7 posts tagged “art”

I'm finally done with setting my room up, and I'm so very proud of it. Pictures of my room will follow soon, but right now I'm choosing pictures to put up. I don't want a photo mosaic, because that is, in my roommate's words, "so summer camp". Here are my options:

This is by far my favourite, but if I saw this in a friend's room I would totally think she's got parent problems.

Very cliched, journey-esque message photo. I like the wet footprints. I remember halting my mum and dad from crossing the bridge before I could snap it.

Whimsical, cheers me up, but doesn't resonate deeply at all.

I enjoy the independence and the responsibility of getting my business done myself. And everything's been perfect except for a few things, surmountable things.

Okay, so this is how my 1.5 weeks have been:

I painstakingly set up my room myself, which might seem unfathomable to most, but oh well I like my room now.

 

Essentially the view I get: A bird's nest on close-up, you can't see it here but sometimes I see squirrels.

I thought it might be nice to leave the windows open and have some natural breeze. But the tree outside happens to be the habitat to lotsa insects. The fugly ones. Sometimes there are nice ones.

 

I moved in early, so I got to see everyone else move in on Thursday, the day I went out to run some errands (cancel phone line, make immunization appointment, get insurance card). Being a student in a school as big and as rich as Penn tends to make you feel very privileged and honoured. The first picture actually shows roads being condoned off especially for students moving in. Same thing happens for moving-out. Seriously. The rest of them minions have to detour.

We had talks, inspirational talks in a huge hall.

And in that same hall we had totally sophisticated comedians giving up stand-up on Comedy Night. (that was when I really felt special I think)

We had lotsa outdoor parties with lotsa FREE FOOD.

Actually you know what forget it you don't have to know everything. I'm way too lazy to wait for the other gedzillion pictures to load and to write about the gedmedbezillion other events.

But I did buy a new journal. The train metaphor I illustrated the cover with is quite literal I think. Could have done better. But didn't. So there.

 

Crap. I was so sure it was all that when I was doing it. But 6 hours later I'm convinced it looks like total crap. It's supposed to be Paris Fashion Week or something remotely like it.

 

 

 

I had time today to do another watercolor.

 

 

Waa! I wanna live in the 50s! Feminist concerns aside, it strikes me almost as a Romantic-revival period, but with all the perks of sanitation and air travel!

So I was quite inspired by Silk Stockings, and decided to do a very cursory study of its fashions.

 

I like the classic, leather-age flavour of this one.

And as for this one, I pasted some screen caps of the film, just to compensate for my paltry drawing - I couldn't capture the kinetic nature of the dresses!

 

 

Geez, it seems that the only thing that saves me from my supine lifestyle is inane drawing.

 

My mum just bought me a set of gouache paints :oD I'm so ecstatic! It's my virginal kit; I've never gone beyond poster colors, water colors and acrylic before.

I did a couple of trial pictures before moving on to painting some real cartoons. The first two were the experiment ones:

Then I moved on to filling up some of the toons I did. I don't know when the character begun to pop up in my head. I just drew her for my notebook cooler, and then she started showing up everywhere.

 

 

 

Not a big fan of the last one. Though I like the auburn Indiana-Jones-esque shorts and the grass, I didn't manage to get her skin color right.

This week has probably been the most eventful and potentially cathartic one this year. I say cathartic because exposure to the arts supposedly purges one's soul of negative worldly emotions and bestows upon one an immediate ecstasy, even if only spiritually. I don't know if I've benefiited in that manner, but I certainly have been absorbed into an effortless trance when understanding the works of art.

On thursday morning I wandered round Cathay, a very puzzling building, though I quite liked the quirky, indie-style tenants in there. More importantly, I watched what is probably one of my favouritest movies EVER, The Black Book.

 

 

On friday night I went to the Singapore Art Museum to catch a screening of esteemed Franco-Swiss director Jean Luc Godard, done by Alain Fleischer. The documentary certainly exalted Godard's enterprise to a very inaccessible art. When he talked about his thoughts, when his contemporaries discussed poltiics and cinema and history, when members of his round-table discussions broached questions, it basically seemed that no one could ever be on that same wavelength. So that documentary was quite demoralizing for a while, and it made me feel superbly shallow. But I was very much comforted when I discovered that one of Godard's films, Breathless, was the very movie that got me hooked on European films in the first place! Yes, I remember that evening after the last paper of my first Common Test in J1, I went to the NLB and picked the DVD because it just so happened to pique my interest. Anyway, though it wasn't my first French film (that was Wasabi, followed by The Spanish Apartment), it carried certain properties that were so different from the movies that I was accustomed to at that time. The free-spirited relationships, the emphasis on everyday conversation (with the camera following the characters down the street, a la Before Sunset), the realism that the people had in their lives as they made important decisions in a bedroom as the man dresses up and smokes and cigar and the woman in her underwear throws a pillor at him, but careless ones while negotiating with someone holding a gun - yeah my intro to Euro convention.

 

 

On Sunday morning I spent 2 hours in the Asian Civilizations Museum, skimming through the West Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia exhibits and spending a hour in the new Viet Nam exhibit, YOU know, the product of a collaboration with the National Museum of Vietnam to mark the 35th anniversary of strong ties between our two countries.

 

 

After that I watched Comrade Don Camillo at the Arts House. I think Giovanni Guareschi is pure genius! Really, more genius that other people befitting of a "sheer genius" commendation. To create characters like that amidst the political landscape of that time, and to imbue them with such caricatured and stereotypical traits that manifest SO COMICALLY, and to think of such outlandish events but connect them in a very understandable storyline.. like seriously, I wish I was able to watch the other four Don Camillo movies.

 

 

And then after that I went for Sotong Fest, a gathering for all incoming freshmen at UPenn, which lasted from 6.30pm to 11.30pm. Solid. I think, I'm gonna be fine there :)