I Return! (With some animation!)

Wow, it has been such a long time since I last posted. I've been working on an animation for my last year at Parsons, so I've been busy with that for most of this semester. Here's a few drawings and collages from that, as well as a trailer for the final animation (Coming Spring 2011!)

"Clouds" Teaser Trailer from Evan Turk on Vimeo.

Here are a couple shots of the set-up for presenting my thesis to the judges (taken by my fellow classmate, Deniz!):

(me, looking a little delirious)

And some of the storyboard collages and drawings:

Paris: Monmartre

Now that school's started again, I can start reliving my summer! Still working backwards...the last day of my trip to Paris, was the neighborhood of Monmartre.

Monmartre feels like a storybook version of Paris, with old cobblestone streets intersecting at impossible angles, wacky characters, and soaring views of the entire city. And stairs. Lots and lots of hills and stairs.

The center of Monmartre is the beautiful Sacre Coeur basilica. It's a very unusual cathedral, that looks almost Middle Eastern, with tall domed towers and the pure white stone. It always looks to me like it's been plucked out of the desert and put onto a Parisian hillside.

Back behind the cathedral is a beautiful (although closed) vineyard. I did my best to fumble through the placard with information about it, but then I overheard people talking about how the wine is awful, because of the lack of sunlight, but sells for a very high price because they donate the proceeds to charity.

My last stop in Monmartre was to the artist square, where dozens of artists and patrons cram into a small square to paint, sell, and buy art. It's great to see all of the artists out there working in such a picturesque place. It makes you feel like you're sitting in the residual energy of Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, and all the other artists who worked there, trying to soak up anything they left behind.

Colorado!

Hello! It's been a long time since I've posted here, since I've been out of town for the past month. I took a wonderful reportage class in Paris for 10 days, and then I went home to Colorado for a week. I'll start with Colorado since Paris will take longer. What a great month it's been! Colorado was so fantastic for a break. My boyfriend Chris and I went back to visit my family and take a little break from city life. The thing we could not get over was how INCREDIBLE everything smells in Colorado! There are flowers, trees, thunderstorms, rain, and just clean pure air. I can't believe I barely noticed how great it smells when I lived there.

Anyway, moving along, Chris and I went downtown into Denver one day and happened upon the Denver Botanic Gardens. They were having a show of Henry Moore's sculpture throughout the gardens, which was beautiful. Just drawing the flowers after having seen the sculptures made the gardens, shapes, and colors feel completely different.

The gardens cleared out once it got cloudy, and looked like rain, but we stuck around and stayed outside in the cool, fresh air. Rain doesn't seem so threatening in Colorado, because it just feels, smells and sounds wonderful.

Towards the end of the trip, we headed up into Rocky Mountain National Park to hike. Another thing I couldn't get over were the clouds! There is SO much sky in Colorado, and the clouds stretch around in a 360 degree panoramic wherever you are. The only time you can't see clouds in every direction is when you're up in the mountains surrounded by jagged cliffs and pine trees (don't even get me started on how good it smells up in the mountains...it's like what Pine-Sol wishes it could be...).

We ended up going on a 7 mile hike that looped around various lakes, through the forest.

Every once in a while, through the tangled pine trees, we could see through to beautiful soaring peaks and turquoise lakes.

Near the end of the trail, we came to the roaring Alberta Falls.

Finally we made it down to the base and began to drive home. The rains had finally come, after booming all day long, and we had given up on seeing any big wildlife for the rest of the day. But wait! Over in a marshy valley was a surprisingly orange animal wading through the grass. We all hopped out of the car and I ran down into the grass to get a closer look. A single, beautiful female elk was grazing near the side of a creek. It's always amazing to see such exotic animals, like something you'd see in Africa, grazing in a field only a couple hours from downtown Denver.

It was a wonderful, peaceful, and relaxing trip, and I can't wait to get back to clear the city air out of my lungs again.

The Cloisters

Chris and I spent a beautiful and relaxing day at the Cloisters in upper Manhattan yesterday. The museum itself is so amazing, and the gardens outside the grounds seem like they're bursting with too much vegetation to be real. It was so wonderful to "get out of the city" for a little while and sit around underneath the trees.

Shakespeare in the Park

Last week I went with a few friends to draw a performance of Richard III in Central Park. Now, I'm embarrassed to admit that I have never read Richard III, so I didn't really always know exactly what was happening, but I tried to keep up! It was easier to get caught up in the beauty of the performance, with the actors moving from one picturesque spot to the next. The whole thing looked like a fairy tale, and the audience was spellbound like little kids hearing a storybook, leaning in towards the actors as they delivered their lines.

I did manage to catch one line I knew at the end of the play, though!

"A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!"

You can view my friends' beautiful drawings from the same event below:

Audrey
Alex
Julia

The Sea Music Festival

A couple weekends ago I got the chance to return to Mystic Seaport, Connecticut while The Sea Music Festival was going on. It was great getting to see the performers and the audience interacting because they were both equally excited to be singing the songs they all knew by heart.

The seaport was full of characters, who looked and sounded like they had stepped out of the 19th century. It was amazing to see how a place can be transformed by the people occupying it, and how the whole place came to life when they sang the shanties.

(They each signed by their portraits!)

The highlight of the weekend for me was seeing The Barrouallie Whalers. They are a group of men from St. Vincent and the Grenadines who, in the recent past, hunted the pilot whales off the coasts of the islands as their profession. Today they sing the unique whaling shanties they sang on the whale boats, many of which share similarities to the shanties sung by "Yankee" whalers in the 19th Century.

It was amazing to see these men sing with such intensity and passion, ,and you could see their whaling days come alive in their voices as they sang.

The even had a short demonstration where they reenacted the sighting and hunting of a whale in a whaleboat out in the Mystic harbor.

Towards the end of the day, there was a concert featuring a group of women from the Mystic area called The Johnson Sisters, the Barrouallie Whalers, and a group of French shanty-men from Brittany, called Nordet. The began by singing songs individually, but as the concert went on, they all began to sing together. Whether they knew the words to begin with or not, they began to show the real power behind songs like sea shanties. The songs were developed aboard ships where people from all over the world sailed, and often didn't speak the same language. The songs have simple, chant-like lyrics, so that, no matter the language the sailor spoke, he could join in and keep pace with the work.

The men from Barrouallie and the people from Connecticut and Brittany could not look any more different if they tried, but these people could come together, from all over the world, to sing songs and fight to keep their world history alive.

100th Post!: St. Patrick's Cathedral

Hurray, this is my 100th post!

Today my plans got thwarted so I ended up going and drawing St. Patrick's Cathedral instead. Not a bad Plan B!

Isadora Duncan in Central Park

Today while wandering in Central Park, I happened to come upon a performance by "Dances By Isadora" in honor of Isadora Duncan's birthday (she would have been 132!). Duncan is considered by many to be the creator of modern dance.

The dancers were beautiful, dressed in flowing tunics with a rainbow of colors. I have always been in love with fabric flowing in the wind, so needless to say I was happy. It was like walking into a fairytale when I came around the corner at the Bethesda Terrace. One of the reasons I love New York so much, is that you can find wonderful things to see without even trying.

The performances featured little girls, teenagers, and women who all danced in honor of the last generation of women that had danced until they passed away in their nineties.