Jane Yim

Final Statement

My artwork shows my love for straight lines and detail. Monotype was very difficult for me to get used to because I usually work with etching or just fine point pens. Painting is not one of my strong points and I still struggle with the use of a brush or choosing colors. Screen-printing was one of my favorite things to learn in this class. I was able to show my passion for lines and details through screen-printing as well as a connection with nature and the human psyche. I was also able to experiment with colors and how it changed the subject depending on what color was used as well as the background of the paper, or even wood. Screen-printing has really opened my eyes to experimentation and it is something that I want to continue to work on.

Wanmin Li

 

First portfolio: Dandelion

The inspiration for most of my works is nature – flowers, trees, plants, sky, etc. I was first drawn to painting because I enjoyed the transparency and luminosity. Now in printmaking, I found that the outcome of the prints can bring the simplicity out of my work. Prints are pretty straightforward, silence and simple.

In this project I choose dandelion as the main focus of my work because it is the symbol of nature and it reminds me of my childhood. Dandelion is intelligence. It represents energy, positivity and survival. I see purity and calmness from dandelion. It brings progress and hope to people.

On my prints, I tried to create an atmosphere and a feeling of live of the nature. I tried to bring out the beauty of nature through the silence and movement through my prints.

 

 

Second Porfolio: The Origin of Nature

In this project, I aimed to draw connection between the nature and the human being.  On the first print, it is inspired by Herni Matisse’s Cut-outs. I create a collage using the dandelion print I made by using the photo emulsion technique. I think dandelion is the most representational plant in nature. It looks like human pupil in a way. It represents live and reproduction just likes human beings. I cut out two dandelions from different color backgrounds and collage them together into one. Following the same idea, I cut out four dandelions into two new ones. There are two dandelions because I want them to stand for both sexes of human.

In order to add some movements into the collage print, I cut out some leave shape with color papers and tape them repeatedly into a way of feeling like wind. I use colors of yellow, orange, blue, green and red because these colors are representing the colorful nature, and at the same time, they are representing the different emotions and feelings from human.

On the second print, it is a print of tree trunk. It also looks like a thumb print of a human being. At first, I use the same colors as the first print and make them dissolve together into a watercolor effect with monoprint. And then I print the tree trunk on top with photo emulsion. I aimed to combine the nature and the human identity into one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Final portfolio: The Expectant Mama

I found beauty in pregnancy.

My prints are presents to celebrate the pregnant body in an artistic way. I think the human form is fascinated in a powerful way.

I created my work in an abstract way so it has simply become a way to soothe our worries about the naked depiction of women.

The colors I chose mainly focus on the natural skin color and the fantasy feeling of the blank expanse of skin on the belly.

My prints are symbolized growing into a woman who is strong and beautiful.

Wanmin Li image list

Victor Ortiz

Statement #1

            For this series I am interested in exploring the psychological stages of a relationship. I was inspired by Latin American poetry and music, as well as personal experience. For the project I decided to use three portraits, one profile, one 3/4 profile, and one forward facing face. For the three I used my own face and used bright saturated as well as unsaturated color to allude to a psychological stages. I also attempted to use printing technique to represent mental stages. As the prints develop they progress from refined outlines and muted colors to thick exploded outlines and vibrant colors. This was done as a way of incorporating effects inherent to monotype, specifically over inking to create lines defined  by the movement of the ink and not the artists hand. The last print (face forward) breaks from the narrative and is meant as the final mental stage of a relationship; It is simple and reflective yet confronting. 

 

Statement #2

            I am interested in redesigning the popular Mexican game, La Loteria. In this series I altered the size of the work by reducing the format to about twice the size of functional Loteria cards. The Cards mimic the format of the popular card game but the images stray from the popular depiction of the standard game. Instead of reinterpreting the images with a stylistic flare I am exploring themes of culture as transcribed by popular sayings in Mexico. The work is limited to a specific audience with specific cultural awareness and only they can break into the second layer of the work which works with popular refrains in Mexican culture. I do not see this as a problem nor do I feel the need to make the work more accessible as it is the cultural specificity of the work that creates a private language depending on audiences.

 

 

Statement #3

Most of my work features a prominent contour line. The line usually does not vary in width and I rely on it to remedy compositions with which I find myself dissatisfied. While I did not completely obliterate the contour line in the last set of works, in the penultimate series, I completely avoided the hard thin black line that I relied on throughout the semester. With this series I was also interested in exploring the societal conception of beauty. In my last set of works I wanted to use lines of all shapes and sizes and differing colors in order to render a figure. I chose to focus on the line because instead of deleting the line from my work, a feature that runs across most of my work, I wanted to embrace it and use it to create the figure and not just define its boundaries.

Valerie Garcia

 

 

VGARCIA- Image list

Final Artist Statement

What is meaning? “You meet in life the exact reproduction of your own thoughts”. We are each responsible for creating our own meaning. In this context, my work is about expanding a narrative, through building a conversation and forming connections. The stories behind my artworks serve as a mirror for my self and the audience, inviting one to enter their own conversations with color and form personal connections through the way my art interprets the world.

Tiara Bonet

Bonet_Tiara Image list

First portfolio: Pure America

    For my first portfolio, entitled, Pure America, I was interested in exploring the shapes of the American flags (square and rectangles) along with the colors of the American Flag and how those colors are the primary colors. The idea has been something I’ve always been fascinated with but never explored. I played around with the types of blues and reds that I used, trying to see how the different values of the colors conveyed a different meaning. Each print has a different blue or a different red, even though they might look similar. By different I mean I used a literal different shade of the color or I might have added extender. I was also interested in seeing if anything changed with the addition of black or having black as a background. I mostly stuck with painting the plates from my traced drawing. Using this technique allowed me to be able to control the amount of paint and to create different textures. I noticed that if I added a lot paint to one side of a rectangle it would bleed out or if I applied paint lightly the brushstrokes stood out more. I learned to embrace mistakes and accidents.  I think mistakes and accidents gave my pieces a certain character and sometimes they inspired my other pieces. Each of my pieces though inspired by the same concept took on their own personality, with each learned technique and each mistake.

Second Portfolio:  Americal life

  My second portfolio is called an American life. In some ways it is a continuation of my first portfolio. This time however I used the exact lines of the flag for most of the images. Also this time I used more red, white and blue instead of red, white and yellow.

         For this portfolio I really experimented with the material I printed on. I printed on different types of paper, photographs, and collages. What I also experiment with was soaking the paper with distilled vinegar or spraying the ink with distilled vinegar while I was printing. I think the technique I liked the best was soaking the paper before printing. It allowed the ink to move more and what was supposed to be straight lines came out with a bleeding through affect.

              While printing on photographs were easy printing on a collage were more difficult. The ink started to dry out and became sticky, pulling up the parts of the collage.

Final Portfolio: I Am Lost

My final portfolio is called I Am Lost. It is about what makes me who I am such as my family. The portfolio started from the questions who am I and who I am not. I am a lot of my parents and my family but in a statement way I am not them at all. I used the silkscreen for repetition. I want the viewer to think about how they feel when they are confronted with a phrase repeated over and over again. For me seeing I Am Lost over and over again makes me feel like I am supposed to be lost.

I do not think this portfolio is finished. If I had the time and money, I would do each picture in color and I would do more.  I also would use canvas panel for some of the text.

Magdalena Zdunczyk

MagdalenaZdunczyk

Artist Statement

Bodies is a study of line, human form and color. I have decided to collaborate the natural human form – mostly female with the abstract feeling. The bodies in each piece are suspended in space and are cut in structure, so the viewer can see only partial image of the female figure. In some of the artworks I wanted to express the overlapping effect to explore how colors would combine. The first series of the Bodies was more defined with geometry and human frame was created by connecting shapes. However, in the second series I have decided to design more natural and organic flow. I wanted the bodies to become humanly. What is more, I used watercolor and monotype to establish shading and balance between the different parts of the figures. Also, I have worked in different dimensions to showcase how smaller pieces “scream” for more space. Because of that, in the last series of the Bodies, I have assembled the figures on a bigger paper to explore the visual depth. Bodies are an ongoing experimentation and process of how line interacts with color and how it can create a simple female physique.

 

Magdalena Zdunczyk 

Prof. Park

Printmaking: Artists Statement 

During the process of learning about printmaking and monotype, I did not have a particular idea or theme that I wanted to create. As a painter, I mostly work spontaneously, from the top of my head and I paint very expressively. What is more, I create artworks that are abstract and surreal. My printmaking projects are definitely a reflection of that. They are a series of experimentations. Sometimes I left the work in the simplest forms with plain lines and other times I have decided to develop more detailed images with playful colors. However, most of the monotypes evolved in the moment I was creating them. From one concept, another one was born. Even though, in the beginning of the process I felt like my works have nothing in common, I have noticed that they are all relating in a way to the subject matter of the body- both human and not. Although none of it was intentional, I can see the pattern that I have overlooked in the beginning.

Magdalena Zdunczyk
Artist Statement – Final Portfolio
Prof. Park
May 12th, 2015

Screen-printing was a very interesting process for me. It is less controlled and sometimes the outcome is not what we have anticipated. At least I have learned that due to my experimentations. Because screen -printing was a new medium for me, I felt a little bit reserved. However, I feel that my final portfolio is the reflection of what I have been holding back. “Bodies” started as an experimentation of color, shapes and mostly the beauty of line. I called my final series “Bodies: Imperfection is Perfect” because I feel that nowadays people overlook the real beauty. They starve for that perfect image of themselves without realizing how perfect they already are. It is surreal and so are my works. I presented them in a form of collage saw well as simple prints over watercolor backgrounds. The colors are vibrant and call for the attention of the viewer. “Body of Burned Memories” is a piece on a bright yellow/green background, which symbolizes a personal approach to perfection. I have used pieces of my own diary that I have kept as a teenager and in which I wrote about the struggles of young girls just like myself. “Bodies” are portrayed naked to give the raw and deep feeling of the perfect and imperfect.  What is more, the surreal “body tree” reminded me of Daphne from Greek mythology. She was kept imprisoned by Apollo, because of his extreme adoration of her beauty. In order to escape the God, Daphne was transformed into a laurel tree. In a way the myth feels very related to my work. The beauty of a female is captured by the influence of media and celebrities or even other people who take part in our lives. We are highly influenced by what is around us. But what if you were just a beautiful laurel tree? Not captivated by the craziness of media, strive for perfection and influence of others. But instead, all of us, in any form, shape or line a symbol of simple beauty?

Kevin Kim

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kevin Kim Image list

Artist Statement

My artwork takes a closer look at the environment that is around me. It shows the relationship between the organic and the inorganic: nature and mankind. I’ve recently noticed a lot of construction going around me and I started to wonder about this idea of self-sustenance. Nature has it’s own way of sustaining itself over time, whereas mankind has to keep improving itself by fixing whatever the problem may be. Through this I have realized that often times there seems to be this struggle between nature and the creation of man. In other words, one tries to overpower the other in some sense. Often times this struggle can seem aggressive and other times subtle. My work tries to portray this. In addition, a couple of my prints have been inspired by Jackson Pollock’s drip technique, where before I flood the screen I would drip different colors onto the opened areas and then flood it, which allowed it to mix the colors up. Also, while making my other prints, I’ve adopted the ghost technique from monoprinting into screen printing. What I did was I would print onto a newspaper, and quickly put another paper on top of it to transfer it over. Then I would do it several more times that left a faded out print. I learned spraying water over it helped it to keep the print stay went, which allowed me to create more faded prints. Overall, my work tries to portray the relationship between the organic and inorganic, yet at the same time it was for me to explore it and also to try and see if harmony can be created between the two.

Katya Branxton

Elizabeth Valenza

Elizabeth Valenza Image list PDF

Darien Cruz

 

Statement #1: My first set of monotype prints are my interpretations of experimenting and combining colors and shapes. I used primary colors in each print. I focused on the idea of movement through my monotype prints. I tried to fill the entire ten by twelve papers with a cluster of colors and shapes. Each cluster of patterns and shapes brings a different type of movement that allows the reader to feel a different kind of emotion. As a first time creating prints, the use of ink on each mono print was different. The more prints that were made, the less ink that was used and the more organized the designs looked. You can see a progression in sharpness and disperse of shapes. My main goal for my next set of prints would be for it to be more clean, organized and the colors to be more complimentary. The prints presented may be unison through colors however they do not complement each other in a way that I intended for them to.Portfolio 1 Image List

Statement #2: Nature is one of the first subjects you are taught to draw in art. Nature in itself is its own piece of work. Its movement, color, and forms. Nature is an art that I have always been intrigued by. In the first part of my portfolio, my main focus was using nature as a décor. The symmetry of the flowers, the use of complimentary and adjacent colors created a partnership and harmonizes one another. Nature tends to be viewed as a woman in human form. I wanted to elaborate on it and set a mood of peace and tranquility with the use of colors and lines. The idea of nature being a human is quite interesting and I would like to continue more on society’s aspect of “Mother Nature.” I used silhouettes and side profiles to demonstrate this because I feel sets a stronger mood and gives mystery.Portfolio 2 Image List

Statement #3:

“Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.”

Memories can be reminders of best moments, tragic times, gains and losses. It can remind you of where you came from, who you have become and what you have lost. Memories are good and bad. Art can be used to depict many ideas including memories and feelings. I chose to make my final presentation about a few memories. Looking back at these memories, they are moments that I wish I can go back to and relive. With the use of pointillism and primary colors, I wanted to capture the value of the moment. Pointillism is a technique of painting in which small distinct dots of color are applied in patterns to form an image. This technique is known for being tedious and unique. This skill emphasizes on the concept of a memory because like a memory, it is only one of its kind. Not one person shares the same memory and each memory holds a different value. I chose to use color for my pieces because color brings life and meaning to a work. Memories can be portrayed the same way. Memories may be past moments but they remain meaningful and still active in our hearts and minds. Some pieces have a fade of analogous colors. The fade of colors depict the fade that a memory becomes when we lose the value of its worth and forget about it.Portfolio 3 image list