All I see are Angry Birds

Teacher: What do you see? Rising or falling?

Student 1: The composition is reminiscent of the Kantian Sublime…

Student 2: I see Angry Birds…

Sarita: It looks like 8 red rectangles. 

This painting by Kazimir Malevich is in fact titled Eight Red Rectangles (1915). Who would have guessed? Our 2-D design teacher spent an hour talking about how great this painting is—how bold and original because nobody had ever made this move to relieve art from the burden of the object. Then we were given this assignment: “Using only four squares in each picture plane, convey the feelings of solitude, isolation, and loneliness.” But before deciding on the three final designs, we had to do ten rough draft sketches for each of the three feelings.

All our assignments were like this. We were not allowed to draw “things.” We had to practice being completely nonobjective and still strive to accomplish the goal of the designer: to achieve unified, harmonious compositions using the elements of line, color, shape, texture, pattern, space, form, balance, hierarchy, scale, proportion, similarity and contrast. I got in trouble a lot because I only know how to draw things and not un-things.

And because our teacher wrote her MFA thesis on “the fine arts critique,” and spent two and a half hours being told her work was no better than a Hallmark card, she was able to impart a lot of artistic wisdom about how the inner artist in us all really needed us to stand in front of the class at the beginning of each session to explain the thought process behind each of our pieces. So we heard a lot of explanations like this:

“I always feel really vulnerable on my left side, like if I was going to get attacked or mugged, my assailant would come at my left, so I wanted to leave more negative space on the right side of my composition and add this massive organic shape with vertical and horizontal stabilizers to reflect this solid presence on the left side, but in the end I decided against it because I realized I what I really wanted was this chaotic crystallographic composition to convey that humanity is just a complete waste of space, okay? So, yeah…do you have a response to this?”

And then someone in the audience would say, “Well, it kind of looks like a slice of pizza or a goldfish eating marshmallows…”

The highlight from this class was that one night when we talked about patterns and how Islamic art has incredible patterns, which led to a discussion about ancient European churches and pilgrimages to see reliquaries and how one of the churches we looked at claims to have Jesus’ elbow stuffed in a vase somewhere. But that's what you get when you sit in a room with 15 other people who are losing brain cells because they're inhaling Sharpie fumes and the scent of rubber cement.

This assignment required us to "harvest" an organic design. We made viewfinders and were supposed to abstract an organic object to the extent that you weren't able to tell what the original source material was. Unfortunately, you can still see objective "plant-ness" in this picture. So I had to redo it. Although, during my critique session, someone said, "I would totally hang this in my bathroom."

Abstract organic design take II. You can kind of still see plant-ness, but whatever.

Using the same organic design from above, we had to then reinterpret the design using texture and pattern.

This is my achromatic scale. I made it on the 4th of July. It. Took. All. Day. And we still had to critique these--meaning, we all had to hang them up on the wall and comment on them. Nobody had anything to say about these. What a surprise. This is an insanely difficult assignment and we all failed. But nobody gets it right, said our teacher, which was her attempt to make us feel better about ourselves. 

Using the same organic design from earlier, we had to create a focal point using value (lights and darks). By the time we were done with this design, we all wanted to gouge our eyes out with spoons and never look at these designs again.

Our next assignment required us to harvest abstract designs using photos, paintings, printed materials. I found this photo and used the viewfinder to zoom in on the right side of the image, then drew a sketch with my eyes closed.

I repeated the viewfinding process with this photo using the upper 1/4 of the picture plane. 

The rough draft sketch looked something like this.

And then somehow I got this--I don't know how--using black gouache and water. Call me accidentally fabulous.

More squares.

Final project, based on the accidentally fabulous design from above. Ignore the crooked mounting job.