Justin Maller

Just thought I'd take a moment to show some art from Justin Maller, as I will be doing my presentation on him this week. He works mostly with photoshop to create his illustrations. His work has a very sharp, sleek, modern look to it. A lot of his work has similar concepts and trends, which I will talk more in-depth about during the presentation.

The story behind my Prjoect 4

I thought I'd take a little time to discuss the story behind my project. Im going to be making a site with some visual depictions of some of the songs from Joe's Garage by Frank Zappa. The album tells the story of a guy named Joe who discovers rock music, and starts playing all the time in his garage. He finds a girlfriend named Mary, who is catholic. But Mary soon ditches Joe to go on the road with a band called Toad-O. She has sex with the band and crew. The band eventually abandons her, and she enters a wet t-shirt contest in order to win some cash so she can go home. Meanwhile, Joe finds out about Mary's exploits and ends up having sex with a girl named Lucille. Not long after, it hurts when he pees, and he thinks he got it from a toilet seat.

Its quite a humorous story and album, and should be enjoyable to recreate visually.

Grants for Individual Artists

As I am a bit strapped for ideas, I thought I'd just briefly talk about a topic that I just finished writing a paper on for my Public Policy in the Arts class. Back in 1996, the NEA was forced to stop giving out grants to individual artists for a number of reasons, including the fact that many conservatives were upset with the funding of obscene art. Our question was to answer whether or not we thought the NEA should be able to reinstate these grants. I argued that they should, because in order to fully extend the arts to everyone and make great art available to all, we shouldn't stifle exclude certain types of art. A lot of individual artists are capable of contributing to society with their art, and many may not have the funds to fulfill their visions. Its important to take risks in order to progress in the arts and to maintain the arts existance.

What are your thoughts?

Dreamweaver Idea

For our upcoming Dreamweaver project, it took me a while to come up with something to do. The project is so open ended it almost makes it more difficult to figure what to do. I'm pretty sure I finally found something, however. Im going to create visual representations of a few of the songs from Frank Zappa's "Joe's Garage". Its a concept album, and each song has a distinct theme, so it should make it easy to develop artistic visual interpretations of the songs. A few of the song titles I intend to illustrate are Joe's Garage, Catholic Girls, Wet T-Shirt Nite, and Why Does it Hurt When I Pee? I think it should provide a fun and comical project that should be enjoyable to do.