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!