So if you came, or saw via the ODU Art Dept. blog, we had a visiting artist in the ceramics studio last Monday and Tuesday (10/20 and 10/21). Erin Furimsky is an incredibly cool lady; she teaches at Illinois State and brought her insight and techniques down here to ODU and was a surprisingly informative and entertaining presenter! She annecdoted her instruction with bits-of-life stories and allowed us a small peek into an artist’s mind at work. It was lovely (and reassuring) to hear about how much she toils over the details of her work; it always makes me feel better to know someone else has spent 3 hours trying to achieve a certain shade of celadon blue.

I took some notes which may or may not be legible, but feel free to poke through them here, here, and here.

I also took lots of crummy shots with my BlackBerry camera, which you can peruse here. On Thursday I snagged a few decent shots of her tiles with my Canon, and in the set, those shots begin here.

Needless to say, it was an inspiring and fun demonstration. Unfortunately I had class during Monday’s and had to show up at the ODU gallery on Tuesday at noon, but I got a good 3 hours of awesome ways to apply printmaking and other techniques to ceramics. Thanks so much, Erin!

You can view her portfolio here.

When I was in the ODU Gallery, being counted for attendance in 279, I was looking at the wall of text written on the glass of Stephen Sagmeister’s exhibit. There was a lot of Korean writing (none of which I can read), and I saw some Japanese, so I decided to leave a message in Japanese myself. It’s down in the left-hand corner (if you are inside the exhibit, facing the lobby), and written in white and red. Here are a couple photos:

Here’s what it says, in my really awful Japanese grammar:

???

?????????????????????
????????????????????

???
????????????

It roughly translates to: “Hey; The English alphabet has 26 characters, but they are all boring (that’s what I think). Regards, “Those Damn Kids” (Manard-Jini).”

I hope sensei doesn’t see this…she just gave me a 94 on my JAPN395 midterm, and I don’t want to lose any of it!!!

That’s about all for tonight. I need my beauty sleep (as you can clearly see in my Flickr……)

xoxo
that damn kid

…from HARD CORE STUDYING! WOOOOOO! Yeah, right…

(Actually if you’re looking for a good way to clean your MacBook, take a white staedtler, “Magic Rub”, or any brand vinyl eraser to it, and just rub away. Works really well all over the MacBook, even on the trackpad!)

Here’s a shot of Webb from today. Have you joined any clubs yet?

Today in ceramics we started our first wheel-thrown project. It’s kinda fun, since I’ve never done it before. My piece slid right off after I got it into a very nice cylinder, and I had to re-center it and basically form it all over again. That was kind of a pain, but the wheel is neat because it acts like a vertical lathe like you would use for wood carving. Gets pretty messy and slimy though, luckily this cat is an APRONCAT! Hah, inside joke there.

Here’s a small rant that most of you will disagree with:

I hate when class gets let out early! Arrrrg! Especially when it’s a studio class and you end up with two hours to burn. I popped into my digital art class at 11, and we were let out by 11:30! My next class isn’t even until 3pm! And even then I’m out at 4:15, and the National Art Educators Association meeting isn’t until 7:30! Maybe I’ll head to the Pottery Art Studio store on Kellam and buy some glazes and some less-rough clay…

I could pay for my parking pass, but my tags are expired and I plan to replace them, so I don’t want to have to go back to the parking office to change what my license plates are. Besides, the ladies that work in that office are, sorry, totally anal cranky whiny bitches. Now, some of you may call this a “pot and kettle” situation, but honestly…every single time I’ve gone into that office, I’ve come out pissed. It’s like Wal-Mart; you go in, knowing what you need, estimate about how long it will take to walk to that section, get it, and pay for it, but you end up wasting much longer than you anticipated and come out all frazzled because everyone in there treats you like dirt, from the kid ramming a cart into your knee to the cashier who’s too busy on her cellphone to ring up your bananas.</endrant>

(To all of my former English teachers, I’m very sorry for that run-on sentence.)

Well I feel stuffed for not bringing my DS today, so I guess I’m going to go find something to occupy my time. I also hear Ishibashi-sensei in her office and I should scram before she finds me and talks to me without my Japanese brain loaded. If you see me wandering around, feel free to point me in the direction of something cool.

Cheers,
Jini