Exploring Q4

What is your major area of emphasis for Q4? This is where are you applying the majority of your time and energy.

·         A focus on musical expression and artistic expression in general. I feel as if acting and music have the same distinct fundamental principles that make them art; expression of life and story. Whether its acting or music, I want to focus on my delivery and interpretation of expression

Are you exploring, or are you working towards a finished product? 

·         I feel that it would be very beneficial for me to do a bit of both. I definitely want an end product, for sure – but I still want room for experimentation and space for exploration, therefor I can search for my artistic personality. If I discover this now, I would benefit greatly from this.

What do you envision as the end result?

• I envision a collaborative acting piece that somehow ties to music. The closest thing to this would be a snippet from an opera, acting out the part as I sing. I want something in which I can express myself musically and visually.

Are you working alone or do you have collaborators?

• ·         At the moment and most of my past time in STAC I have worked alone, though I would like to change this. I would like to work collaboratively and change my habits of “lone wolfing.” I need to be in a working environment with increase collaboration because it will help me with work production and it will help me with idea development skills.

Who are your community?

• ·         I would prefer people with skills in acting and music; I don’t want to work with photographers, for example, because there would be no obvious artistic relation to generate Ideas. In other words, it wouldn’t benefit me very much to work with photographers, for instance, because photography has nothing to do with music and it would be a waste of my time.

Where are you now, where will you get to?

• I’m at a beginning point of something of which I’m not sure of yet, but ideas will come as ideas and new influences come.

What are 5 criteria with which we will evaluate your work on this this quarter?

1. inspiring
2. intellectual
3. impetus to something out of the ordinary
4. flowing 
5. “colorful”  

Minor:

What is your minor? Why? How will it be useful to you? How will it be fun?

• ·         Architectural design. I intended on working on this since the beginning of the year but I have focused myself on other things. I have a great interest in redesigning the designed.  

Where are your starting? Where do you hope to get to? 

•  Old sketches from sketchbooks of years gone by. I have professional drafting tools and I would like to use them for a change- and eventually create a model of my best piece. 

A Waltz? or not a Waltz?

Today was very much a day of intense arrangement of my Sicilian styled piece. I was initially thinking of making this piece a "canzone" which is a song, different than an aria which is a singe solo song from an opera,  but I am seeing a better outcome for this piece as a chamber piece with mandolin parts and bass and cello parts as well. In regard to my time frame, I am always keeping the idea of its practicality of completion and it seems doable to record the piano part and a mandolin and bass part. The cello and string section is a bit too complicated to arrange and write out for now; also considering the long and tedious rehearsals I would have to have with a string section- for now and I will save this for a future date. One problem that I have found was that the piece has a “waltz” feel and these are usually written in 6/8 time. The piece is written with in 6/8 time, though it has the feel of a 4/4 time and I felt I had to conduct some research to determine whether or not I am doing something wrong. First off, I listened to some waltzes and I listened for their “feel”, while in my head, my piano part played along.

Johann Strauss – “Vienna Waltz”

 The two matched and I felt I was on to something, but I still felt I needed more reassurance. To do this, I wrote out the lead to the mandolin part with the octaves part to the piano (they’re the same) and I found that 4/4 would be holding the phrase over and it didn’t flow. The temp I was looking for was that waltz feel where, as counted as quarter notes in rhythm, is 1- 2 -3, 1- 2 – 3, 1-2 -3, and so on and so forth.

With this, I found a YouTube video with a great explanation two why 6/8 is 6/8.

YouTube- Difference Between 4/4 And 6/8 In Music

 It went over the aspect of how 4/4 can be similar, but instead there are 6 eighth notes that are counted “like quarter” notes in the aspect that they are counted as one beat. 

Piano Arrangement

These past three weeks have marked hell week, and the final production of "How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying." My role, J. Pierrepont Finch has become somewhat of a challenge to me. It was not that playing the character was a difficult thing, it was attempting to put myself into Finch's intellectual mindset; what is next and what is it that finch is thinking in terms of the past or present. That, to me, is the most interesting part of the art; to place yourself in another man's shoes and live their life for a whole two hours. Lately, I have been also been very interested in music composition. I have embarked on a journey in which I plan to finish a piano arrangement in which I initially composed approximately 4 weeks ago. New plans changed my initial idea, and now I am in the process of writing string parts to it. The piece is based off of Sicilian music with mandolin parts. It mainly focuses on the mandolin and the piano as the "narratives" to the "story line". I am also thinking of adding a vocal part to the song, possibly in the style of classical operatic style. Another main influence has been the emphasis on the harpsichord. This idea mainly came from Handel's "Suite in F major (HWV 348), Bourrée". although Handel's piece is a completely different sound, stylistically speaking  if focuses its sound around a general pattern of a "theme", so to say.  Sicilian Music with mandolins

Painting Workshop Pieces- With Galen Pittman

The last three days in STAC have been pretty much jammed packed with art. Today I have the joy to say that My “Native” painting is near completion! I must have gone through hell and back to get that painting to “work” again. I guess that last three days have been a matter of simply “doing” that contemplating. The paintings pictured below, including the Charcoal piece shown below are the pieces of which I created in the Painting workshop with Galen Pittman. This experience with Galen was a truly wonderful workshop. One main point that that Galen brought up was everything within a painting is intertwined. Everything in the figure leads to the next. The charcoal drawing was a preliminary drawing to test our skills. Although this was a preliminary drawing, gale assisted me in this piece as well. The idea of interconnected figures and light/dark contrasts that he spoke of aided in the process of creating the “see-through” effect on the bottle. The next day, I mostly applied the concept of contract between light and dark figures. I made sure to contrast lighter tones in colors by highlighting them with a white, while bordering it with a dark to contrast it and bring out the white’s natural tone. Gales Workshop was a wonderful experience for my technical aspect o painting. I hope to be part of workshops like this in the near future. 

Painting On the Way- Artistic Inquiry

One problem I have been finding myself in lately is that I cannot physically finish my work. it is probably incorrect to say that I cannot "physically" finish my work, but it would be incorrect to say that I cannot finish my pieces because I have ran out of ideas. Ideas come easy to me. It is easy to finish apiece when there is an easy flow of ideas throughout the piece's work process. when circumstance occur such that a good ideas is created to spark the beginning of a project and nothing more, I’m left with pieces such as the one shown above. This piece has caused much aggravation in that it seemed like a good idea a first, but as time went on during the process of creating, ideas seemed to stop flowing. Initially the idea of the piece was derived from my grandfather’s brother who works hand-to-had with natives of Latin America, working to preserve their cultural values of ancestral backgrounds. With this I decided to paint an interpretive and subjective figure of a native from the Americas. The flowers were to represent the soul and hospitality and the white above the figures chest was to represent vibrancy. I figured the fastest, easiest, and best way to interpret my idea would be to use quick-drying acrylic and palate knives. It all seemed to be such a wonderful idea, but when I finished the figure, I was left with open/ unfinished space. I am currently conducting research on South American natives. I am hoping that this will spark some creativity and create or be the basis of new ideas. 

African Art and Influence

-1-

-2-

            These two pieces work within the same realm of ideas and principles. the underlying concepts of the pieces was slavery and this came about after reading books and news articles on cultural masks showing tribal identities and inter brotherhood between tribal members of African tribal members. “These masks would describe peoples ways of life, ranging from the food they ate, to the wars they fought, to the gods they believed in “(The). “The masks are dramatic portraits of spirit beings, departed ancestors, and invisible powers of social control” (Art). As these people were slowly stolen from their land to be turned into slaves, the land changed and stayed the same. it stayed the same in that it still believed in its culture, but changed in that the peoples way of life changed. They were taken from their homes, oppressively, and virtually forced upon their new lives as slaves with the discontinuation of their previous life and rich culture. These principles can be summed up into the second piece. This piece describes the native oppression and their struggle as an identity. The repeated image represents the lasting impact it had on our modern world and how slavery destroyed cultures and lives of millions of Africans. The first piece is a mask and it was made to correspond with the second painting. This mask (the first painting) depicts a depressed face with dark square tears dripping from the eyes of the face pictured. This pace mainly includes red as red can symbolize blood for pain- so do the teardrops pictured within the piece, as well. 

Ray, Benjamin Caleb. "The Art of the African Mask." The Art of the African Mask. Bayly Art Museum, n.d. Web. 5 Aug. 1994. <http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~bcr/African_Mask.html>.

Kraus and L'elisir d'amore

 - 1, Kraus.  -

- 2, L'elisir. -

As for these pieces, I completed them in the beginning of the first quarter. I haven’t had the chance to put them up, but now is the time I felt best to upload them. In the midst of their creation, I began to ponder about sound and its power of connecting all spaces- plane, flat, circular, or cubical. Its power also seemed to find a way to connect spaces in an aesthetic way where energy is not only flowing, but its connective, fluid and concentrated. In the first piece, Kraus, I decided to recreate the face of Alfredo Kraus but with a shown energy movement between spaces. this piece was the first out of the two and proved to be more problematic in that I could not portray my ideas exactly onto the paper...I fixated myself on the aesthetic portion of drawing, making every line perfect and the face similar to that of Alfredo Kraus. The second piece, L'elisir, proved to be the more fluid out of the two. Even though the first piece is not completed, L'elisir, surely proved my imagination true. In this piece, the energy reverberating off of the singer's body is self-contained; concentrating the energy in the tips of the fingers and behind the body as it moves- leaving energy. The energy given off is all around but self-contained within the character. Both pieces were modeled off of interpreted visions of the artists or operas from memory; no pictures were used or duplicated.