Collage project

Summary:

My collage is an outdoor scene, with a sun shining in the upper right, and the sun’s rays extending toward a bookshelf that houses a representation of who I am – my family, my interests, my insecurities, and my experience with art. Within the sun’s rays are pictures of my past (including parents and grandparents), the place I am from (Colstrip, Montana) and the place I now consider home (Belmont), my present, and a representation of art that is meaningful to me as history.

Assignment specs and responses:

On a standard sheet of poster board create a collage that says something about you, your world, and your view of art. This project should incorporate all of the following ideas:

Decisions: see everything below

Color: You must include
complementary colors: Complementary colors can be found with the purple flower on the bookshelf surrounded by yellow ribbon and two yellow circles.
analogous colors: The representation of the sun is made of 3 shades: yellow / yellow-orange / orange.
saturated colors & dull colors: The flower in the bottom right corner consists of a bright orange and a dull orange.
warm colors: Warm colors (mainly oranges and yellows) are found with the sun, the sun’s rays, and circle accents throughout
cool colors: Cool colors are found in the purple cut-outs on the bookshelf.

Light: You must have both light and dark areas on your collage—these elements must represent thoughtful choices.

Texture and Pattern: The stem of the flower at the bottom right is 3D, wrapped with fiber, and the flower center has faux-gems. The center of the sun is 3D as well. The photos in the sun’s rays are in a linear grid pattern.

Volume: I used darker green of the grass versus the lighter blue of the sky to create grounding of the image, as well as a sense of depth. The layers of grass and hill-shaped cutting also contribute to this.

Line: The yellow circles in this collage move the eye around in a triangular line, starting with the sun, then to the yellow accented purple flower on the left, and then to the circle at the bottom right, also accented with yellow. The solid lines that form the representation of the sun’s rays also serve to move the eye from the sun to the purple flower.

Space and Scale: The most obvious object with scale is the very large image of my son. As a mother, you not only care more about your children than anything else, but they take up the most time and mental energy in your life. The pictures in the sun’s rays are small and close together in no specific order because that’s how I see ancestry and culture and experience coming together to influence a person (in combination with the personal choices they make.) The grass is the foreground and houses the bookshelf and the picture of Jake, while the sky is the background and houses the sun. The sun’s rays visually connect the sun in the background to the bookshelf in the foreground.

Symbolism: The bookshelf’s middle shelf with all the purple objects represent 5 of the major things in my life I’m insecure about. The room with the piano that seems to be off all by itself at the bottom right represents my questioning where music fits into my life right now.

Subject Matter:
Your collage should incorporate the elements that make you who you are. It must include the following themes:

You: The most important things to me are my son, books (and learning and teaching), art and design in its various forms, spirituality, scrapbooking, and my friends.

Friends and Family: This collage has pictures of my parents and grandparents, my son, and my best friend and her family. There are also pictures of my two sisters and I; my older sister is faded from the picture of the three of us in the bookshelf, because she died last year.

Your town, community, school: There are two pictures from my hometown in Montana, and three pictures of Belmont. I have been at Belmont in some capacity since fall 1997, and consider it my home – the places around middle Tennessee where I’ve lived are just incidental.

Your country: When I started thinking about it, art plays a big part in my understanding of our country’s history. The paintings and photos in my history books always grabbed my attention much more than any text could. Symbolic art objects like the Statue of Liberty (pictured) and Mount Rushmore (not pictured, but visited often) and war memorials are touch points for national sentiment.

The world today: In order to understand the world today, we need to have a historical knowledge of how we got here. Art is a way to bring that knowledge to life – as I said, looking at art from another era or country can grab a person’s attention much stronger than just text can. Additionally, the human impulse to create art exists through all cultures and all of recorded history and gives us common ground.

Art: I view art in several ways.
- First, as a parent and aspiring (already part-time) educator, I see how children learn primarily through movement, experience, and sensory input. Creating an art project involves all of these things – art is beneficial to a child’s motor and planning skills and creative thinking, and it builds confidence.
- Second, I see art as a way to learn about our past and our world – the phrase “ars longa, vita brevis” is below the pictures of our visit to the Frist. If you think about it, all that really remains after time passes are the different forms of recorded art – both visual and written. (A subset of this is my personal hobby of scrapbooking – recording memories through images and words in a way that is much more interesting than just a photo album or journal.)
- Third, I like to look at interesting things. I love Belmont’s campus because of all the statues and landscaping around them. I loved the public art in Seattle. I deliberately designed my main living room wall to be aesthetically pleasing and visually balanced. We have opportunities every day to make our surroundings not just functional, but beautiful, and visual art, design, and crafts all come together to make that possible.

History: How has history made you who you are? How has it shaped the world today? How does art relate to history?

I don't see history as necessarily shaping anything; I see history as a shape we observe looking back.

However. Through art we get a glimpse into the minds of others. Art can teach us about history - sometimes as observation, sometimes as opinion or propaganda. Art can spur on political or social movements by encapsulating and representing ideas. Art can also represent beliefs and understandings of different cultures across different time periods.

Art, history, science, literature, religion, politics . . . none of these things can really be understood apart from the others. They're all tributaries of the same body of water, always moving forward and always changing.