Eileen Neff

Today Eileen neff came to speak to us about her work. She got her BFA here from Tyler, but before she started painting she was a literature major. She then had the opportunity to take a photography class for free and has not made another painting since.

Her asethestic began as collaging by hand. Her major theme was being the combination of objects inside and outside, something that always appealed to her and had a great deal of double meanings. She said that her lack of formal eduaction in photography has granted her freedom in the medium.

She showed us many of her works, begining with photographs in black and white with color added by hand, and then to installation, and eventually she began using the computer. Eileen's work with the computer did not change much from her work by hand. She used the computer's capablities modestly and simply. One of the main differences was that she began to make her images in full color. Some time after, she began to create images that she could never create by hand.

I very much enjoyed listening to what she had to say and looking at her work.

Sharon Louden

This Tuesday Sharon Louden came to speak with us. She decribed herself as just an artist, because explaining what she does always takes too long. She does painting, drawing, intallation, and now animation. She has a very formal art education focused on the figure. She draws her influences from nature, lines of architecture, hair, dance and the body in motion. She also has a thing for simply beautifuly lines.

After a while, she got bored with the human figure and started breakinf it down into lines. These lines have their own personality. Her work became minimal and about these lines that have motion and gesture to them. She kept in mind her formal foundation, called what she does now "formality with a twist."

Soon she felt she had "hit the ceiling" with painting all together. There was nothing new to do with it, and it wasn't giving back to her anymore. Sharon felt it was important to try new things, and so she turned to sculpture and tried to create a new place for herself with it. After she tried glass and then rubber. With these new mediums she intended to add more gesture to the elongated lines she was still so in love with.

Recently, she has just started to do animation. Working with an animator, her challenge is to keep things simple and to resist all the special effects. Her goal is to keep animation as close to drawing as possible. Sharon highly enjoys working with new mediums as a way to reinform the artwork that she has already done and to expand upon it. Her audience has changed as she has, as now her animation is to be shown at an important film fesival in New York. She says her next challenge is adding sound, something she feels she isn't quite ready for yet.

This past week I went to the University of Pennsylvania Muesum of Archeology and Anthropology. It was great to actually get off of campus and into some other part of the city.


I spent most of my time there looking at the Egyptian art. I was really impressed that they had their own sphinx! The columns were pretty cool to see too. I didn't see anything that I had actually seen in art history, but it was fun that I could recognize that characteristics of Egyptian art.





I was really excited to see the Code of Hammurabi. I thought it was the real thing at first. then I looked at the label and realized it was just a cast made of the real thing. That was very disappointing.

Warning Label

We also made warning labels in Illustrator for computers class. This is mine. It's supposed to be about setting the house on fire. My dad always tells me that when I light a candle I'll set the house on fire, and I find that really annoying, so I made this drawing as ridiculous as possible. No one would ever go and set a cupcake under a curtain.

Text Drawings

In computers class we made text drawings a while ago. Here's one of mine. The other doesn't seem to want to upload right now.

Photoshop Pairing Project

Here are the results of my pairing photoshop project in my computers class.
















These are the stairs inside my apartment complex that I walk up and down everyday. One day they were painting the railings, but I waited until the railings were dry and the little sign had fallen off to take it. I think they go pretty well together, since this sign was something I found in this location.










This is a photograph and a sketch of different parts of the same staircase in the tech center. i feel that they related really well because they are the same thing but in different media and capture a different part.





















Here I paired a picture I took of Montgomery Street which is very littered with a piece of trash, the starburst wrapper, that I found one day walking down this street.

Bradley Litwin

Bradley Litwin came to speak to us at today's lecture about how the digital revolution affected his art making. He basically took us through his whole life, explaining what kind of art he was making at each time and with what kind of technology.

He began his talk with us by explain his method of "laying lead," describing the pencil as a tiny machine and drawing as an extraordinary experience. He used to think when he was young that no one would ever want to draw on the "video screen." He only wanted to draw with tangible insterments. His early work consisted of mostly cartoons of machinery and science-related things.

As he said he was forced to settle down and start a family, Brad began to design automatic machinery with his own company. He watched as computers and their technology slowly advanced, but he wasn't impressed and saved his money until he bought his first computer in 1987, an Amiga which had drawing and amimation capabilities as well as color far superior to the macs and pcs of the day. From there, he wandered away from machinery and into computer imaging, multimedia, and 3D modeling. He had a company that designed for all sorts of other companies inclusing pharamaceuticals. He continued this work and eventually photoshop for pcs came out in 1992.

More recently he was asked to create a kinetic scuplture, which he had not done for quite some time, and so now his work merges his tangible designing with computer imaging.

Overall, his work was very interesting and his lecture was, too.