Westcott DesignStudio 08

This is a quickly assembled piece about the studio, showing some work from students, and some interview snippets. 

A few shots of the event on Friday night, July 25th.  We were sharing the venue with Mike Rozell’s glass art exhibition.  Students mixed live on the building outside (after dark) and their work was on display inside the house.  Their 2-surface installations were playing in the stairwell all night.

So we had a few visitors, a handfull of local luminaries, come and review some of the studio work today.  Here are a few pictures of a two-surface installation, some TV and some over-the-shoulder presentations.

Yes, it was our last day.  It doesn’t seem possible, but two weeks have ripped by.  Today all the students had a chance to show their work to a small outside audience, see their reactions and then to hear some objective feedback.  Everybody did a great job and it was pretty fun.  I think the visitors were impressed - they should be; the students rocked it.

This whole studio has been pretty amazing in terms of how fast the students got hold of some very sophisticated technical tools and just started making evocative art with them.  I was/am surprised by the progress and by how much the studio was able to do in such a short time.

Now we just have the Friday event.  Anyone reading this:  please come to  our event.  The students’ work will be on display, installed in the Westcott House.  Most of the graduates will be present to talk about their work and the studio.  For details check the Westcott house home page: www.westcotthouse.org.

Thanks to the house, to all the sponsors, the amazing staff Eric, Sonya, Tom for support, Jenny for adding so much in the way of art and creative sensibility and especially Marta, who did pretty much everything.  This has been great.

Much more content about the studio will be posted here in the coming days.

The students spent parts of two days, guided by Jenny Montgomery, sketching and painting various aspects of the house and grounds.  Jenny emphasized the observation of light and shadow.  There was some discussion of capturing time, as the light was observed to change swiftly as the sun moved overhead.  The efforts to quickly observe and capture gesture and simple details was helpful and I think spilled over into the videography and photography as the studio continued.

These are clips from our second exercise.  The assignment was to use some of the photos and video collected from a trip to downtown Springfield to create a short video segment which was abstract.  The definition of abstract was left relatively open and undiscussed until after we reviewed the pieces.  Three teams of two, each piece 30 seconds to 1 minute long.

Abbie and Kari:

 

Collin and Brian:

 

 
Dylan and Anthony:

 

I just wanted to put up a few words about last week, and a few pictures.  We had a visit from John Reynolds from the Architecture department at Miami University and three of his new graduate students.  They guided the studio through a day of exploring the dynamics of the design within the Westcott House.  It was a pretty different take on the place from the kind of digital media gathering we have been doing.  The students created some pretty incredible sketches, collages and 3-D sculptures based on their exploration.  

Thanks so much to John and his team.

Some pics of the studio at work, followed by the three collages.  The collages were made by cutting up pictures of details of the house and grounds, then pasting and drawing with various media.

Hi Guys,

I want to congratulate you - what an amazing job so far! The Westcott House comes alive with you all exploring and intepreting the space and details in your own unique way. Can’t wait till Friday event.

Hi. Great to have you here!

This is about half way through our studio. We were joined by two new students this week and now are a functional gang of six. Today we focused on gesture and abstraction. After a quick illustrated discussion of abstraction in art, led by Marta, Jenny took the whole group out for painting and sketching exercises in the garden and house this morning, trying to out run the afternoon heat. This almost worked. It got amply hot outside long before noon.

The students produced some very nice drawings and a few big paintings. There was some emphasis on quickly grabbing and reproducing visual elements, especially light and shadow. As the morning sun moved overhead, the patterns of light through the glass in the house and the shadows of plant and building in the garden, moved, emphasizing the element of time and the need to consider different and changing perspectives.

In the afternoon, we are heading into a two day exercise to build an installation which will reproduce the experience of being at the Westcott House. The installation will be two rear-projected surfaces, each playing a different sequence of images. The assignment will require one of the surfaces to emphasis the abstract and gestural, allowing little or no figurative content, and the other surface will be composed of more representational imagery.

We also talked about and brainstormed around the idea of including some concepts of opposites, or opposing characteristics into the piece, such as light versus dark, large versus small, hard versus small, and boring versus exciting.

To follow up with the gestural drawings, every one is trying to gather short, gestural images with the digital devices, still cameras and video cameras. This is a sometimes difficult task, since these tools tend to make the user think about exact recording and representation. Students have to work a bit to get out of that mind set and get some more expressive, less didactic imagery. I hope this will lead to some very expressive content in the installation piece.

On Monday morning we had a visit from the conductor of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra. Peter Stafford Wilson spoke to the students about his musical choices for the upcoming Westcott House Centennial celebration. We were treated to an explanation of the process and reasoning behind the kind of creative decisions that a conductor makes, and listened to Michael Torke’s “Adjustable Wrench” with accompanying analysis/commentary by Peter.

This was a great chance for students to get inside the head if a working creative professional. We thank Peter for letting us have a glimpse of that process.

Students who had some experience reading music followed along over the conductor’s shoulder as we listened:

more about Peter Stafford Wilson here
more about the Springfield Symphony Orchestra here

These pieces are from the second day of the studio.  At that point we only had 4 students: Kari, Brian, Dylan and Collin.  They had spent most of a day or so wandering, photographing and really, really quickly learning the basics of video editing.  The assignment was to produce a 30 second to 1 minute piece showing unseen or unusual views of the Westcott House.

Kari and Brian made this:

 

Dylan and Collin made this:

 

Welcome to the New Media Design Studio ‘08, presented by the Westcott House and The Now Device.