The Borders Project

I can't believe this school year is almost over! It's so exciting that I'll be heading home on Thursday!

This last block I'm doing now is a drawing class, and our final in-class project consists of painting/drawing an image on a large sheet of paper, canvas, or wood. Dr. Salix has given us the theme of "border" -- physical, psychological...you name it. It just has to have a personal implication as well. And, since it's personal, he's actually letting us do horses, which means, of course, I'm doing a horse. (Me? Pass up an opportunity to draw horses? Nuh-uh!) We have to come up with our own scene and idea, which is the hardest part for me, since it has to a) meet all the requirements in the rubric, b) show some sort of border, and c) have a very subtle and mysterious message. I'm used to having strict guidelines to follow for class projects, so thevague openness of what we can do left me pretty blank for a while. Dr. Salix gave us time to brainstorm in class, and this was my first idea:

Basically, the horse and rider would be jumping over the fence, sort of from one world into another. The fence and landscape would show the difference, as well as the two halves of the rider's apparel. Dr. Salix said it was a good start, but to go home and do some sketches and play with it some more. So that evening, I did several sketches and studied different pictures to come up with my second plan (click on the image to see it more clearly; I apologize for it being so washed out in the center):

So I brought that into class, but it is a little too long. Also, Dr. Salix says that it's too literal and the message needs to be harder to grasp. So I brainstormed for a little bit and...I'm back to square one: a jumping horse. And that's pretty much all I have at the moment. Dr. Salix told me to leave it at that for now, practice drawing charcoal and gesso horses over the weekend, and then we'd see what happened after I painted the horse for the actual project. So here are my products of the weekend practicing; the two standing horses are from live drawings, while the jumping horses are from photos:

So, tomorrow I'll actually paint the jumping horse for the project...and then I guess we'll see where it goes from there! I'll try to photograph the process so that I can post it here. It should be interesting, especially considering that I only have two days to complete it!