Intersection
I sit at the only shaded corner at the intersection of Millvale and Liberty. Directly in front of me, a red brick fortress towers over the street; its pillar is planted firmly at the sharp curve of the intersection. Rows of dirty windows and clouded glass tiles on the building are facing me. It is around 5:00 pm, and these windows reflect the setting sun into my eyes. I see a tall man in a wheelchair (maybe around 20 feet tall) being pushed by a woman in a blue uniform. Both are flat against the pillar’s wall.
Kitty-corner to me and is a structure made of this same red brick. Steel rods rise from the brick base four stories high, and green barrier poles connect these horizontally. Inside this structure are rows of cars, some hidden by a large sign. A bright red box on this reads “EMERGENCY” — a stark difference from the smiling man on the other side of Millvale Ave. Following down this block the car lot continues. Its rows of open spaces on the walls expose the trunks of cars inside which reflect the sun’s glare.
Up and down this side of Liberty Ave, the same logo populates the street. It looks like a a melting green face of a rubik’s cube, and directly below this image are the words “West Penn Hospital”. I find the design of these hospital buildings surprising, as its features look rather dismal. I usually think of hospitals as very open with panes of glass for walls, or at least having light concrete. The red brick makes it look more like a medieval castle than a modern medical center.
I am surrounded by this red brick. Across the parking structure and on the other side of Liberty Ave, a First Commonwealth Bank stands solitary in a lot built of, surprise, the same red brick as everything else. The only buildings that are not made of this material are the ones I am closest to. I sit on a concrete slab outside of a sister building to the hospital—this one is made of mostly glass. As I am typing, a young boy runs up to me laughing and giggling. He shows me his toy drill and pretends to drill the bolts out from the silver fire hydrant on the concrete slab. To my right, a massage parlor and a coffee shop (which is sadly closed—shoutout to caffeine addiction) are made with a yellow brick and have burgundy awnings overhanging their doors.
Down towards my left, I see a billboard. Somehow I recognize it, but I don’t know why. Then I realized—it’s the same billboard that Mark Baskinger told us about earlier in the day. “Buy YQ Cabinets. Get FREE Granite.” He told us it was bad, but WOW I was not expecting that. I know we weren’t supposed to take pictures but I felt a burning urge to document this eyesore. With that, I decided it was time to pack up and leave. Goodbye, Millvale and Liberty.
During the rough draft for the paper relief, my main thoughts and struggles were about debating the details I should keep or cut. Mostly the debate came down to: how small would these details be, were my technical skills with the exacto knife good enough to keep these details clean, and how simple can I make this piece while still making it comprehensible and communicative? I think I was able to strike a good balance, and I’m glad I didn’t do smaller details because there was glue EVERYWHERE. I like to think I’ve learned a lot from my days as an avid arts-and-crafts-er, but working only with white paper led me to see that my assumption was very wrong. However, I think that was the largest struggle from the process. In the end, the only part I was really unhappy with was the bridge, because it looked like a random block in the middle of the composition.
Crit Notes:
- Keep clean (maybe use a damp towel, gloves, or baby wipes)
- Start bigger, then trim down to keep edges clean
- Avoid ambiguity from over simplification and confusion from too much complexity
- Be mindful about cropping (tangents to borders create tension, weird crops make objects hard to identify)
- Details have to be spot on otherwise they lead to confusion and become distracting
For the second draft of the white-on-white, I chose to add more details. Although it was mentioned in the critiques that too much detail could be too confusing, I felt like mine was too simple. I did not want to add full windows, but maybe hints of some on the main building so that there would be more detail without being too overpowering. I also decided to cut out squares on the bridge to make it look less like a brick and more like a bridge. In the first draft, I left the sidewalk with a lower relief, which I thought looked unnatural, so on the left I made it higher than the buildings, and on the right I made it the same as the other details; I happened to like the one with the same level of relief, so I decided that I would continue like that. The craftsmanship was slightly better on this one, but there were still issues with some of the cuts and definitely a lot of glue residue. Note to self: do the lamp post in one full cut.
After crits, I needed to rethink some of the changes I had made; the windows I scored into the sides of the buildings did not show up under the harsh lighting conditions, and the bridge, instead of looking like a floating brick, looked like a floating bus. After asking Stacie, Kyle, and Marisa, I decided to go with the idea of not indicating all the windows, leaving most of them connected.
Going into the grayscale draft, I focused on fixing the issues stated above. I added the second bridge back into the piece to help create more depth, and I made the changes to the windows on the bridges so that they would look less like a bus. Because I didn’t find the etching of the windows to be of any benefit to the relief, I chose to leave them out and keep to a more simple piece. I tried to create dimension in the circular tower by using different tones to indicate shadow/highlights, and I also decided to add the telephone wires in the sky to help break up the negative space a little bit.
While making this one, I definitely kept the cuts a lot cleaner than before, and I also was able to control the glue a bit better. There are some splotches of dirty glue, but luckily they kind of blend in with the speckles of the paper.
For the following critique, those who commented on mine liked the depth in my piece, especially that which was created by the shading I did on the circular tower.
On my colored draft, I chose to use green because I felt like it was an important aspect to my intersection. The green logos of AHN contrasted really nicely with the red brick, so I wanted to have the important color be incorporated into the relief. I did not like the lime green color given to us, so I chose the dark olive, and replaced the tone that was closest to it. If I had tried to replace the darkest color, it would have been too low of contrast (as pictured below):
While making this draft, I felt much better about the craftsmanship; the cuts were cleaner, I finally got a hang of the glue, and I felt like the papers lined up pretty well. My biggest issue was that I did not feel like the green gave the same depth to the piece as the grayscale did. The green does not give me any emotional response to the piece, and to me, it just looked like Shrek. My favorite draft was still the colors, but I think I finally got to a level of craftsmanship I was proud of. Could it be improved? Of course. There are slight gaps, and some of the papers got ripped, but I felt like those thinks were so small it was not worth redoing again. If I had unlimited time, I would do another draft, but with other classes to do homework in and wanting a healthy amount of sleep, I just let those imperfections be.
Although this is an unpopular opinion, I actually really enjoyed this project. Walking away from it, I learned some critical things:
- BE CLEAN!! — dirty papers make your art look messy and careless, even if the cuts are perfect
- BE ORGANIZED — I still don’t know how this happened, but I somehow lost an entire large side to a building?
- ASK QUESTIONS — those bridges were going to be the death of me, but with the help of one teacher and two TAs, I finally got to something I was happy with
- EXPERIMENT — playing around with the sidewalk really helped enhance the entire piece overall