Erin Hulburt
Arts Scholar
Pentathlon Semester 2
Visual Art: Art Project
there's a lot here you can just skip to the last paragraph
For my first Pentathlon, I chose to do a destressing visual art project to help me get back into the swing of school and homework. This piece, along with the others I have created recently, hold a decent personal meaning to myself. For context, I’ve had problems with art block for several years now—I haven’t been able to freely sketch out ideas and draw ever since ninth grade. Back then, I was extremely interested in a webcomic; I would scroll through social media and read people’s theories, predictions, and character analyses, as well as look at copious amounts of works that other artists were creating inspired by the comic. I never shared any of it, but I would use nearly every second of my free time to sketch out these characters and not care how good it looked, meaning I was getting a lot of practice. Which is great! But then, the webcomic ended, people moved on, and the comic very quickly became a “cringey” interest to have. So I stopped sketching. I found other interests, but I also found myself being incredibly self-conscious about both my art and my interests. I didn’t like, and still don’t really like to this day, talking about the shows, comics, or other media that I like. That combined with less free time due to school meant that I basically stopped drawing.
However, this last November I found a new interest that for whatever reason sparked that same fascination that I had way back in ninth grade. It has an extremely active following of other artists who pump out art like there’s no tomorrow, and with nothing better to do over winter break I decided to join them and pulled out my sketchbook to doodle a few of my favorite characters along the sides. Flash forward to today, and I can say with absolute certainty that I have never drawn this much this consistently in my entire life. And it’s incredibly fun! I end up intentionally challenging myself with difficult ideas outside of my comfort zone, and I’ll spend hours studying similar works to see how other artists tackled a specific concept and how they set up their composition. I’m learning a lot more about advanced photoshop techniques too, which is great for my major as I have just recently declared a double major of Arch with Studio Art. My only concern right now is that I do not believe that fan works can be submitted for any sort of portfolio, but we will cross that bridge when we get there.
For this piece, the inspiration came from a tense, cryptic episode based around a nightmare, where at the end the dream starts to literally fall apart as the character realizes that they are in fact dreaming. I really wanted to tackle poses and composition. I found some very good resources for pose references while doing research for this project, which will be useful for the future. For composition, I looked into pop art or “trippy” art to help me decide on the color scheme. I chose purple as the predominant color, as in color theory purple is often the color associated with corruption, which I thought was fitting for a nightmare. My biggest takeaway from this project is definitely the experience with drawing the pose, but a close second would be the background. Being able to quickly assemble together a background is a big skill in a lot of digital art fields, as while the background can really make or break a piece, it is often not the subject of the piece and thus not a lot of time can be spent on it.
Seminars with Artists: Amy Sillman | Live from the Whitney : Presentation
This is a lecture that was recommended to me by my ARTT210 professor for our intro unit to color. Amy Sillman is an American painter who primarily deals with abstract or non-figurative oil paintings. She is incredibly well versed in color theory, and in this lecture, she explained some of her experiences with color over the years. For oil painters, or artists who work in physical mediums in general, there is a weight to color. A tube of phthalo blue does not have the same weight of a tube of carmine red, nor do they have the same creation process. Carmine red comes from the exoskeleton of insects, Some shades of purple are painstakingly extracted from specific types of sea life, indigo on the other hand has a cruel history relating back to the holocaust. She brings this up because when the average person looks at a color, that is all they see. They do not see the incredibly detailed history and creation process behind the paint. Humans have went through and done a lot in order to get the colors we have today, and yet despite all that work and in some cases cruelty, there’s evidence that shows that we each don’t see the red in the same way. The way I see red is different than yours, you see red differently than your neighbor, and so on. This gets worse in the digital age; the way a color is displayed depends entirely on the screen upon which it is viewed, and more often than not the bright colors cannot be replicated by your average printer. The point of this is that color is relative, and entirely exists within your own head. Color is just light waves that our brain interprets, and color theory is just our attempts at organizing and classifying that information into a way that makes sense. We only have the color cones to see red, blue, and green. Everything other than that is just our brain trying to make sense of a color we cannot process.
I’m a double major now with Arch and Studio Art, and despite both being art related, we talk about wildly different things in each class. The topics we have just scratched about color in ARTT210 have completely changed my perspective on how color fundamentally works. Architecture is rigid; things exist how you see them or how they literally exist within the world, whereas color is so much more nuanced. A painting can appear as green, but if you were to upload that painting to photoshop and use the eyedropper tool, you can see that the color is actually a very desaturated a greyed-out red. It only looks green because of the color that surrounds it, and you will not be able to replicate that color using green paint because your eyes lie to you all the time and there is no green.
Mon Ami qui Brille dans la Nui : Film
Mon Ami qui Brille dans la Nuit (My Friend who Shines in the Night) is an animated short film directed by Grégoire De Bernouis, Jawed Boudaoud, Simon Cadilhac, and Hélène Ledevin for Gobelin’s 2020 Short film festival. It tells the story of a ghost who, on the way to some form of the afterlife, is struck by lightning and falls back down to the earth. A repairman, Arthur, finds the ghost and spends the next few days helping them return to their resting place. I found the art style of the film quite unique—it blended real backgrounds with the simple thick-line style popular with internet graphic design and app icons.
The film was released just a few days short of Halloween, and yet it has a much different view on spirits and the afterlife than what is traditionally depicted in the United States and many European countries. The directors explained, “We wanted to tell a story which mixed a children’s narrative with a more realistic relationship between people”. Arthur takes the ghost around town to various doctors, therapists, scientists, and even an exorcist in an attempt to help them. There are no ancient curses, malevolent spirits, or life-or-death situations that are often found in ghost films. In fact, Arthur shows no negative emotions at all towards the spirit or death in general, he simply wants to help out someone in need. This film highlights the ability of short stories to create a detailed narrative in such a limited amount of time. The characters do not have many lines, but by the end you are still able to get a good understanding of their personalities. Short stories are all about how to condense a message in as little words (or in this case, time) as possible. I myself am not very big into film, largely because I do not have the time or attention span for a 2-4 hour long piece of cinema (looking at you Justice League), but I think I am beginning to understand the appeal of short “artsy” films such as these. Each one is unique in both its moral and its method of storytelling, and to top it all off, I do not have to sit down at a movie theatre and memorize a whole cast of characters in order to understand what is happening.
Color Me Stress Free : Presentation
For pentathlon 4, I attended Nicole’s capstone event through Zoom, where we colored in one of her custom Mandola designs with whatever we had around. Since I’ve been on a digital art hitch lately, I chose to open the file in Photoshop and color it that way. Nicole explained to us that they’ve been proven with research to provide stress relief, then had us close our eyes and imagine a calm, relaxing place. We were to describe this place in 2-3 words that we would then use to guide our coloring. My words were grassy, windy, and warm, so I chose many shades of green and blue with warm accents. For about an hour we sat and colored while Nicole played some music. I can’t say particularly if it helped lower my stress levels because there is a lot going on and at this point I do not think I am going to be able to relax until 2022, but I do appreciate the effort and the cool design. It was nice to have this count as a school event, because that meant that I could sit and color and still technically be doing work.
Sinnoh Fusion Ensemble Live at Berklee Caf (October 11 2019) | music
For my final pentathlon, I scrolled through the videos of a musician I follow and saw that he apparently did a concert in the Pre Covid times. Carlos Eiene, who goes by Insaneintherain online, creates jazz arrangements of popular video game soundtracks. In this concert, he played his arrangement ensemble of the Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, which is one of the first games I played as a kid (or at least was aware enough to understand what was going on). Considering that the games' soundtrack are MIDI files, meaning they're composed entirely of synths that only emulate instruments, it's super impressive that he is able to transcribe the songs into an actual live performance.
These games are wildly acclaimed for having great soundtracks despite the technological restrictions, and you can see here how music can inspire and bring people together. Insaneintherain kick started his music career from these arrangements and received loads of support and popularity from fans of the games who share a similar love of music. Now he gets to publish original songs, work with other famous musicians, and preform for live audiences.
These sorts of things always make me want to try and pick up guitar or piano again, although I've done this at multiple times throughout my life and I usually end up stopping a week in. It's a little hard to self teach yourself music, or find time to practice during school.