The title of this unit is “Art As A Means For Change”. We had to choose a theme about a subject we are passionate about that could be related to social justice or activism. We also had to combine 2 types of media in this project and either image or text. My piece is entitled “Woman to Woman: not enemies, not rivals, if not friends then allies” This is a quote from author Tiffany Reisz from her novel “The Priest”. I made a – by – mixed media watercolor, pen, coffee, and image transfer piece on watercolor paper. “Woman to Woman” is about the bond between women that prevails even when we don’t know each other. There is a deeper type of understanding we share. I represented this through the look women share with each other by showing eight pairs of eyes all meeting the glace of another pair.

My first step was to paint the canvas with coffee for an aged and neutral look. I then took reference photos of my friends eyes in different positions. After choosing which eyes and directions they should go I created the layout using ohotophop. I then projected that layout onto theprojector at my school and traced each pair of eyes. I used the reference photos to finsihhthe drawings and add details. To start painting I did a watercolor underpainting of the undertone in each photo. I added multiple layers and values to each pair of eyes. After painting, I added more coffee stain. Then I began the process of image transfer with my pre chosen text. To do this I had to flip the text and print it, then use a colorless image transfer pen with acetone and burnish. With an ink pen draw the eyelashes and add any details in black. To finish it off I printed more quotes at a larger scale and after transferring darkened then with a ink felt and brush tip pen.

Easy Once I got into a rhythm of drawing and painting it wasn’t too hard for most of them. I have already experimented and gotten confident with drawing with pencil and using watercolor. I wanted to do this project because I have been practicing painting with watercolor on a smaller scale and I thought that I had gotten pretty good at it. I wanted to use this unit as an opportunity to test that and to try larger-scale drawing as well. I also enjoyed choosing and arranging the eyes of the models in different directions. It felt tedious at times because I was very particular about which eye position to use for each girl I photographed because I took multiple photos of each pair of eyes. However, this project was not all smooth sailing. I had never done image transfer before our media testing so I had a slight complication with that area of my project. First, the ink wasn’t transferring at all because I had used my home printer. After reprinting at school, it worked but still came out quite light and hard to read due to the size of the text. I didn’t mind that too much. For the text I really wanted to be read I went over it with a pen. Another stressor of this project was Lana’s eye. I think the underpainting was too dark. It showed through pretty heavily and I had to go over her eye multiple times to get it right. It ended up being one of my favorites because of the number of layers and depth to it.

One way I visually communicated my idea was through the use of no one focal point. This shows that each pair of eyes is part of the collective. They are all part of the community. The element of art used is balance. My piece is not symmetrical, but it is well-balanced on each side due to the even number of eyes and their placement. The principles of design used are form and space. The negative space used lets each pair shine on their own while still being part of the whole picture. It encourages your eyes to move through each pair easily without staying on one too long. The light text, although a bit sad my quotes got drowned out, actually in a way helps support the message. My original plan was to have them be hard to read by overlapping them and I figured the text would be light. I had not anticipated how hard to read they would be, however. The text in the back is the foundation of the community. It represents the shared and often unspoken experiences of women. We can’t read it but we know its there. So much is left unsaid and only communicated through a glance. I did however want some of the quotes to be apparent to illustrate further the message of the piece which is why I went back in with larger text and darkened it with a pen.

The idea for this piece came from a quote from Virginia Woolf A room of one’s own. We were reading it in my women’s writing class at the start of this unit. The quote is “Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely Antony and Cleopatra would have been altered had she done so!” (WOOLF) This quote is about the way women are often pinned against each other especially in literature when needed to further a man’s story. It started a discussion on how women turn against each other for men even today. While true, it also made me consider how the opposite is true. Women have always had a sort of bond that men don’t have, and often don’t recognize. This piece is about the unspoken bonds and understanding women share and how it comes across through a look. I really wanted to focus my attention on this look that i believe all women have experienced. This look occurs when you realize you two are the only women in a male-heavy space, when you see something happening to another woman, or when you both catch something others didn’t. A quote that I found while researching this that unfortunately got buried in the image transfer process really explains this glance. “

“Women have to create these different mechanisms to communicate with each other ... it's an unspoken language…At least two men saw what was happening…None of them knew what to do; they were uncomfortable. They didn’t know the unspoken language.” (Hwang) This is from a news site reporting on an instance of sexual harassment. It’s true. It really is an unspoken language women learn without realizing it. “Women know that other women can provide that aid and step in,” she said. “There’s greater empathy and understanding there. It’s happening to her; it can happen to me. It’s a form of empathy that compels you to take action”(Hwang). This is again from the same source and explains perfectly the reason for this language and its origin of it.

One way this topic is linked to a previous artwork is through the broad topic of feminism. In unit two of last year’s class, I made a piece titled Eighteen. It was a photo series about the sexualization of women turning 18. These pieces are more closely linked through my use of quotes in each to show my message. In Eighteen I used a quote from former KNBR radio host, Patrick Connor, about 17-year-old Olympian Chloe Kim. Within this piece, there are many quotes from many sources about the topic of sisterhood as the backdrop and context to the eyes.

My goal was to fill the back with these quotes, including overlapping them. However, I ran out of time to do this at school. To improve this piece I would fill the background and blend the sides of the eyes into the rest of the page better. I would also not use a brush pen when darkening the larger quotes because I believe that made them come out messier than I intended. I would use a felt tip.