Alimars Arts

Recently, I attended a special film screening of "The Artist is Present". It surveys Marina Abravomic's artistic endeavors and focuses on one of her biggest shows at MoMA. Abravomic is a performance artist in which her body becomes her canvas in a sense. Her early art is shocking because she plays with bodily harm to herself - nothing is an act or an illusion. She had a piece where she was laying in the middle of a pentagram lit on fire and passed out from the fumes. She even carved one onto her abdomen in another performance. The early pieces make me wonder where is the line drawn between art and self-harm? Can a form of self harm even be considered art or is bodily harm only a maladaptive coping mechanism? As both an artist and a former Crisis Counselor, this is a difficult question to grapple. As an artist I cannot deny her expression nor can I speak whether her performance art that involved harm to herself was out of a place of pain or not. As a former Crisis...

In revisiting portraiture I have realized that I made errors in my facial proportions. There are something I utilized that were correct such as knowing that the space between each eye is equivalent of one eye. The main thing I realized I had wrong this whole time was that foreheads are half the length of a face. It baffles me and I think its because in my minds eye a forehead takes up such a small space because hair is covering it. With faces I think it is especially difficult to separate what our minds eye thinks a face is. Which seems counterintuitive to me because we are hardwired to detect faces easily and can even spot images that appear like a face even when nothing is present. Maybe because faces are so imbedded into our minds we tend to generalize them and therefore have a hard time separating our generalizations of what a face is supposed to look like from the realities of the actual structures of the face. Somethings to keep note: From the top of the head to the top of t...

Did you know that you can essentially make all colors out of just the primary colors? Greys and whites can be added. Color matching is so interesting yet so difficult. The same thing applies to skin tones. All variations can be made using just combinations of red, blue and yellow. Skin tones happen to be neutral colors which are all basically made from mixing opposite colors. Something interesting to that I learned is we have a tendency to mix skin tones that are brighter than they really are. It kind of makes sense considering that humans are extremely good at detecting faces and human silhouettes. We can even pick out an image of a face when there is not one. I think as a result of us being such social creatures we see skin tones as more lively than they really are. So in order to balance this problem greys can be added to tame down the overly brightness but you also don't want the greys to overpower either. Also white should only be added at the end for highlights. Here are exa...

My mind has been blown - the old painting masters Cézanne, Rembrandt and Monet are not all of what I thought they were. I recently discovered that the traditional art historical canon is biased and has created an unrepresentative view of creativity and artistic styles. It has left out entire groups of people only later to place them in subgroups. The traditional canon for art history has favored upper class European white male artists. It is interesting to see that art history has been governed by a select group who overtime decided what qualifies as great works of art and artistic genius. The definition leaves out women and minorities who have not had access to the same resources as men did such as supplies or education but even so they were able to create with items more accessible to them. Yet they are left out of traditional canon as if they never existed. How can we understand culture, history and politics by ignoring these groups of people? - Art is not only a piece of individua...

I decided to take a Figure Painting class and lately we have been doing value studies. This is something I have not done much of and I am realizing how important they are. The challenge was to not mix any black or white and to only use a neutral hue created by mixing two complimentary colors (eg. blue & orange) to create a range of values. Each time I used a different combination and I learned something new about complimentary colors that I did not know before! complimentary colors are opposites but each pair of opposites have different attributes. Before I explain let's brush up on a little vocabulary: hue = color, value = light to dark intensity. The pairs Red & Green have similar values but high contrast between hues, Yellow & Purple have the highest contrast between hues and Blue & Orange have similar values but the highest contrast between warm and cool colors. So what this means is imagine if you used these colors to obtain contrast and took a black and w...

Abstract Expressionism,  Marina Ali, 2014 Comic by Sephko  I have contemplated about starting an artist's blog. Of course many questions pop up such as, who will care to read or view my work. I haven't "made" it yet as an artist. But I think the journey is so important not just the success story or simply a highlight reel. I follow, read and subscribe to many artists and creative people I look up to. Mostly I hear about success stories and their reflections and advice looking back on their journey. I believe their struggle in retrospect is much different than what they felt and thought during that journey.  I do like to hear these stories because I learn from them but often times I wonder what would their story or message be from the vantage point of their former self before they reached a certain point in their creative endeavors. I also think that so often we believe that success is linear when it actually zig zags with ups and downs even if as a whole it i...