Friday
Foundation 2D Studies. This is the basic design class - the sort of class in which, at some point, I'm certain I'll have to make a color wheel. We broke up into groups of three and "interviewed" each other, asking each other a list of questions in order to get to know each other a little better. After that, we went down the block to the Art Institute (the museum next to MCAD) and looked at a Rembrandt of a woman who had stabbed herself with a dagger - the teacher pointed out how the eye was drawn to different locations in the painting because of the direction the woman was looking, the use of color, the point of the dagger, and so on. We also looked at a collection of illustrations titled "Unprepared"; I don't recall the name of the artist, but primarily the pictures were about the anxieties a young woman faces in today's society regarding everything from a distorted self-image and others' perceptions of you to teen pregnancy and drug abuse. The work showed strong influences from Victorian advertisements and Mexican paintings, if you can imagine that. Following this, we returned to the classroom for an exercise in abstract expression. We were presented with a number of words - anxious, depressed, joyful, etc. - and we had to express that word using lines. The idea was to use simple lines without identifiable form to get the idea across. It was interesting, and something I remembered Scott McCloud talking about in "Understanding Comics," so it wasn't such an alien idea to me. Definitely something that would be applicable to comics...

After school, Marilyn and I swung by the school library to pick up a video to watch. We were waffling between "A Clockwork Orange" (Marilyn's suggestion) and "Silent Running" (mine), but then Marilyn picked up a movie directed by Jean Renoir called "La Grande Illusion", a film from 1937 about prisoners of war in World War One, meant to appeal to the German people not to listen to the nationalistic furor of their leaders. Unfortunately, Goebbels made sure any copies of the film that came close to Germany were burnt. Orson Welles named it as the one movie he would save above any other. So, we watched that one last night, and it was quite good. If it was at all accurate, it's pretty shocking to see enemy officers treating each other with such politeness and consideration...

(I fear I have to add that we're pretty certain "Hogan's Heroes" was largely based on this movie; there are too many similarities to ignore.)