One has to submit three home tests as a part of the application for the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD, where I have just decided I will be attending next year!). One, a depiction of a bicycle (I will be posting that up soon). Two, use the front and back of a piece of paper (see my This/That). Three, to combine text and image - see my drawing below. 
My actual artist's statement:
Read and See, 16 x 20,” Graphite on Paper. December 2010. When I started considering the third prompt of combining image and text, I was reading the novel C by Tom McCarthy with my English class. A major motif of the book is ciphers and new WWI-era telecommunications, like Morse code. I find very interesting these visual, portable manifestations of the spoken word that can be “read” without the eyes. Upon more thinking about and research on this, I realized that if Morse is speaking through hearing, then Braille is speaking through touching. Braille is the quintessential combination of image and text - it combines message and a tangible image to create one means of communication for the blind or visually impaired. After reading about and then in Braille, I have really come to enjoy and appreciate, albeit on an amateur level, this dying language, its power, and its history. The image reads various parts of the following: “For the third sample, your visualization must combine image and text. You may approach these three drawings in any way you wish.”
I used many websites' and non-profit organizations' information to help me with this project, including CBS Kids' Arthur, which has a site You've Got Braille (essentially a Braille translator. Very cool, see above.) Upon the recommendation from the site, I used Elmer's glue to make 3D glue-dots on top of the 2D Braille print-out from the website. That way, I actually was reading the "Braille" that I had translated with this site. Braille is extremely interesting; I recommend you read up on it and try to read some Braille yourself!
One of my biggest challenges in drawing is photorealism - it's really just not my thing. Often the perspective of my drawings will be even slightly incorrect and throw off the entire picture to the point that the wrongness of the perspective becomes distracting from whatever else is going on. In this drawing I really focused on getting the perspective just right - I did a lot of tracing, gridded overlays, computer work, and calculating (perhaps this was all overkill) to make sure it wasn't off. Above, see one rendering of the perspective: the black squares are each about 3 Braille characters wide, and the white gutters are the spaces between the characters. As you can see, the angle of the original photograph is very dynamic and the perspective shifts in every direction: left-right, front-back, diagonally, etc. (and the Braille dots themselves had to shift in darkness, width, and height to convince the eye that they are going back into space).
Above, the original photograph which served as the base of the drawing. Those are the hands of a boy from an art classroom next door to mine. I chose to use young hands because I thought they would be more interesting or thought-provoking than an older person's (who might have lost sight due to age). Some questions might be...why is this young person reading Braille? What happened to him? Etc.
Have a great week,
Alice
p.s. Check out this blog in Blogger's new "views" options, like flipcard.
Yay RISD!
ReplyDelete--BC
I love your drawing! The original picture it was based off of was great as well, and the whole addition of the Braille makes it even more interesting. I kind of think it would be pretty neat to learn Braille!
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