Our assignment in figure drawing studio was to imagine that our model was starving or extremely malnourished having minimal musculature or fat on his body.  This drawing was made with red conte crayon in my drawing pad.

This vase is simply the form of the lower abdominal region of the female body.  The vessel was thrown on the wheel from porcelain clay and altered before being cut from the wheel surface.  I carved it further after it was removed and then sanded the surface smooth after bisque firing.

This drawing was made with a wax crayon on a lithograph stone for my printmaking studio.  It is an innocent reinterpretation of the story of Adam and Eve.  The assignment was to choose a myth or folk story to depict.  One could interpret the grown man in the apron as God in the story as Eve, as a mere child, makes an attempt to retrieve an apple for herself in an innocent but immoral theft.

This pot was a technical nightmare and is still a work in progress.  The central vessel was thrown on a wheel while the vertebrae and ribs were hand-built onto the altered structure.  To make the vessel represent deflation or exhaling, the ribs were lifted off of the face of the pot into suspension.  As they dry, even desperately slowly, they warp and twist into each other and some of the more brittle ones break off.  Since this stage of its progress shows the concept the best, I chose it to represent the idea as a whole.

This is a simple piece I made for my introductory digital arts studio, where we had to take an image and use Adobe Photoshop to add text to compliment the image or contradict the image.  I chose the peaceful image of geese flying over the water to complement the poem by Mary Oliver titled "Wild Geese." This is a poem that my ceramics professor, Chris Staley, read to my class last semester as an inspirational gesture to start the day.  I used it in this piece so I could share it with other people who might find it as calming as I did.

Figure Drawing sketches from today (2/9/2012).  We used compressed charcoal on wet newsprint with a live model.  I am very happy with the drawing on the right and the blending that occured to create some kind of contour shading around the model's limbs and framework.  You can still see some of the guidelines that I used to balance her proportions using ligher lines in her abdominal region.  The arm on the right is a bit thick and her shoulders seem a little too broad. I will try to work smaller next time so I can include her whole body including her head in the page size.

This piece from my printmaking studio was premised on the theme of "difficult differences."  I was thinking about the American idea that, as a superpower of the world, we are responsible for the rest of the world.  This is a very romantic idea and I believe that 'we' use it to justify invasive actions that will, theoretically, benefit us, or a choice few, financially.  I used Mexico as an example of a people who need and want our help, but we demonize them because they benefit us more if they stay where they are and provide a cheap source of labor.