Building

This week’s throwback piece is from my junior year of high school. This is a landscape painting from a spot in Mt. Adams, Cincinnati. I got lots of positive feedback at the time on this painting, which I did not understand. Lots liked the window & door on the middle house, and liked the energy of the piece. I hated the black gate however, and still do hate it very much. But I don’t dislike this work, I just don’t feel any special connection to it or particularly enjoy looking at it. It isn’t terrible, it is pretty decent, especially because I was just learning how to paint at this time in my art career. I would change the perspective and make the lines more straight if I were to do this composition now.

In high school, we went to Mt. Adams a few times to sketch and take pictures for studio. Mt. Adams is a great art community, and have art walks often. It is a wonderful place for artists to convene, and holds many fond memories of those fun field trips with friends.

My father in particular really enjoyed this painting, so I gave it to him for Christmas that year, and it has been in his room ever since.

Freshman year at DAAP, we participated in a group project in one of our required studio classes. All I remember was we were supposed to build a mini house using wood, cardboard, and various supplies. My group decided to make a giant snake dome, with an Aladdin/arabian inspired theme, complete with an interior filled with pillows & lights. We were going for “Aladdin meets hookah bar” and we called ourselves the “Tool Girl Taylors” haha. At least I liked my group members!

It was one of the worst projects ever! Building a wooden “skeleton” frame to support a ton of cardboard, then stapling cardboard together for the exterior walls, and making a sturdy base as well proved much more difficult than we thought.

Along the way, there was lots of hiccups and stressing out. Being a sensitive artist, I broke down and cried a few times. After lots of building and rebuilding, stapling and cardboard, we finally had the project completely finished. This was my first time staying very late at DAAP and not getting much sleep, so I was tired in every possible way. I don’t know if I pushed a lot of this project experience out of my memory, but I really cannot remember much about this project except how horrible it was. I don’t even know how long it took to put this together, it was a few days of very hard work.

This was the “dome” of the sculpture, which was the hardest to staple. Making a cardboard dome is very hard work, and was the worst part of the whole project. Ultimately, it ended up looking very cool though!

The interior! I didn’t take too many pictures of the final product, I wish I had more!

The view of the ceiling from the interior…this may have been the coolest part of the project!

The exterior of the final product. As you can see, that is a TON of cardboard stapled to the wooden base. I never wanted to work with cardboard or staples again for a while after completing this project.

The saddest part of this entire project was that it was up for less than 24 hours. After all of the stress and hard work, we had to tear it down. Needless to say it was very frustrating. I’m very glad I will never have to go through that project ever again.

This picture pretty much sums everything up.