"I Am What Is Missing"

The concept behind this self-portrait is the fact that all of us may feel so trivial in life, yet we all have such a strong presence and importance. We may seem mundane in existence due to the amount of people in the world, but our life can bring so much power at the same time. The poem used in these images is by Mark Strand and helps demonstrate this idea.

The image of me in the middle was used in Photoshop while the other two images were used in Illustrator. The image in the middle is a composite of two images. First I used selective color and increased the blacks and yellows. Then I changed the contrast and enhanced the vibrance. I added a drop shadow and put on a slight sepia filter. For the images used in illustrator, I changed the contrast and increased the magentas. I used the daub painting filter on them and then created the text. I feathered the text in parts to emphasize the fact that they were the 'absence' or what was 'missing'.

Artist Presentation

The artists that we chose to present in our exhibition are Tom Repasky and Maurits Cornelis Escher. We decided to pick these artists because they both were surrealists who used different media from one another. We were interested in how both of them expressed twisted perspective views of the world. The theme centered on this idea of transforming things around us to make us look at things from a new angle.

Tom Repasky was born in 1949 in Ohio. While he was in his adolescence, he fell off of a cliff and experienced a change of perception in life. He started to see the world differently and used this as inspiration for his work once he became an artist several years later. He tried to emphasize the different psychological viewpoints of things. This was seen in his works: “Reflections” from 2008, “Life Is A Game” from 2009, “Look Out” from 2009, “Watching Them Selves” from 2010, and “The Watchers” from 2010. In 13 years he created more than 3,000 pieces.

M.C. Escher was born in 1898 in the Netherlands. He was very educated due to attending the Harlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts and by living in Rome for 11 years. Escher drew a large amount of his inspiration from architecture school while playing with perspective and impossible spaces. Instead of trying to show the viewer a psychological viewpoint, M.C. Escher altered physical space to create different viewpoints. This was seen in his works: “Hand with Reflecting Sphere” from 1935, “Sky And Water I” from 1938, “Balcony” from 1945, “Puddle” from 1952, “Relativity” from 1953, and “Waterfall” from 1961.

Princeton Museum

I have been to the Princeton Museum several times due to the variety of work they have there. This time, my favorite exhibition consisted of the Chinese landscapes. I really enjoy how different they are from other types of art, simply for the fact that they are hanging scrolls with ink on silk. This makes it much more interesting to me. These works tried to show all different examples of the definition of a landscape. These were from the 12th century all the way to the present and showed a change in how artists approached their work. Landscapes are something that are found all around the world no matter where you are. These tie us together and make us feel connected. I also enjoyed the work from the Byzantine time period because I am learning about that in my art history class at the moment. It is always exciting to physically see something that you are discussing. It makes it much more enticing and makes me feel more emersed in the work.

Pizza Hut

At first I traced different cartoon characters. I felt that they looked unprofessional and sloppy so I chose to change over and complete a logo. I practiced on several different ones before I found one that I liked. This is where the Pizza Hut logo came in. I liked the way there were delicate curves versus harsh angles. It created strong contrast. The colors were also pleasing. This was my end result.