It's almost time for Explorations!

Explorations officially opens today, and the opening gala is this Friday from 7-9pm!

Here's a little photographic review of what these past few weeks leading up to the show have been about.

Last you heard from me, I was wondering the best way to display my work. Well, I started an experiment with photo transfers on canvas....

My photo-transfer process.

Lining up the transfers, trying to figure out a configuration.

Underpainting.

First coat.

Second coat.

Rethinking configurations.

Thinking about configurations of multiple sets on the wall.

Putting wire on the back of each canvas...

Then, my classmate Eben and I volunteered to make a poster for the show. 

"What should be on the poster?"

"I dunno, random colourful brushstrokes or drips?"

"Sounds good to me!"

Creating a drip painting to photograph for a promotional poster.

See the final product at the top of the page!

Monday, we set about hanging the show. With 15 artists, and WAY different styles and methods, this proved to be quite the challenge! We carted paintings back and forth to see how pieces interacted... but we finally found a visually cohesive layout. Yay!

Come to the opening to see all the amazing works in person, and to talk to the artists, grab some munchies, drink some wine, and see what we've all been working on since January!

Check out the Facebook event here. If you can't make it to the opening, the show will be up until Sunday, April 8th.

The Navigator: Student Profile

A couple weeks ago, I met up with Tamu Miles, the Arts Editor for VIU's student newspaper, the Navigator. Every issue, she does a profile on a student of interest within the arts. Since I've had Creative Writing courses with Tamu over the past couple years, she asked me if I would be interested in being interviewed. My answer? Of course!

Here's an except from the article:

As an artist, Godel paints, draws, takes photographs, and works with clay. Currently, she is finishing up her last course for Visual Arts and, along with her classmates, is working towards creating a final graduating project that will be revealed at the end of Mar. in a show called "Explorations." For Godel, this project involves combining and exploring the different mediums she works with. "My focus has been a continuation of what I started last semester in a directed study where I went to life drawing classes but brought clay, so I was actually sculpting the figure very quickly and spontaneously." Later, she went home and photographed, drew, and painted the sculptures, saying that "[she's] kind of continuing that exploration and the interaction between the different media." 

Godel says that she has found that some of her best work comes out of being spontaneous and working quickly. "And then [transferring] into . . . other media as well, like painting quickly [and] not too meticulously. We had our first critique for this graduating class and I had some paintings, and what I thought were the best results was when I worked quickly and wasn't too worried about details." To add drama to the clay sculptures, Godel photographs them and then draws or paints from these photographs. "I'm just finding that whereas you just have a little figure of a sculpture, how it's presented, how somebody sees it doesn't always have the same impact. The medium of clay can sometimes be viewed as something less, or kind of be looked over."

You can read the rest of the article here.

The opening night of Explorations is coming up on March 30th, from 7-9pm, so remember to book that night off and come support the graduating students!

Please also check out updates about the upcoming Portal issue and launch. You can check out the blog, and make sure to come to the launch on March 27th!

Looking for the big picture.

In working in the graduating art class this semester, we have to keep thinking about how we want to present our pieces. This is something that I, in particular, have to think about. These aren't just paintings that you put up on the wall. Some of them are, but then there's the question of the sculptures themselves, the photographs, the drawings. What would I choose, and how would I exhibit them together? How would they interact with one another?

I think that the best option for me would be to leave the original sculptures out of it. They of course are invaluable to the entire process, but that's just the thing: they are part of the process, not the final product.

I love them to pieces, but this is about vaulting them into new dimensions, and figuring out how they can be shown at their best. As sculptures, in person, they just don't have the same impact.

Case in point:

BAM. See? Impact.

Let me know what you think!

Oh hi there.

Eye candy time! ...the sculptures, not the model... I LIKE CLAY, OKAY.

Which do you like?

Men made of yellow mud.

It's Life Drawing Wednesday! I finally got to play around with my new clay, and boy was it awesome! The texture was so smooth and easy to work with, and I just love the colour. And then there's the anticipation of how it will look fired. So exciting!

I was really in the zone tonight, and even though I haven't done any sculptures since November, I noticed that I'd improved on a couple things. One was time-management, but the other was technical. I was paying really close attention to the heads. If you remember last semester, I thought they were looking too cartoony, so I mostly steered clear. This time though, I was trying to be conscious of proportion, and features, and all that. I kept remembering a video clip I watched on Ceramic Arts Daily about the proportions of the head. The video I watched was here, but here's a nice condensed version that's pretty similar. Pretty much just the first minute or so.

Here's a photo I got around the halfway point of the evening...

ONLY TWO PHOTOS?!? you ask... well, I swear I'm not being coy. My camera died! There will be more to come very soon, I promise!

In the meantime, moment of the night, while getting a brief shoulder massage from Courtenay:
Me: "Do you feel the knots?"
Courtenay: "I don't know... what I'm touching."

Also great: listening to Graceland.

Sending myself an acceptance letter.

Last week, I got to email myself my own acceptance letter. Something to the effect of:

Dear Melanie Godel,

Thank you for your submissions to Portal 2012 etc etc... We are pleased to inform you etc etc...

If you are not contacted by Tuesday, please email Melanie Godel etc etc...

Please submit a bio, addressed to Melanie Godel etc etc...

Sincerely,

Melanie Godel

Soon-to-be-published author and artist, right here folks.

Fun.

You see, on top of being a Visual Arts student, I'm taking a Creative Writing minor. This spring, I'm in a publishing course for VIU's literary magazine, Portal. All aspects of the magazine are created and run by students, from designing, to fundraising and advertising, to screening submissions (exclusively from VIU students) and editing, to planning the launch. 

One of my jobs is "Acquisitions Editor", where I had to draft up the acceptance and rejection letters for all those who submitted work. I sent them out after a very long Monday evening in the library, and this included an acceptance letter to myself.

Two of my poems, and two works of art (one drawing and one photo) will be published in the magazine. Yay!

I considered posting the artwork that will be in the magazine, but where's the fun in the that? You'll just have to wait for the magazine's launch, March 27th from 2-5pm in the Royal Arbutus room at VIU.

In the meantime, check out Portal Magazine HERE, and maybe like us on Facebook HERE, and perhaps even consider following us on Twitter HERE.

And for good measure, maybe check out the fundraiser we're putting on on February 10th at the luxurious Corner Lounge, which will feature music from Dope Soda, and of course all manner of shmoozing with us publishing types. Check out the event on Facebook!

Signing off!

Capital letters! Poo jokes! Quotes!

Oh, hello there. Long time, no see!

Well, you see, I'm doing this little thing here in my final spring semester of university called ARTS 486, also-known-as the GRADUATING PROJECT. This means that over the course of the semester, we have to complete five projects in a direction of our choosing, and have works ready to be mounted in the downtown Nanaimo Art Gallery for the graduating show, Explorations, in March. March! March. So soon. Breathe...

So, I've proposed to continue the explorations that I started last semester in my ceramics directed study with Scott. I want to continue exploring the mixture of media, including some painting, and trying out some gel medium transfers of some of my photographs from the fall, which I want to apply back onto clay slabs. Full circle!

I'm also hoping to go to more life drawing classes (sadly, last week's was cancelled due to the snow day), but I want to try my hand at a lovely red clay body that I got in Victoria, known as Klamath Yellow. Why is "yellow" in the name if it's a red clay, you ask? Well, as the man at the clay store aptly put it, when it's wet, the clay is a lovely "baby-poo yellow." Once fired, it turns into a beautiful red. The benefits of this? Well gosh, who doesn't like making things change colour (read: magic) WITH INTENSE AMOUNTS OF HEAT? And poo jokes.

Unfortunately, I don't really have much started that I can share with you all, visually speaking, but for a written project this week, we had to look up some art vocabulary in reviews or artist statements. This led me to discover the art magazines in the Periodical section of the library, where I have decided I should spend some more time this semester. It was there, this morning, that I stumbled upon this lovely little quote about sculpture, which I find relevant to my work.

“Sculpture is the silent key to the world we encounter every second of every day. You might say that sculpture is what is not painting or printmaking or performance or video, what is not photography or film or cyberspace. You might be right. But you may just as easily be wrong.”

 – Ian Carr-Harris, professor at OCAD University

More to come, and thanks for reading! 

Holiday Projects

Happy New Year!

I'm back, after a little hiatus, but I'm ready to get this blog ball rolling again.

Over the holidays, I had a couple drawing endeavors. The first was a commissioned birthday card from a regular at Mon Petit Choux. She'd remembered me drawing my own Christmas cards last year, and asked if I could make a birthday card for the captain of her outrigger canoe team, Just 4 Kicks, the 2011  Cora Cup champions. She provided me with some photos of the team and the trophy, and I got to work with my Prismacolour pencil crayons.

The woman in the canoe is the one whose birthday it was, and the wave is what the trophy looks like.

Also over the holidays, it was my parents' 30th wedding anniversary. My parents were already paying for us all to go to Cuba together, but my siblings and I wanted to do something special for them. We came up with the idea of compiling some of our childhood memories into a book, accompanied by some drawings. I ended up taking on the task.

Unfortunately, with the end of semester, and the previous card that I needed to finish, the project got pushed to the background until I was set to leave for Cuba. I started it on the ferry, sneakily worked on it on the plane (with my parents one row up, on the other side of the aisle from us), and more while at the resort. Needless to say they suspected something was up, and they were quite nosey about it until we finally revealed the book to them at their anniversary dinner.

I ended up splitting the memories up into a number of categories, including "Parenting", "Food", "Travel" and "Activities". Here are some of the pages, mostly from the "Parenting" section.

I forgot to get Andre to sign it before taking the pictures...

The book was a hit, and stirred up a lot of memories and laughs. Unfortunately, I didn't get the chance to finish it before we parted ways (it felt a little bit like having homework on vacation...) and Mom and Dad made their way back to Dubai while I came back to the island with the book. My task now is to finish it before I see them again in the summer.

Happy anniversary guys! Love you!