will work for critiques or tacquitos :D

[Bearlaser]

Thanks for the crit and well wishes Jonas. I've recently been trying to make them 3.5 units tall with 3 being the standard divisions which will hopefully fix it; I was kind of setting the distance between the hairline and the top of the head in arbitrary fashion.

Sorry I haven't posted in a while guys. I went down to Colorado Springs(my hometown .__.) for my cousin's wedding. The reception was at the Fine Arts Center, which I had never been to. I was kind of just showing face; I love my cousin but weddings aren't really my type of scene; you guys probably know how that goes. Anyway I saw that they had a Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit called "Eloquent Objects" so I veered off from the reception to check it out. On the way to her exhibit I saw a lot of pieces by other artists. I didn't care for most of them, but then I don't like most modern art. There was a lot of beautiful glass sculpture. All of the paintings before the O'Keeffe exhibit were pretty shitty(in my opinion :l) with the exception of 2.

I consider myself a beginner and don't think highly of my technical abilities but made me a little sad to see the lack of fundamental skillsets in the art. I think there's a difference between communication and expression. For example an infant can express dissatisfaction by crying but you don't know specifically what's wrong with it. It could be tired, hungry or maybe a bug bit it; who knows? In order to *communicate* a specific intention a set of standardized concepts(in this case language) is necessary(though shape and color psychology suggests that some visual elements may be intrinsically linked to certain emotions or experiences). I think that the fundamentals of art are much like a language in this regard. So many of the pieces I saw seemed like they were struggling to communicate an experience or feeling that would have been more manageable had the artist been more knowledgeable in the fundamentals.

I was feeling kind of meh about the place wondering if I'd see any art I cared for more when I saw a couple of early Renaissance pieces in a room I hadn't been to yet. The rest of the room wasn't visible from where I was so I got pretty excited about what might be in there. I turned the corner and boom: Sargent, Moran, Bierstadt, Hopper, and others I wasn't familiar with :D I was so fuckin excited. I couldn't believe they were tucked away in a tiny corner room and no one gave a shit. I was the only person in the room. I had seen some of the paintings before and had saved some of them on my computer but seeing them in person was completely different. Some of the Hudson River School painters used optical  mixing in their backgrounds while keeping the foreground sharp, but from a few feet away it's seamless. Sargent's brushstrokes were more impressionistic up close, especially on the hands but the strokes followed the planes of the form. I don't know. It was just cool. I had to go back to the reception after a while but I came back the next day and did some studies while I was able to. They even let me take pictures so long as I didn't use a flash.

I'm still trying to get over the fact that the most impressive shit there(in my opinion) was just in a tiny ho-hum corner room on the first floor. It's like when you go into a bookstore and see something like Twilight heavily advertised meanwhile Seneca is in a cardboard stand off in the back.

I tried to do a study of Sargent's portrait of Elsie Carter(who incidentally is one of the daughters of a founder of the city in which the painting is currently located). I ran out of time and failed but it was fucking awesome being right there in front of something made by Sargent(this was extra cool given that I've been trying to focus on heads with the goal of getting good at portraiture lately).

I'm moving back August 3rd and I'm fucking pumped to go back and do a more finished study. I fucking love art.