At the very beginning of my derive, I had this moment that completely colored the whole experience. As I started away from campus, I saw a building that for some reason, still not entirely clear to me, so strongly represented a person in my mind's eye that I haven't stop thinking about it, even now. It was totally square and had rows of very angular windows with window shutters. It was brick and white and black wood. It looks nothing like a person. But it was totally a person. This phenomenon made me start to think about representation, and what makes something physical have a meaning outside of its physical body. Like, what does art achieve? I combined those musings with an idea I had previously had to draw a portrait for my final project, and came up with this...
My idea for the final project is very nearly complete, but there is still a connecting link missing in the concept. I think this will not be discovered until I get started, so I'm really excited to get things rolling. I want to take portraits of people in my life at Brown--this will be a really, really great way to work on my photography skills, something I've never looked at with artistry in mind. Instead of just capturing a memory, like most of my pictures do, I want these pictures to say something more about the person in them than you could see just by looking at their face--I want to capture personality. The word "expressions" comes to mind as a possible theme/title. But taking it a step further, I want to invite my people to share with me something that demonstrates how they express themselves (inspired by my desire to include a page from my friend's journal next to her image) to be a part of the project. I'm not yet completely satisfied with this idea as a whole, partly because I really want to get some drawing worked into it. My current thought is that maybe for each face, I'll select a feature that contributes a lot to the expression and draw that. I'd like the end result to be a book--one page with the drawn feature, the next with the face and the opposite of the face with the piece of expression from the subject.
In terms of timeline, I'm going to contact the people I'd like to work with and notify them about the expression piece and set up photo sessions right away. I'd like to give myself a couple days after collecting all the pieces and before the first critique to really takes some time to figure out the best way to put it all together. Logistical things to work out are: the book (print images and paste into a notebook of some sort?) and the printing (affordable, viable, high-quality printing?).
Final note, unrelated: the website project... my friend and I worked on some css styling this weekend. The important (and quite obvious, if you look at it) next step is the color scheme. We're waiting on a third friend's contribution (Parsons student!), which will be an amazing, colorful/crazy background. From there we will be able to get the color scheme figured out. http://chiplockemusic.com/ I don't think this is something that I will be focusing on too much more this semester, both because we have to wait for the illustration and because I'd really like to put as much energy into my final project as possible. But hopefully this summer when we're all together back in Portland it will be easier to finish the collaboration.
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