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Triangle Man, Triangle Man / Triangle Man hates Particle Man / They have a fight / Triangle wins / Triangle Man. -- from "Particle Man," by They Might Be Giants. |
Friday, February 12, 1999 What Happened Thursday (Part I) Sundown's approaching, so I have to make this relatively fast. So, to backtrack a bit... Thursday's schedule was as follows:
11:00-12:15 -- English 399: Ideology and the Power of Culture.
2:00-6:00 -- Art 153: Two-Dimensional Design
11:00 -- Deadline for this week's issue of the school paper.
The scene: Late Wednesday night. I had a carnival scene due the next day. To be exact, I needed to find some way of representing the energy and sights and sounds and feel of a carnival, without getting representational. In other words, I wasn't supposed to actually show what a carnival looks like, but somehow get the feel across using abstract shapes. In black construction paper on a white 15" x 20" illustration board. How was I supposed to do that?! Somewhere along the line, it occurred to me that the essential theme I could work with was that of organized chaos. That is, a carnival is a hubbub, with people teeming all over the place in a random fashion, but somehow coming together as a unified whole. So I decided to just cut out a whole lot of shapes and scatter them around the illustration board, and see what happened. So I cut triangles. Lots and lots of triangles. Big triangles and small triangles, medium triangles, and tiny triangles. Equilateral triangles and right triangles. Triangles of all sorts. And I strewed them all over the place. The results weren't that great, and they weren't that bad, either. Certainly better than nothing, and I didn't have time to develop anything else. The catch was that is was about 4 AM, maybe 4:30, and I still had to glue these scores of triangles to the background. I looked at it, shuddered slightly, and decided to leave it for the next day, as I needed to get some sleep. At 9:20, my alarm went off. I hit one button or another, and sort of drifted in a semi-conscious state, checking my e-mail along the way, until about 10:30. At which point I looked at the clock and freaked a bit. I got to my English class at 11:30 AM. Without having done my homework, not having taken care of it before class. From there, I went to the newspaper office, where I proceeded to glue a whole lot of triangles to an illustration board, while arguing with another editor about the role of remediation at the City University. I got done at about 1:55 PM, after which I sped off to class.
Most of the class wasn't entirely successful in meeting the challenge. A bunch came close. Two or three managed it really well; I loved one in particular, which managed to show what was clearly a roller-coaster car in motion, without quite getting literal about it, in which the background and foreground were equally important, which is basically what this class is all about. Mine clearly didn't make it, but was just as clearly on the right track. My problem was that, as mentioned just a second ago, balancing the background and foreground is everything in this class. The negative space should be just as interesting as the positive space. In my case, the triangles were clearly the important bit, and the background was just there. Still, it was at least clear that I understood the assignment, and I did pick up on the problem even before tacking it up for the professor to see, even if I didn't have a chance to do anything about it. So I'm feeling okay with it, on the whole.
Oh, dear. I'm out of time. I'll take this up tomorrow night, at which point I also may be able to do something about my e-mail backlog. Please be advised that I've read everything I've been sent, and appreciate the responses I've gotten from readers; I just haven't had a chance to answer them all. But I'll do my best to remedy that over the weekend.
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