Unknown Separation

Today I was given a mission, and that was to explore the exciting GTA bus system. As soon as class ended I headed out to the Bus stop with Leah, Heather, Sara, and Anna, located at Anna's house. The was a small sign up with the route number on it, and with my experienced skills at bus riding I immediately knew that route 2 would lead us to Four Seasons town center. We ended up having to call the bus number to pick us up and surprisingly the bus came literally within seconds of receiving our call and location. Once the bus arrived I was pushed along quickly after I swiped my card by the Bus drivers impatient motives. Apparently we were causing the bus to by slightly delayed due to an off route call. I could see on the looks of everybodies faces that they were not happy with us. Well I felt bad, but hey, its the way things worked out, so what? After quickly absorbing the torrential downfall of frowns, I sat down comfortably in a hard plastic shelled seat. Definitely not the best seat in the world, and my survival rate dropped due to the lack of passenger protection gear such as the commonly known seat belt. I understand I'm riding this bus at my own risk, and also the fact that unless this bus plowed off a cliff or got jacked by terrorists, I was quite safe. Moving on past the physical feeling of being on the bus, I'll let you know that it smelled like the fumes from a dirty lawnmower. I didn't hear many people talking, so I assumed the passengers were on there way to work, or heading home for the evening. If i were to describe some of the people then I would say most of them were predominately African American. I actually didn't read the excerpt about the sit-ins in greensboro before going onto the bus, due to a time crunch. However after just reading over it, I've realized that things now seem to be very equal, but not at the same time. I couldn't understand why Most kids at A&T are African American still, and there is a white minority. I have a few friends who go there and they are African American. I asked them why they didn't choose to go to NC state or some other school for engineering and they told me because they were familiar with the school. From the reading it seemed that alot of African Americans were applying to get into white school and were denied, and now that the restrictions are lifted things are still very similar...to some extent. Back to the bus though, It was a curious sight to see only African Americans on the bus besides ourselves. I'm not sure why, but my first guess was not joy riding around Greensboro like myself. The bus returned to the depot where we proceeded to get off and explore the area. The first stop was the Greensboro train station. The station itself was impressive, it had high vaulted ceiling, and many rows of large wooden benches. These benches stretched half the room, where only 4 or 5 people actually were sitting on them. My observation would be that public transportation has changed alot since the car came along, and trains are no longer a reliable source of transportation due to it. Again much like the bus, most of the people in there were African american, and again I realize that although many things have changed an unknown segregation still lays before us. This occurs in school, in work, and even in transportation.

Uhm...first week of class

This week started off alright, but then when I found out Tuesday night that I couldn't get into the studio after work...I guess you could say I was "pissed" off. I understand that some of the cards were deactivated, but its worse when security won't even let you in. Struggling through 9am - 11pm from going to class early to finding times to eat, and then going to work and still finding other ways to work around the clock. Time constraints are harder on me this time but I'm just going to have to figure out how to manage my time alot better. Once my card is activated then I think everything will work out a little smoother.

Uhm...first week of 2nd year

Uhm...first week of 2nd year

Pathways and Nodes

First stop on the journey to he natural science center: Intersection between spring garden and Warren street, which is the location of my residence.




Second Stop: Approaching a Baptist church on Aycock going towards battleground ave.
Third Stop: Under two bridges down Aycock.

Fourth Stop: On Westover I passed a large high school on the left.Fifth Stop: Detoured down friendly ave. and passes the new friendly center.
Sixth Stop: Lucky 32 back on westover ave.

Seventh Stop: Krispy Kreme on Battleground ave.

Eighth Stop: The freshmarket on Lawndale rd.

Ninth stop: Forest Lawn Cemetery on Lawndale rd.

Final stop: The natural science center. The most notable aspect was all of the vegetation around the building

I made a Mess of Things...Elsewhere

Elsewhere was a real "change" for me as far as art is concerned. When I first walked into Elsewhere I thought that you could buy the items from the store. However I was wrong, very much so. The concept of the store was how the objects, that you cannot purchase, move around. The store is almost like a living breathing organism. It all started when I picked up the bouncy palls and slammed them into a colossus mess of instruments, some only pieces remained, and heard a loud crashing sound of atonality. I was worried they would lose the bouncy balls, but the owners didn't seem to care, they just kinda shrugged when things fell off the wall of bouncy balls flew across the room.

After having a brief walk through of the building, the owners explained to us that the whole purchase behind the building was change. Visiting artists would come there and move objects all around creating puns, and other strange creations. These creations shape the atmosphere and space within the environment. I can remember when I walked across the creaky "levitating" platforms over the glass bottles embedded within the floor that I was really experiencing that space. I felt like i was going to fall through any minute, and I quote Zach when he said "it was a leap of faith. "

There were many other experience's within elsewhere, almost too many to talk about so I'm just going to skip ahead to the drawing experience.

I heard the owner mention concept of layers many times over, and I decided that it would be a good Idea to try and draw my space using layers. So I started off by drawing a basic perspective of the space as shown below. (My space was the skyscraper) This picture is composed of a couple layers in itself, which included a layer of pencil, a layer of pen, and marker.


From here I took a new sheet of trace paper and drew in the objects that I saw within the space, some of which changed spots over the course of time. But this only added a neat messy effect to it. below are the objects in empty space without the structural layer added. As you can see the objects where drawn very quickly in a gesture type manner (this tends to be prevalent in my style).

From here I Layered the drawing to get a closer look at it, and realized that alot was going on in the drawing. I liked the way that felt , because Elsewhere was all about busy clusters of junk that moved around unknowingly. I decided that I wanted the space to stretch out more and have alot of contrast between the layers so I went back through and added another layer.

In this next layer I went back over the original structural perspective of the skyscraper and drew the lines so that they would interact with all the other lines. This created interesting weave in the drawing and I liked it because it felt more energetic, especially after I added the color, which was the next layer.

Here is the color layer in empty space.

Finally I got the final drawing of the space.




I would consider going back here in the future because everyone was so nice. I felt at home when I was there amongst the piles of mess. However still organized in some fashion, I still felt like maybe I could make art work without having a clear polished statement. Beyond art this space is an organism in all forms. I guess Mark Rothko was right about art in space.

Sketch-Up tryout

I had a little difficulty using the guide lines, but besides that everything was pretty clean and easy to understand. I'm still not a big fan because it just doesnt any personality to it. I feel like hand rendering something like this would bring more attention to it.