Great Artist Reflection
This year was the last great artist of my career at TCS. I have always enjoyed this time of year and as I move on I will miss it a lot. This year since our class couldn’t decide on one artist or a group of artists, like we have in the past, we each picked a different artist to study for the next six weeks. I wasn’t familiar with most of the artist’s style and back round and the selection we choice had a large variety. We waited until the very last day to set up our room. I felt like some people felt a little bit of tension from this but the room ended up looking really good like it usually does and we had some time to spare.
I have had mixed feelings about picking individual artists. I didn’t hate the idea because everyone would get to learn about something that appealed to them, though I wish that it could have been a shared artist because then there would have been more of a group element. The artists we picked were random and had close to no similarities in their artwork, there were people as different as Joyce Watkins and Joseph Boyes. I liked a lot of the artists that were chosen and I liked seeing my class mates interpretations of their work. There were also some artists that I didn’t like as much, and I wouldn’t have been something I would have choose to study.
For my Artist I chose Ben Dehart he is a local artist who works for Trader Joe’s and designs their chalkboards. Even though he is not a professional artist yet and his work hasn’t been shown in galleries, I still consider him a great artist. He works for the Trader Joe’s in Hill Crest and lives in North Park. He creates the masterpieces that hang in the market. He uses chalk as well as chalk paint when which are easier to create details with. I didn’t have chalk pens and the chalk was to difficult to work with i used acrylic paint accented with chalk for my artwork. The chalkboards are based off of products that the store wants to advertise and I didn’t have any products to advertise I based my artwork off of people and inside jokes from our class.
The week of Great Artist we were given a day that was completely dedicated to great artist. I thought this was very productive for me as well as for many of my class mates. Even though I didn’t have a lot of time for the first part of the day because I was being painted for another Great Artist project I still got a lot of work done that day. I took the job of formatting, printing and, mounting of the writing pieces we did to go with our art work. I thought it would be easier for everyone to send there writing to me instead of everybody printing them out and having to reprint them because they didn’t match. This wasn’t stressful to me at all, I think it saved us time in the setting up process. Instead of covering our room in white sheets we chose to cover two walls in black butcher paper and the other two in white sheets. I think this was a good idea because we didn’t have a lot of sheets and the ones we did have were either stained or too small.
I really enjoyed my last Great Artist. I learned about only one artists work but, I touched on eleven different artists. I loved the variety of the artwork and the presentation of the room in the finale. Even though some times it felt like we were short on time everything came together and it looked really good.
