Intention vs. Expectation

Before I went on hiatus from teaching due to my sickness, I was teaching a magazine design class called Visions. The purpose of the class was to create a magazine with the same name. The text below is the transcript from a lecture that I gave in that class. I had realized at the time that the students needed a bit more guidance in understanding what I wanted to do with the class.  The transcript was written in one sitting. I had gone back and do minor editing on the written text.

One of the things that I have been trying to do in the last several classes has been to guide you through this process of conceptualizing what the final outcome of our magazine is going to be. Over the last couple of weeks I have been doing this without overtly stating my intent. We have definitely made progress in a direction toward our goal. And most of you have very successfully participated in furthering that process. But, somehow, I have been wondering if I should more overtly state what the intention this class is. It is very well known to many people in my life that I often do not successfully make the case for my intentions explicitly clear. However, in the cases where I do attempt to state that intention, somehow it always ends up getting misconstrued.

So this is why I want to take the time to have this conversation with you. I have been noticing that there have been some confusions as to what my intentions are for all of you.

All of us in this class have this understanding, coming in, that our objective is to create this magazine that will be put into production. What I have tried to do is completely contradictory to other classes that I have conducted. In those cases, when I have given out specific assignments, I have provided with them given rules that needed to be followed. In those cases I do have certain expectations of what I want the students to produce. In all cases, I would have left those expectations open enough so that there are room for the students to create their own expectations of what the outcome of the assignments would be. What I kept noticing was that the students would end up needing more information about what they are expected to do. They want to be given examples to see how they can specifically execute those works.

In this class I began with a different approach. If you remember, I began the class by showing you some examples of different concepts of a magazine to get the conversations going. But from that moment on, I made it a point to leave open the final conception of the magazine to all of you.

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Cypress Valley High

Last Thursday Cypress College Art Gallery opened its door to present the work of the students in the Fine Art department. I have been on hiatus from work over the last few weeks and haven’t had the chance to see our faculty nor our students. It was a nice way to reconnect with everyone again.

I was incredibly impressed by all of the work in the show. The work came from all disciplines: Ceremics, sculptures, printmaking, illustration, painting, photography, video, and computer graphics. We have a burgeoning scene going on in the department right now. I love the people who teach there. They are all accomplished artists and historians in their own right.

Over the past year, the students had had the chance to work with the artist Kiel Johnson, whom I, along with Paul Paiement, included in the show Intersections four years ago in this very same space when he was our gallery director. I remember fondly that Kiel had done a painting specifically for the show that we both curated. In fact, the painting is featured in the video that I have included below.

Kiel was brought in by our faculty, co-gallery directors Devon Tsuno and Ed Giardina, to collaborate with our students. Our department was buzzing for those couple of weeks when Kiel was on campus.

Kiel worked with our students to create a short film, which was screened in our theatre after the opening. It was nice to see the finished film shown to our community. I know that it was something that the students have been looking forward to experiencing. The students worked very hard to produce the film. I was happy to hear that it will now make its rounds in the film festival circuit.

I really have to give it to our current director Sarah Jaffray for putting together a really nice show. I have had many experiences of putting together shows, and I can say that they are quite arduous undertakings. Kudos to all involved.

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The Madman

You ask how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen,—the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives,—I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, “Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves.”

Men and women laughed at me and some ran into their houses in fear of me.

And when I reach the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, “He is a madman.” I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, “Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks”

Thus I became a madman.

And I have found both freedom and loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.

But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in jail is safe from another thief.

—Khalil Gibran

Saturday Afternoon at the Page Museum

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One of the things that I wanted to do when I went off Facebook about a month ago was to get back into drawing. My friend John Choi has always been trying to get me to go sketching with him. He’s currently taking a class with Will Weston, and on Saturday they all went to the Page Museum so I decided to join them independently.

I was recently given an HP Touchpad. I had rooted and installed Android onto to the tablet so I wanted to see if somehow I could use it for sketching and have it be a replacement for the normal sketchbook/pen/markers combination that I use for sketching. I have had Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile on my phone for awhile. The screen on the phone was so small, however, it rendered the app completely useless for any real drawing purposes.

The sketch above was the only one that I did during my almost two hours stay there. I had gone in that day not wanting to really attempt to make any good drawings. I wanted to draw just for the sake of drawing. I wanted to get into the act of it again without having to worry about the end results. I also had wanted to see if it would be possible to use the tablet and the app in place of a sketchbook, pen, and markers.

Most of the process during the sketching actually went into discovering the capabilities and limitations of app itself. Although, I have had the app for awhile, I have never had any complete experiences with it. Somehow, after almost two hours of working on only one sketch, it just seemed absurd afterward that the drawing didn’t come out more complete. That, in the end, it still looked like some quick sketch.

I think the thing that still throw me off about using the table to draw with is the fact that the stylus that I had wasn’t very intuitive to draw with. I was originally going to purchase the Wacom stylus, but went for the generic Rocketfish brand from Best Buy instead. Both had exactly the same design. The only difference is that the Rocketfish was about $10 cheaper than the Wacom.

The tip of the stylus was a large, rounded rubber tip. Coming from using a micro-point Uniball to sketch with, and combined it the small screen of the tablet, those were the big factors to get acquainted with. It didn’t take me long, however, to get into the process of using the app and the tablet, being able to intuitively move around the tools and navigations of the app.

I really would like to take the device out again to do more sketching. I really like the fact that I have access to all the tools that I need without having to carry the physical objects, i.e. pens, markers, etc. I keep getting these comments about how drawing on a tablet really isn’t drawing or being creative. There seem to be that tie to paper and pen. I have to admit that it does feel in some ways like I was cheating, being able to erase and undo on the fly. And also to be able to work with layers and to be able to reduce the opacity of the layer to lighten the lines I was making.

As you can see from John’s sketches from the same trip, in the end, it really comes down to how well you draw. I’ll redeem myself by producing more drawings on my next outing. By the way, in case you were wondering, the sketch above is of the skull of the Giant Sloth that greets you when you first walk into the museum from the ticketing entrance.