Diorama: September 22-29, 2022
The Mission:
We’re going back to elementary school book reports this week! Grab those old shoe boxes and your crafting materials and create a diorama. For your topic, have your diorama depict a recent scene from your life. Or, if that’s too depressing, depict a scene of you enjoying life in a place you’d like to visit. If you feel like your scene needs explanation, feel free to send that along with the photo of your submission.
Due September 29 by 7:00 p.m.
The Submissions:
by Captain Quillard
Been loving the fallish weather over the past week, and it made me think of fall hikes with the dog. My trees look a little sad and the dog’s legs look broken, but it’s my first diorama in 40 years, so sue me.
Next Week’s Assignment:
This is officially the first time I’ve used WebMD to define art:
“Synesthesia is when you hear music, but you see shapes. Or you hear a word or a name and instantly see a color. Synesthesia is a fancy name for when you experience one of your senses through another. For example, you might hear the name ‘Alex’ and see green. Or you might read the word ‘street’ and taste citrus fruit.”
Painting by Melissa McCracken
For a while now, I’ve been moderately obsessed with the art of Melissa McCraken. Melissa has Synesthesia, and says:
“…the most wonderful ‘brain malfunction' of all is seeing the music I hear. It flows in a mixture of hues, textures, and movements, shifting as if it were a vital and intentional element of each song.”
McCracken uses her condition to create oil and acrylic paintings of songs, by listening to a song and painting what she sees. I find many of these abstract paintings to be beautiful in their own right, but the idea of them being the visual representation of a song really speaks to me.
None of us has Synesthesia (or maybe you do - what do I know?), but let’s try a version of McCracken’s art anyway. For this week’s mission, choose a song to listen to — probably one you love, but I’d imagine one you really hate would also evoke some good emotion. While you listen to the song, create visual art of some kind — it does not have to be a painting — could be a sketch or a collage or whatever. Most likely it will be abstract art, but could be realistic if you prefer. Let the song inspire you and try to recreate some version of what you “see” or feel when you listen to it. If you don’t want to listen to the same song over and over while you create, feel free to choose an entire album instead.
Include the song title (and, ideally, a link where we can listen to it) with your submission.