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Madoka Kinoshita

Japanese-born illustrator Madoka Kinoshita grew up around anime, video games, and other cartoons as a child and began to mimic the style in childhood. She became an illustrator at age 23, and works with digital art, sketch art, and most famously large canvas artworks. She uses bright, pastel colors such as aqua blue, baby pink contrasted with thick, crisp, dark lines that bring out a sense of childish joy and innocence. Her famous canvas art is created through various layers of acrylic paint, carefully cut pieces of masking tape, and careful application of epoxy to keep all of her lines crisp. Her main focus tends to be on the large eyes of many of her characters as they are filled with many bright and colorful sparkles, creating an incredibly cute image. In some cases, this innocent style is contradictory to the actual subjects, creating many different levels of art. Her main goal is to make people happy when they view her art.

In Amy Tan’s TED talk, she discusses where creativity comes from. She explains that some people think that creativity is something that an individual is born with. She then questions whether it is from past lives, as her mother thinks, or if it’s from mental illness like with Van Gogh. Narrowing the origin of creativity to simply being born with it or not doesn’t seem extremely accurate to me, however Tan continues to debate about the source. She says that creativity can also be learned, through parenting or some other form of learning over time. This makes a bit more sense than simply being born with the ability to create. Personally, I feel that creativity is something that grows over time after a certain spark the artist experiences. This is what Tan describes more towards the end of the talk, as she starts to describe a type of muse that people find that leads them to create.

In Stan Brakhage’s “Stellar”, the title very clearly screams “voyage through space”, I kept seeing much more than just this. It wasn’t very hard to get the feel of going through space, I kept noticing things that looked vaguely like arms, faces, and people smiling and such. I’m not sure if it’s the rapid movements and large amounts of black that make me see some strange or creepy images, or a combination of the two. I almost feel like the piece was created with intent to have a Rorschach-like effect, that or I’m just seeing things. At the end of the video, Brakhage explains that the video is a collaboration with Sam Bush, the printer. The video is described like music, though the creating process was likely very similar to making music, as the piece was created through various layers of paint.

In Spoon’s “Inside Out”, in an interview for Song Exploder, the drummer explains the process of creating the song. Like Stellar, the song was created through the layering of different elements.  With the song, some of the elements are referenced through other artists, and instead of simply capturing the sound of the other artists, they intend to capture the feeling the artist was going for, or the process that was used to create this sound. In both “Stellar” and “Inside Out”, the layering of different effects help to create the final product.

Part 1:

I’ve learned through my week of tracking my use of time that a majority of my time is spent putting off doing things that could be done quickly and then immediately put out of the way. I put most of my time into leisure, and not as much as I should into schoolwork or studying.  So far this hasn’t led to any real problems, though I should just do things immediately instead of hours after I plan, or even days later.  Although I spend a lot of time on leisure, I need to work more on drawing or sketching anything instead of just playing around. In the duration of the week, I’m pretty sure I only drew one thing for about an hour. If I want to get in my 10,000 hours I need to work on more things. I need to set aside 2 hours or so a day to draw, sketch or testing things out in photoshop/ painting/ etc.

Part 2:

I really enjoy rabbits, to the point where I’ve made plenty of rabbit-based characters. I just feel  like I have a lot in common with rabbits.

It only makes sense that over years of creating to serve an objective purpose that people would begin looking for things with better design. The book excerpt explains for a few civilizations, the pattern of creating things to suit a need and then improving the design of these things. This happens to be my general pattern for creating most things. I start with a simple, general design, and then I begin to move more specific as I add in design. It almost seems like a universal law since it is prevalent in cultures all around the world. As time passes, designers have become more and more aware of what needs to be updated, as well as creating new ways to be innovative.

As we approach the so called “conceptual age”, I need to work really hard on high-touch and high-concept skills. Although I’ve already started to work on most of them, I still need to work on meaning. I love the idea of math though this excerpt is right, calculators and super computers have rendered that aspect of me much less important than building a skill set that can’t just be recreated. This excerpt makes it extremely clear that creativity is a skill that can’t just be learned by a computer, and thus it needs to be developed. I’m not too sure how I feel about the whole “right brain left brain” part of the excerpt, but the rest feels pretty accurate.

Articles

1. What are the main points of each article?

In the first article, the main point is that entrepreneurs have started looking towards artists to bring in more creativity to the process of business, and also that entrepreneurs can learn a few things from artists. In the second article, the main point is that artists and entrepreneurs are extremely similar, where the line between the two are blurred, but both can benefit from learning from the other.

2. What can artists learn from their “entrepreneurial cousins”?

Artists can learn the importance of building connections and having a support group from entrepreneurs. As the second article states, artists may be more focused on refining their craft than counting on others to reduce the costs of becoming an artist.

3. Do you agree that artists are entrepreneurs? why?

I agree that artists are entrepreneurs, because they have to initially work with the current flow of the market before they can create what they really want to do, and artists and entrepreneurs have to work using their passion towards a goal that isn’t completely mapped out.

4. Which of the 12 characteristics of artists do you agree with?

Although I agree with all of the characteristics, the two that I agree most with are 9 and 11. My favorite kinds of art all involve storytelling, and not just in a metaphorical sense, and every artist I’ve seen has been in love with their work.

5. What others would you add to the list?

Artists are extremely flexible, because they prefer to do what they want and then make it fit to their requirements.

6. Additional notes.

Artists are becoming more necessary and wanted in business.

Artists and entrepreneurs share many of the same traits, and are rather similar in what they do.

Grit

1. Do you have grit, or is this something you need to work on?

My personal grit score was 2.75, so I have a little grit, but not as much as I need. I work hard, and can focus on things for many hours at a time. However, I give up on things quickly, and become discouraged even faster. It’s a huge problem that I need to work on.

2. List a couple of things you could do to increase your level of grit.

Build thicker skin; have less people affect me negatively from it

Set aside time for work and stick to it

Stop seeing failure as the end of the line

Photographs are indeed everywhere, as introduced in Vilhim Flusser’s The Photograph, however this just adds to the ‘danger’ of their existence. At the most simple, naïve interpretation of photographs, they “represent the world itself”. The author begins to deconstruct this perception of the photograph by explaining the concept of white and black. This concept cuts things down into a specific binary, where there are only two distinct choices. Like yes and no, 0 and 1, 100% good and 100% bad. There are some gray areas explained to exist, but this is explained to show how black-and-white photographs are images of theory. By this explanation, black-and-white photographs should exist in a vacuum, except they aren’t. They exist, in photographs. This creates a sense of separation between photographs and real life, proving the obvious: photographs are a form of art, and have meaning only understood through abstract concepts.

From here, the article goes into further depth such as how “green” in the world of concepts has an infinite amount of meaning, and also how it’s basically impossible to decode every single meaning in a photograph. From how I see it, especially after this article, decoding a photograph is best done when comparing the intentions of the photographer and even the camera. Photographs are deceptive in this way, behaving like magical beings with a gateway to another unreal world. Photographers do what they can to manipulate photographs, making them into some form of super being.

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