fooooood

So I [unwittingly] drove into the heart of the storm Friday to visit the Culinary Institute of America (and my best friend...I'm not that dedicated to food). There, I stumbled upon a couple of dueling snowmen at Vassar...


Oh, and the food was amazing of course - specifically the fries with black truffle salt (yum!)

And then this morning, I visited The Duck and the Bunny - a snuggery. They must have taken some notes from our class since I found a few emulations:

If you like scones and finger sandwiches with your tea time, you should definitely take a visit! It's on Wickenden street. I miss the Blue Elephant though :(

Michael Yanagisawa - Imitation

For my copy I did Picasso's "Bullfight." We went to the Guggenheim in high school, and this picture has since became my favorite. I tried to copy faithfully, but it was surprisingly very difficult, so the result is a fairly-close copy. The pencil was too light to show up on a picture, but here's the original:

I was thinking about coloring mine in too.

Olivia Fagon

I'm unable to load my imitation but I chose Goya's Saturn Devouring Child. This is one of my favorite painting, but it was extremely difficult to reproduce. The application of the paint was so gestural that recreating it with a pencil proved difficult. I tried however. I am not a fan of art reproductions, but I understand the value of trying to recreate an artist's piece of work. But that would exercise would have much more to with the process rather than the final product, which is just a copy. Goya's piece speaks to Benjamin's idea of aura, a quality original art has from the immediacy it's given through the context that its created in. It would be almost impossible to truly recreate Goya's Saturn because so much it stems from unstable mental state, which we see translated through color choice, and rough grotesque gestures with the paint brush. There is a uniqueness, an 'authenticity' as Benjamin describes that can not be reproduced.

5-Elsa Obus-Translation, Imitation, Emulation

I copied The Toilet of Venus by Diego Velazquez. My favorite part about the original painting is the curves of Venus' body. I think they're so human and soft.

In my reproduction, after numerous (failed!) attempts at drawing human faces, which frankly I am not so good at but will work on, I decided to focus more on the movement of the background and leave the figures as pale shells. I think this actually still ended up accentuating the curves of the human form. I know it looks pretty different but I think it's interesting.

06. Megan Estes. Imitation.

I don't actually know the name of this piece. It is a photograph I found in Black and White magazine.

I tried to render this pretty closely, mostly because I don't know what something looks like unless I'm staring at it. It's not exact, but I like how it turned out.

04 - Chris Tyler: SIMULACRUM (?)

In copying this 1806 Ingres painting, entitled La Grande Baigneuese, I initially found myself distractedly absorbing the work of art (rather than being absorbed by it). The entire act of copying the work with the help of the grid felt particularly mechanical, and, ultimately, quite unfulfilling. However, as soon as my figure began to take shape (and I consequently became increasingly less frustrated by my inability to render the figure to scale), I found myself being absorbed by the work itself. I became enthralled by Ingres' delicate, velvety rendering of the bather's skin, and as I focused on shadowing her person, my mimetic task quickly became a fulfilling one.

It's not an exact replica, for I really only focused on the figure herself (a figure that Ingres, interestingly enough, seems to have been particularly obsessed with throughout his career). Indeed, Ingres returned to the form of this figure several times throughout his life...and so I wonder what aural quality my own duplica-of-sorts takes on in its subconscious illumination of the original artist's fascination.

Carel Weight imitation

This is a great painting by Carel Weight called "The Witches are Here". He exactly captures the London architecture and light, something I have spectacularly failed to do.

Lucy Schultz- Imitation

I did an imitation of this Diane Arbus's photograph. But I can't get my drawings to load on the blog for some reason, so I'll just have to show them in class.

Candice Low copycat

This is a print called "Dancers Resting" by Raphael Soyer, and that is my attempt.

5. Daniel Ton - Imitation

I copied Gustav Klimt's Beethoven Frieze (1902). To compensate for the monochromatism I outlined the focal subjects in marker. I also applied a metallic Sharpie sparingly, since Klimt's use of gold is one of the reasons why I like him so much. Sadly, the marker is old and dying, so it's not as metallic as I hoped.

Here's the original. In case you're wondering, it's a gorilla.

6 - Jonah Kagan: I'm it, @ ion

So back in the 60s when I used to drop acid all the time, I used to love to stare at words and watch them twist and melt and bleed together. After I cleaned up my act, I found a certain comfort in the work of Wes Wilson. So naturally I picked this concert poster of his to copy:


Reading Benjamin's essay made me consider the place of artwork like Wilson's. Copying it gave me a sense of just how much effort and precision actually goes into a piece like this. But its purpose is to announce a concert - it is a medium designed to convey information to the viewer. However, this particular concert came and went, yet the poster is what people remembered. Even though this poster was mechanically reproduced at the time, it is now considered a more pure form of art. Is it just time that separates the two? Why aren't we grabbing posters off building walls and keeping them for ourselves? Surely someday some misguided student will think its a good idea to try to copy one of them...

Anyway, here's my dose of psychedelic for the day:

5. Dan Cary- Imitation

For my Emulations, I found two pics I liked. The first was a really simple logo of a pitbull's face for an animal shelter. It was built entirely from the shadows which I thought was pretty cool but I wanted to give it more substance so I drew what I thought the face should look like and added a body as well.For the next one, I was studying in the sci li and needed to take a break so I picked up a magazine that someone had left behind and saw this ad for Grand Theft Auto. I picked a single one of the characters rather than the whole scene and tried to be pretty true to it.

For my

5. Kat Yang - Emulation/Imitation

I chose some of Van Gogh's works. This was definitely a challenge since Van Gogh is about the texture and movement of his colors, and I am about flat awkwardness with my pencil. There is definitely something lacking in my emulation of the post-man looking guy, and I'm not just talking about the facial hair.

Van Gogh's Vase With Violet Irises Against a Yellow Background

Van Gogh's The Lover: Paul-Eugene Milliet

I decided to make a younger, more clean-shaven version of Paul-Eugene. Those whiskies are pretty daunting.

I agree with Benjamin that works of art are associated with an aura; they are best understood in context, whether it be the context in which it was created or the context in which it is admired. I don't think my imitation/emulation really has an "aura" around it though. I don't believe they really capture nuances that weren't covered by the original works themselves. Mechanical reproduction really has revolutionized what is "original" and what is not, but this is not one of those examples. I think it's interesting that you can take one photograph and manipulate it and distort it to get something that is also unique.

Yum

Allison Barker - Vermeer Copy

Below is a Vermeer Painting and then my copy... which safe to say is not a Vermeer ;)and actually that's not the best photo of it either.

5. Rachel Borders: Art Changes, therefore I will Change a Piece of Art

The one phrase that really stuck out to me in Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction was "The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable" (IV). Although it has little to do with my recreation, I think that it speaks very true to the nature of art. Art has changed over the years and what people find to be art naturally has changed with it. Art is alive. And I think the nature of art is its ability to morph with time because if it didn't it would become irrelevant. Art could be considered on of the world’s oldest traditions.

For my reproduction I told a picture copy of a spread of the 2003 Vogue featuring Cameron Diaz (for all you fans out there). My goal is not just to recreate the picture of Diaz, but the whole spread as if I have copied a two-page spread of a magazine. So hopefully my final image will look like the image I have inserted above, but with a few changes. If all goes well it will be a commentary on Western Cultures idealized version of beauty. There will probably be some word changing and other surprises. I guess you will just have to wait to see.

Dan Cary - Live action animation without rotoscoping

I starting trying to make this effect a week or two into the semester. It's really started to come along and is now resembling something that's pretty cool. I used junky footage of my suitemate Jon (I actually just walked over with an old digital camera while he was working on a song) which is why the lighting is so bad. With good lighting, a good camera, and possibly a green screen, I think I can put together a really cool effect. The bad lighting leads to reflections which is why the face isn't well defined.

I plan on using this for my final project combined with still frames so people walk up to what appears to be a painting and it the person it's of moves every once in a while before becoming a painting again.

4. Challah "holla" Bread

Pouring the mixture onto the bread

The final French Toast

Primary Color Saucy Sauce recipe.

I don't seem to have a picture of the sauce though...

Do you Like Green Eggs and Ham?

Group: Rachel, Leah, Dan, and Candice.

Ours vs. Dr. Seuess's

So we loved this idea of the play on Green Eggs and Ham (Dr. Seuss to people who don't know)

We took ham. Dyed it green and cut it into the shape of pigs. Then we took hard boil eggs and deep fried them with a shell of oatmeal and pistachios. The pistachios were to symbolize the green.

The experiment ended with a green finger and a few fallen eggs, but all and all it was successful.

Here are some snapshots of all of us eating. (Don't we look cheery at 10 am)

Gourmet or Grotesque? A Gluttonous Explosion of the Conventional Chocolate Chip Cookie

VISA0100 Cooking Project
Group: Lucy S, Lucy BC, Chris, and Allison

Title:

Gourmet or Grotesque? A Gluttonous Explosion of the Conventional Chocolate Chip Cookie

Abstract:

We conducted this experiment in order to better understand the idea of the monster cookie; a cookie made up of so many different delicious foods, that it may or may not actually be appetizing. Having concocted a basic cookie batter, we went on to add ingredient after ingredient, which though they individually encompass deliciousness, combined together to become an inevitably disgusting monsterous cookie. Our experiment resulted in 44 small cookies made at the time each ingredient was added, and a monster cookie made up of 4 different batters. In the end, we found that these exaggerated "garbage cookies" were nothing short of, well, garbage.

Introduction:

This project was born of the idea of a monster cookie, of sensory confusion surrounding food. It is common to hear, “Believe me, I know it looks gross but it tastes really good!”, or “eww it looks better than it tastes” as we often ignore smell or sight in favor of taste or our misguided when we try to do the opposite. For this project we wanted to push the idea of monster cookie (inspired by Meeting Street), to look for the place where appetizing becomes disgusting. We went through many different thoughts, considered making “spring cleaning” cookies which questioned the idea of age of food by adding all sorts of contradictory cues in the form of conflicting holiday candies like candy corn ostensibly from Halloween with peeps from Easter and Hanukkah gummies. Or a break-up cake which we would dramatically drop a beautiful cake on the floor. We ultimately settled on the theme of evolution and family tree to explore these issues. We wanted to start with all of the same ingredients, have the same palette and then let ourselves loose with the batter, taking a cookie “snapshot” at each step along the way to document the mutant cookie strains.

Materials and Methods

Gather 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour, 1 tsp. baking soda, 1 tsp. salt, 1 cup (2 sticks) butter (softened), 3/4 cup granulated sugar, 3/4 cup packed brown sugar, 1 tsp. vanilla extract, and 2 large eggs. Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees F. Combine flour, baking soda, and salt in small bowl. Beat butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla extract in large bowl until creamy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Gradually beat in flour mixture. Stir in morsels and other bits (i.e. Butterfingers, Oreos, M&Ms, Oats, Snickers, Sprinkles, Marshmallows, Reese's Pieces, jelly beans...). Drop by rounded tablespoon onto ungreased backing sheets. Bake for 9 to 11 minutes or until golden brown. Cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely.

Results:

Discussion:

As you can see from the photographic evidence, a true "monster" cookie is far more delicious in theory than it is in practice. The final result is entirely inedible - a concrete-like conglomerate of processed sugars, corn syrup, flour, and other decadent ingredients (including Tequila!) that would indubitably nauseate even the strongest of stomachs. The creation of this cookie raises a number of pressing concerns regarding contemporary food habits in this country. What, after all, are we actually putting into our bodies? Just because we think something is delicious does not mean it is actually possesses any nutritional worth, and yet we often continue to eat it without interrogating the processed ingredients that have gone into its production. Additionally, what effect is the overwhelmingly gluttonous appetite of the American people having on both ourselves and the rest of the world? Clearly, too much of a good thing is anything but...and, as this cookie physically demonstrates, we might be well served to think more carefully before we gorge ourselves to oblivion.

4. Surprise!

Because our concoction requires last minute cooking in order to ensure the best oral and visual aesthetic, our creation will be a surprise and posted tomorrow after class. Until then, we hope you're not allergic to nuts (or pecans specifically)!

Bestest,
Elsa and Kat

Not A Warning!

I repeat this is not a warning, the experiment has gone wrong! Cross Contamination!

Ground 0 of the Cross Contamination