So thank goodness that my childhood was filled with closets full of alien heads and dinosaurs running in place! What a limited life it would be without these kinds of things.

I am lucky to have been able to discover what I love at such a young age and that I’m able to pursuit it. Within the world of film, I want to go into Production Design or Art Direction, the section of the crew responsible for the overall look of a film. They are one of the key creative roles in film and work to implement the scenic elements of the visual feel and aesthetic styles on a project. I have continued to be involved in the Fine Arts world and feel this is only helpful for me as a filmmaker. I’m still focusing on Painting (but now oils instead of watercolor) and have added Digital Photography to my emphasis, an interest that probably emerged considering my attraction to film. Most of the films that I have made since entering USC have had a very strong art influence and have often been more abstract than not. I believe that art is a reflection of life and film is one of the most powerful medias and vehicles in the world. Film is a medium that allows us to reflect on the human condition and helps to deal with issues in society. I think that art is one of the most important things we can do right now, with all of the chaos on our planet. As Anselm Kiefer once said, “I believe art has to take responsibility but it should not give up being art.” It does not matter whether it is in the form of simple entertainment, something to reflect upon, or to teach an message, contemporary filmmaking and fine art is just that much more important as the American modern world continues to direct our daily lives. As an artist, I understand that life is unlimited and that there is no such thing as impossible. At a time when some people might argue or it may seem that everything has been done, artists know that it most certainly has not.

baby birdies

I am the proud new parent of 6, yes six, brand new baby birds. They are of the non-descript bird genre & they live in my bathroom window. The slatted window panes that cover my bathroom window are missing a top slat, and apparently while I was away on spring break, two birds decided this space between the glass & the screen would be a perfect spot to raise some children. At this point they have all hatched and they are unbelievable!! They're like tiny little see-through organisms with appendages and little tiny not-yet-developed wings, covered in fuzz. I love them!! I'm nervous about how they're going to get out of that space once they are ready to fly away, but I figure the parent's wouldn't build a nest in a spot that wasn't a good idea. So I'll leave it up to nature to work itself out. In the meantime, I have six little babies. Here are some pictures.


Here they are a few days ago. They grow so so so much everyday. Sorry, its a hard angle to take a good photo and not just see the screen. Anyway, you can just make out the oldest one's bright orange beak. He's waiting for mom to come back with some food. Aww so cute!! And still some of them haven't been born yet, you can see the last two eggs right there.


So fuzzy!

RES magazine

“Film, Music, Art, Design, Culture.” I mean, really, what else is there anyway? My dad got me hooked onto this magazine a few years ago when I was still living at home. I was never really into magazines – before I discovered RES magazine. This magazine is so cool because they have such a high regard for design (and therefore the layout is great, modern, easy to follow, compelling, etc), keep up-to-date with interesting articles, but really because of their use of multimedia.

I have always been really interested in music and love discovering new bands. Yet apart from hearing about new things from my friends, I don’t seem to be very good at discovering things on my own, haha. One of the best things about RES is that, as a quarterly magazine, every issue comes complete with a DVD that has a variety of new music videos (often by really great directors, etc), short films, and new music. I’ve discovered many bands that I ended up loving from RES – not to mention got a whole different kind of inside look into the current (often independent) music video world (these aren’t really the type of videos that would be shown on mTV, etc). And although my dad first gave me this magazine for the music, I ended up discovering a bunch of interesting filmmakers from these DVDs and articles also!

And their website is even more hands on. The main index has an elegant style of design matched with a simple color palate and instructions. Under the main heading, the three main links lead you wherever you want to go within the magazine – all made easy under one site ! – magazine – resfest – watch and listen. Plus you have access to all of their great articles. Some of the people focused on in the most recent issue include Matthew Barney, Beck, Michel Gondry, Miranda July, Richard Linklater, Animal Collective, Gael Garcia Bernal - just to name a few...

RES has had plenty of time to develop as their ten year issue is coming out soon, yet has remained involved in the more underground side of things – staying true to the alternative and independent artists of the times. I definitely recommend this site, this magazine, checking out resfest, etc etc etc!



http://www.res.com/

THIS IS NOT AN ART BLOG

MAGRITTE

Saturday morning, my dad calls me up. He was listening to NPR and they mentioned how it was the 2nd to last day of the Magritte exhibit at the LACMA. A sly way of urging me to go he slips in, “I doubt I’ll make it down there by tomorrow, but I thought you might want to go.” Actually, I was glad he reminded me because I had wanted to go. I was already driving aimlessly in my roommate’s car (he had gone to Vegas for the weekend and conveniently left me his car key) I decided to head over the to show.



The second-to-last day of the show, I knew it’d be crowded. And crowded it was. The set up the show, the exhibition itself, was great I thought. They paid special attention to detail: doors and walkways were carved from his made-famous images (the man the bowler hat, recognizable abstract shapes), the carpet was a repetitive image of his famous sky with clouds.



And it was a lot of fun getting to see a lot of these famous paintings in person (as it always is with images like his). The show was actually titled Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images and was based not only off his works, but features many contemporary artists (31 other artists, to be specific, including Vija Celmins, Andy Warhol, and Robert Gober – to name a few of the memorable ones) whose work had been based off or greatly influenced by his. While is really an interesting concept and worked quite well with some works, some of the pieces were a little far stretched – maybe just playing around with words and word juxtaposition in art rather than actually being more related to Magritte’s works. I guess that this works in some ways, seeing as Magritte’s most celebrated contribution to art history is his play with words and images, but I think his work is deeper than that, and a lot of the contemporary art that I saw wasn’t.





One of my favorite things about this show, however, was due to the audience. Maybe it’s a blessing that I went on the last day with the rest of the Los Angeles crowd. Many of the people were there as families and had brought their young children with them, little ones maybe only five years old, etc. Because of the surrealist nature of his work, it was a lot of fun to see how these kids were reacting the pieces. There was one little boy and his father who were looking at Le temps traversé together. Of course the boy was squirming a bit, it was towards the end of the exhibit, but once the painting got his attention he was exclaiming, “Oh dad, I love this one! I love it!” and then after a brief pause, “Where’s the other part of the train, Daddy?”



There were kids at the show like him, full of wonderment and excitement. And there were others, like the two boys I saw with their parents on my way out who were griping to their moms, “What are these? How are these pictures? I don’t get it” without even really glancing at the works. It was just funny seeing/hearing all the different interpretations of the work, especially from a child’s POV.



Either way, it was overall an interesting show. I would recommend it, if it hadn’t already ended.

DRAWN HOME

Over the past five weekends, I’ve been helping crew on a USC thesis film project.
Most of the production majors in my year are actually crewing (for credit, as a specific position) on one of these four, competitive projects this semester. But most film majors don’t have a minor or another major. Since I’m a Fine Arts minor also, I decided this would be a good semester to take a break of sorts from film classes and just concentrate on my fine arts classes. I usually put my major first, and since film is so demanding, my paintings and photographs get put far on the backburner, further than I’d like to put them.

I do plan on crewing on one of these thesis projects (aka a “480” (named after the course number, CTPR 480)) in the fall, so I wanted to get some experience helping out on a crew this spring. As it turns out, a bunch of my friends are working on the same crew, on a short film called Drawn Home. I lucked out because this was the project that had the most production design work needed, and I wanted to help out with the art department. Here are some production stills and photographs from the sets and locations we’ve set up over the past few weeks.

Two of the main characters in the film, posing in front of the set up for the finale scene, a fantastical re-creation of a childhood drawing on a suburban lawn.


Drawings that the young version of the main character, Hanna, "did" for the film. I made a bunch of them. It was fun getting to draw like a kid again. :)


The carriage and some flowers from the finale night scene. (The first photograph in this blog is also from this finale scene.)


Another really cool thing about being so qualified (compared to the other PAs on these projects who are usually freshman, etc), is that they let me have a lot more control on the set. For many of the smaller scenes in the film I was actually given the role of production designer, while the actually production designers worked on setting up the bigger scenes.
This is a still from the studio that I designed for the main character, Hanna.

I've had a really great experience working with this crew. Now I can't wait to crew on my own 480 next semester!

THE TORTURED ARTIST

Although he only made it to the age of 28, Egon Schiele is still known today as one of the most prominent Austrian artists and a great figurative painter from the turn of the 20th century. Because he died so young and because of the moving nature of his work, he has often been epitomized as the image of the ‘stereotypical’ tortured artist.

A self-portrait Schiele did at the age of 22.

I find his paintings fascinating because they hold so much energy, sorrow, emotion, charisma... He was recognized early in his life for his artistic abilities and followed them by applying to Kunstgewerbeschule (the School of Arts and Crafts) in Vienna at the time. He also sought out Gustav Klimt, who was known for helping out young artists, but took a particular liking to Schiele and became his mentor. It was probably a combination of Klimt’s support (buying his early works, introducing him to potential clientele, etc) and his obvious talent that allowed him to lead a comparatively successful life as an artist at the time.



A portrait of his wife from 1918 (the year both he and his wife died, along with 20,000,000 other Europeans from the Spanish Flu Epidemic).

Although he dealt with his fair share of controversy towards his works (they were thought to be too scandalous, even at times compared to pornography) I’m impressed with the amount of recognition he did receive within his short lifetime. When he was in his twenties he was admired enough to have several solo shows, even one in Paris. This makes perfect sense to me because I love the quality of his work and really respect him as an artist, yet for the time that he was alive and painting it seems that someone of his stature getting that kind of recognition for his art is incredible. I was lucky enough to see a bunch of his works, paintings, drawings, sketches, when I was studying in Paris, France. He has an amazing eye for composition but what has stuck with me the most about his work is his use of color and detail. I saw a lot of portraits he did and the meticulous depiction of the hands of his subjects always grabbed my attention.

Also by Schiele ::
Egon Schiele is really a very inspiring artist to me, I love his style and the way that he uses paint. It was really fun getting to see more of his sketches and other works at the Vienne 1900 show in Paris; interesting getting a view into his 'process' and whatnot. I love the dark nature, almost brooding moods that his subjects give off. I think his use of oils is beautiful.
























So, just for fun, to the left is a quick drawing from my Winter 2005 sketchbook that I did at the "VIENNE 1900" [Klimt Schiele Moser Kokoschka] Show put on by the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais that I saw when I was living in Paris.

artist talk.

I saw two different artists speak on campus this week. On Monday night, I heard Anne Collier, the photographer, talk about her work. It was kind of interesting, I didn’t know much about her before I showed up at the MFA building to see her speak. She showed slides and seemed nervous.

"smoking (anne collier)"

Paired with her photographs I thought it was kind of appropriate, seemed more moving almost when she didn’t want to answer questions or talk in too much depth about her pictures. I like it when an artist’s work is personal, because it should be. While it was kind of odd that she was here to show us her pictures and talk about them but didn’t want to get into too much detail or really any detail at all, it made it seem like the pieces meant more to her because of that.

"problems (anne collier)"

Tuesday night, I saw the Chinese painter Zhi Lin talk about his work and his process as an artist. An amazing artist, it was a bit ironic because he talked and showed us his work in exactly the way I think artists should talk about their pieces. I would love to be as articulate as he was. He had a detailed presentation, including maps (he’s lived all over the world) and sketches and photographs from historic events that shaped his work. He has had a pretty amazing life it sounded like. His work drastically changed after the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989, during which he was on a double decker bus in London. For the past fifteen years he has been working on five large scroll (seven feet by twelve feet) paintings: Five Capital Executions in China. It was pretty incredible hearing him talk about his process and seeing the slides of his works. I guess one of them is hanging in a gallery in Pasadena right now that I hope to get a chance to go see. Here is a link to the Koplin Del Rio website which has some good images of his work. http://www.koplindelrio.com/lin/capitalexecutions/lin.scrolls/index.html
"starvation (zhi lin)"

THURSDAYS