11/5 workshop

This week made for quite an entertaining SPACE session. Molly and I (Anna) planned a workshop focused on beauty. Our plan was to begin with a brief discussion of what we thought beauty means and then show visual works, mostly portraits, by different artists and talk about how they presented beauty. We planned on spending the last half of the class working on broadly-defined self-portraits– i.e. picking traits of ourselves that we found beautiful and finding ways to visually depict them.
In class the discussion on beauty was fine, although a bit colloquial. Once we brought out the portraits by other artists all hell broke lose at the sight of Frida Kahlo’s unibrow and mustache. It was actually quite funny, and it seemed that there was a fine balance struck between understanding the more serious undertones of the session and just having fun. The self-portraits turned out great, and although most everybody balked at the idea of having to draw themselves, once they realized the possibilities for abstraction most seemed to enjoy themselves and create meaningful works.