So to make up for the lack of posts, less talking and more pictures.
Two weeks ago, there was a camera lighting workshop arranged for our studio, but there places were limited and therefore there wasn’t any place left for us Exchange students. So Zuzana, one of our teachers, arranged an etching workshop at AVD, the academy of fine arts and the other art academy here in Prague.
Thing was that this workshop lasted the whole week, every morning from 9 till 13. With me having classes at the same time it was also quite hectic, but fun!
The etching itself was awesome, I made an detailed aquatint and a small soft-ground etching, which I hadn’t done before but is a very nice and quick technique too!
Last week was the final week to make a choice when it comes to the elective courses. In the end I settled on Figure Drawing, Czech Language, Genius Loci of Prague, Very Anxious Meetings, Clay Modeling and Czech Modern and Contemporary Art and Architecture. This is more than I have to, but there is just too much fun things to choose from! Also if it turns out to be too much I can drop one or two, I still need only 30 ECS and with this I will be having 34.
But let me tell you what these courses are all about! Well, Figure Drawing, Czech Language and Clay Modeling are self-explanatory, but what is this Genius Loci of Prague? It’s basically a weekly tour through Prague with the teacher talking about modern architecture, think first half of 20th century. It’s fun, I get to know architectural styles and periods I didn’t know about and maybe I’ll be able to tell from which period buildings are from their looks in the end! 😀 And the teacher is really enthusiastic about architecture, especially Functionalism and Rondocubism, which is something typically Czech, it seems. Czech Modern and Contemporary Art and Architecture is similar, but we will visit museums, galleries and monuments instead. So I go twice a week visiting places in the city!
Last Friday we visited the Vítkov Monument:
This building is kinda strange because it had so many different functions during it’s history… It was build as a memorial for Czechoslovakia in the thirties, then the Nazis used it for storage, during Communism it was the place to display the body of the first Communist president of Czechoslovakia, Klement Gottwald. After 1989 it was left unused for years and now it is a museum. And a memorial. And there is a ceremonial hall which is sometimes still in use.
The view from the roof is amazing, though! We visited the TV tower the day before with Genius Loci of Prague. 🙂
On the very last moment I decided to take the Anxious Meetings course as well. :/ It’s a quite varied course with discussions, guest speakers and sometimes even excursions. Last semester the course concluded with an exhibition. It’s called Anxious Meetings because no topic is too weird or personal to not speak about during the discussions. I kind of missed some theory in the other courses, and the exhibition looked promising, so I decided to follow this one too. So far it’s been fun.
This first week of school was quite hectic! And guess what? Almost all the classes were in Czech! 😀 But my Czech fellow students helped to translate what was said, as wel as the teachers whom can speak English. XD
No, it was fun! Monday I had my first studio class, were we got our assignment for this semester (although I think we will do more than just this one). We get to make a comic of a short story of Edgar Allan Poe! We had to pick the story from a hat, and I got Ligeia. Pretty interesting, I hadn’t read that one yet! (actually the only Poe story I have read is The Cask of Amontillado)
I also got another assignment, to make a 30-second paper animation with a circus theme. From what I got is this an assignment for the first year students, but I’ll gladly do it too because i never did paper stop-motion anyway!
Its worth mentioning that all students, no matter first, second or third year get the same assignments simutaneously. Only the paper circus thing is aimed at the first year students by means of practise, I guess.
These are actually some of the ‘cleaner’ spaces, most of the corridors are filled with all kinds of artworks and furniture… Which will be supposedly get cleaned up during the next weeks. This week was still exam week for the Czech students.
Also, fun fact: dogs are allowed in the school! As well is smoking inside. :/
One of the most fun classes I had was clay modelling! 😀 I’ve never worked in clay after a living person before, and the teacher is really nice! Looking forward to this class next week!
Yeeeeesh, I am going to do something with climate change. Which involves more research. Last one with no sketches, promise!
Climate change is an extremely complex topic, as there are so many factors related to each other, and we still do not know exactly how it all comes together.
An illustration of the complexity:
It is generally known that greenhouse gases as methane and carbon dioxide are responsible for a rise in temperature across earth. This basically results in the ice in Artica and Antartica to melt. On one hand does this mean there is less white snow and ice to reflect the sun’s light, which will only result in even higher temperatures, like a snowball effect. On the other hand, increase of melting water in the sea dilutes the salt percentage around the poles. This influences the course of ocean current such as the Gulf Stream (which is responsible for Norway having ice-free ports during winter, up to Murmansk in Russia) When the Gulf stream will change it’s course or stop completely (it has in the past), Western Europe might get a much colder climate instead (I mean, we’re on the same latitude as Canada) (1). And then there are other factors I haven’t mentioned yet, such as the jet stream air currents (yes) and the fact that current climate models aren’t able to calculate the effect of clouds yet (2).
The most ‘likely’ scenarios of climate change leave us with these consequences (3):
sealevel will rise (more floods)
droughts and wildfires will become more common in most warm places
other areas will get more rainfall (including Northern Europe)
more extreme weather overall
More water, more droughts, more extreme weather. Do you think what I think?
And similarities rise even more when you know that the lines on these guys are inspired by the Nazca lines (mythology)!
(this is actually not how the story works, Rayquaza stops Groudon and Kyogre fighting each other and represents clear skies rather than extreme weather (it’s Ability nullifies weather effects after all). Groudon and Kyogre created land and sea on the earth, respectively, although they are capable of creating droughts as well as floods. They are not associated with climate change, but I couldn’t help but make the connection! Know what’s out there already, so to say!)
Floods as well as heat or fires appear in several doomsday myths, so it’s only natural to create a creature representing floods and/or rainfall and a creature representing droughts and/or heat. Originally I also wanted to design a extreme weather creature too but I think that’s too much in the given time. I rather present two well-made creatures than three a-OK for the sake of having three.
Now let’s start designing! My wrist is already feeling much better, so I should be able to throw out some sketches this week.
Sorry, no sketches in this post. I just post it here to be sure I have posted them all on tumblr…
As mentioned before, the Norse Germanic tribes had also their view on how the world would end, named Ragnarök (loosely meaning ‘destiny of the ruling powers’ or ‘decline of the gods’).
For the sake of this research, I wrote a very brief summary, as I’m only interested in the large course of events:
The first sign is fimbulwinter: three winters without summer, the sun provides no warmth in this period
When Ragnarök starts, the sun and moon will be devoured by the wolves Sköll and Hati respectively, the stars fade and the Earth will be covered in darkness. The ground will shudder and mountains will crumble, freeing the wolf Fenrir from his chains.
Jörmungandr, described as a sea serpent or dragon, will breach land as the sea violently swells onto it.
the Gods fight Jörmungandr, Fenrir and each other to death and the earth is engulfed in flames.
the Earth sinks into the sea and will resurface as a new world, with a new man and woman to inhabit it. (1)
The Maya have been associated a lot with a Apocalypse myth, as in 2012 rumours appeared that their calender would end and therefore the world with it. Though, these rumours have been largely been ungrounded. The Maya calender is based on baktuns, periods of 144,000 days. Around the 23th of December of 2012, the calendar shifted from the 12th baktun into the 13th baktun. There has been no evidence that this change of age would had apocalyptic effects. (2)
The Aztecs are also not known to have a true Doomsday myth. This is because the Aztec gods are not separated by being ‘good’ and ‘evil’, these concepts didn’t exist in Aztec myth. (3) The closest thing is the story of female skeleton demons called Tzitzimitl descending to earth during a solar eclipse to eat us poor humans.
According to Hindu, the world will end when the tenth avatar of Vishnu and Shiva will appear on earth, Kalki. He will appear on a white horse and with a blazing sword (does this sound familiar?).
Within a large system of ages and years, we live in Kali Yuga, the last of four ages that make up the current kalpa. Kali Yuga lasts for 432,000 years and is characterized by decay, deceit and violence. People will live in sin, following false religions and plagues, famines and natural calamities will appear. (4)
Sources
(1) Bellows, Henry Adams (2004). The Poetic Edda: The Mythological Poems. Dover Publications.
Dragons look different all over the world, but dinosaurs looked also very different in the past.
When Gideon Mantell found the remains of what later became known as Iguanodon in 1820, he first thought of a crocodile. When he took a closer look, it became clear that he had found among other bones the teeth of an ancient reptillian herbivore. Other naturalists first dismissed them as either fish teeth or those of a rinoceros, until they noticed similarity with the teeth of iguana. Mantle gave the creature therefore the name Iguanodon (Iguana-tooth in Greek). In 1834 another incomplete fossil of the animal was found, which lead to the first artistic renderings of Iguanodon. A well-known mistake Mantell made was intrepretent the thumb-claw as a horn, placed on the nose.
In 1878 coal mine workers in Belgium found what is still the largest Iguanodon finding to date. With 38 individual animals found researchers were now able to construct an almost complete skeleton of the animal. Though, Louis Dollo took wallabies for reference and mounted the skeleton upright as he thought the smaller forearms wouldn’t help to support the weight. In the artistic renderings of that time, one can still very well see the reference to crocodiles.
It wasn’t until the 1960 that Iguanodon was researched more and researchers now concluded that there was no way that the dinosaur would have walked around like a kangaroo. Its tail just couldn’t bend like that without breaking. Iguanodon was a tetrapod herbivore which could stand for a short period on it’s hind legs, but had to walk on four.
It was also around that time that other dinosaurs got an ‘update’, for example the widely known Tyrannosaurus was also thought to walk upright when it was found in the early 20th century. In the 1970s researchers concluded that Tyrannosaurus wouldn’t be able to balance its weight when walking upright, and that the tail would be held upright as counterbalance to the enormous head.
This quarter at art school we can theoretically do whatever we want. Theoretically, because we still need to have some sort of concept and idea of what it has to represent of course. I’m immersing myself in the world of creature design, but I don’t have a ‘concept’ yet. -.- I just want to design creatures.
Anyway, as we need to post weekly blogposts on our school site about our research, I thought I could post them here as well. Seemed nice to share some progress of creatures and monsters, not? I started researching where all these creatures actually come from (or at least the most well known, the dragon).
Dragons appear in a lot of different myths all over the world. That is, these are all different beasts that we call a ‘dragon’, but when you delve deeper it appears that these creatures actually looked very different. There seems to be one thing they all have in common, though: they all have at least one snake-like feature.
This does make sense: venomous snakes live all across the world and were a pretty serious threat for people living in ancient times or the Middle Ages. Also think of Satan’s appearance of a snake in the Bible. Snakes are commonly associated with evil (at least in the western world).
One theory claims that our ancestors might have found dinosaur fossils and thought of the creature where those bones belong to. This is a rather tricky theory though, as there haven’t been found a lot dinosaur fossils around the Mediterranean Sea. Even more interesting, ancient bones were more attributed of heroes of the past rather than giant animals.
An other explanation says mystical creatures might came to existence through miscommunication and a different cultural reference. The myth of the unicorn could be very well a rinoceros described to a person who hasn’t seen any other large four-legged animals than horses and cattle.
