So, apropos of my previous post, here’s the skinny on what I’ve been working on for the past week.
All students at Reed need to complete a Junior qualifying exam (commonly known as a “qual”) to prove that they’ve got the chops to complete a Senior thesis and haven’t just been, well, dicking about for the last three years. For Art majors, this means a 10 day process involving the creation of 10 preliminary studies, one finished piece, two papers discussing one’s artistic practice and previous works, a showing of the qual work and previous pieces, and a 45 minute oral examination. It’s hefty, but also a whole lot of fun. We’re given an essay to respond to at the start of the week, which can (loosely or otherwise) inform the final piece. Susan Stewart’s On the Art of the Future proved dense and somewhat infuriating in its unnecessary intellectualism, but was ultimately fruitful and thought provoking (and surprisingly relevant to comics).
Anyway, no time to discuss that here. ON WITH THE PRETTY PICTURES!
[slideshow]
(Things the photos don’t quite do justice to: the incredible, deep sea sheen of the book cloth, the veins of shimmery gold in the marbled paper, and the delicious, physical sensation of playing with this thing. Bookmaking is so satisfying to me because you get to handle and interact with the product in a way that’s totally different from our standard approach to artworks. Mm, tactility.)
The OTHER exciting news is that I was recently selected as a recipient of the Kaspar T. Locher Summer Creative Scholarship, a $1750 prize designed to fund independent art/dance/music/theater/writing projects over the summer. I’ll be using the money to back a longer comic (tentatively titled “Wherefore”) based around my youthful days and the strange sense of misplaced identity that comes from being raised between cultures and continents. Terrifying, but thrilling. There will, of course, be copious documentation for you all to enjoy throughout the process SO HOORAY FOR THAT.
(Part two of this post appears separately because WordPress image display options are icky.)
BRAVO for you Lucy! Congrats on being honored for your brilliance. You deserve it. I’m so glad I will get to say, “I knew you ‘when'”.
hey Lucy,
questions that came out of exploring your post:
what cultures, continents were you raised between?
also, “we remake ourselves through stories” – what story do you want to tell about yourself, and what do you want it to remake you into?
inspired by the thoroughness of your images, too; namely the borders.
-Parz