IB Higher Level Visual Arts - Year 2
The IB Diploma Programme visual arts course encourages students to challenge their own creative and cultural expectations and boundaries. It is a thought-provoking course in which students develop analytical skills in problem-solving and divergent thinking, while working towards technical proficiency and confidence as art-makers. In addition to exploring and comparing visual arts from different perspectives and in different contexts, students are expected to engage in, experiment with and critically reflect upon a wide range of contemporary practices and media. The course is designed for students who want to go on to further study of visual arts in higher education as well as for those who are seeking lifelong enrichment through visual arts.
Adapted from the IB HL Visual Arts Course Description and Aims.
Monet
This piece was inspired by Monet's impressionistic style and was a stepping stone for further developing my theme of "reflections" in my IB development. My inspiration for this piece dates back 10 years when I first moved over seas. My mother and I would walk the trails in the nearby park and we could come upon this bridge, we would feed the geese and walk across the bridge to the other side. When I was little I thought that the steps were so big that I would have to climb up onto each step just to ge to the top. When I reached the top to feed the geese, my mother and I were so high above the water and the pond was so big I could barely see the other side.
After moving around the world and visiting so many places, my senior year of high school I decided to go back to the bridge from when I was little. I quickly discovered that the bridge was not as I had remembered it. The bridge was the smallest bridge I had ever seen!
This memory I hold very dear to my heart because it is one that my mom and I share from when I first started school and then to go back when I graduated from school made it all the more meaningful. When displaying this piece as my centerpiece in the gallery, I hung an old picture on the wall next to it of me when I first visited the bridge 10 years ago with a picture of me when I revisited the bridge.
The painting was sold in the student auction for the charity of our choice along with many others in my final exhibition.
Limoncello Reflection
Over the course of this year I have been attempting very challenging project ideas, then taking that idea even further and adapting it to my own style. When beginning this glass and reflections painting, half of me wanted to go back to where I started and return back to mixing paint and drawing what was in front of me, and the other half wanted to explore the endless possibilities of paint. I chose to paint one of the most challenging artistic creations, glass and its reflections.
I explored famous renaissance Dutch painters that painted glass in their still-life paintings, and also experimented with oil, watercolor, charcoal, and acrylic paint, attempting to paint water in a glass. The idea was astonishing; using an opaque substance to depict something transparent inside of a clear glass. Furthermore, painting a reflection of that is even more challenging, and that is what I chose to do.
Through many analyses, experiments, photographs, drawings, and paintings, I finally reached a finished product. A still-life painting of six limoncello glasses, in front of a bowl of lemons resting in Annie glass, on a stone table, with the sun shining down on them, a reflection. Colorlessness, transparencies, and reflections, all created by paint.
"Three Musician" Transcription
A transcription in art is a task where a piece of art is chosen and the artist takes that art piece and makes it their own, taking the style and ideas within the piece, but transforming it into your own style. In my case, I chose the famous painting “The Three Musicians” by Pablo Picasso and explored it with a three-dimensional mind-set. I wanted to make the sculpture look like the painting as best I could, and explore it with cubism. Cubism was an early 20th century style where perspective with a single viewpoint was abandoned and was made of simple geometric shapes, interlocking planes, and, later, collage. Taking these ideas, I wanted to create a large life-size sculpture, similar to the painting, and interlock the pieces to add another element of cubism to the original work. In order to do this, I needed to make small scale models to make sure that the weights of the pieces were equally distributed and that the pieces were balanced. After completing the models, I needed to scale up, and that is where the math came into play. Math was a crucial part of this piece because if one measurement was off, the pieces would not fit together properly. From, scale-models, to calculators, to power-tools, all the way to painting the finishing touches, I completed my transcription project and have truly understood the importance of math within art.