Winter

Winter has hit the Midwest, and hard. One day, the temperatures were at sixty five degrees, and three days later the high was a beautiful twenty three, and it has stayed there or below since. I guess I should get used to this Kansas weather, and one would think that I have already, sine I was born and raised her, but with the sudden changes, it just does a number on you. 

The reason why I am mentioning the weather is due to the snow in the forecast. As someone who rides their bicycle everywhere, this is going to be horrible for me. I still ride my bike everyday from my home to Baker University, but only the two mile round trip. With snow on the ground however, that will limit me to walking. Yet, there is some good that will come of the snow, when and if it hits. That is photographs. I love living in this small town in the winter just for at one simple fact. The city has a "lost in time" feel who the snow hits. It almost shuts down completely and the images that can come from it are just amazing as I found out last winter.

This semester at Baker is almost done. I cannot believe that my career at this institution, which I am now closing out my second year at, will be coming to an end in one years time. I feel like I have done so much here, but still not enough. Aside from taking every single art history class the school has to offer, I have also been treasurer, vice-president and president of its art club, been an employee of the college library an the head researcher and curator of its world famous bible and renaissance to romantic print museum. I have been able to make a few good connections and meet some amazing people. I think I will a be able to cherish a lot of moments from this institution.

i have finished the biggest drawing that I have ever done in my life. It is a four foot by four foot self portrait of myself (image below). It turned out pretty well, but not exactly how I had hoped. The eyes are what bother me the most. I do have some time I can work on that, finish it up a little more and maybe do another drawing, since I will have almost a month off from every thing except for a few hours here and there the museum. So outside of reading this winter, I might work on a new drawing. It will be fun. 

I did do some more ceramics in these past few months, but none of them turned out the way I wanted to at all. Most of them ended up in the trash bin behind the ceramics building at Baker. I will try again in January and see what I come up with. I hope this time around they come out better.

That is about it for this update. More to come at a different time. Thank you for reading.

Self portrait - copyright 2013 Chris Ortiz

Time has passed.

Some time has passed since the last blog I wrote.mi am sorry about that.  I will keep more in tuned with writing from here on out. Things have been very hectic with school, the Quayle, and I have also taken up cycling over the past few months.

i think I am going to take a vacation from the Quayle next summer, returning to it for the fall. I want to write again. It has been a long time since I have done anything professionally, since my time at Lawrence.com, and that has been a while. The thing that I miss the most is writing about art, the thing I care about most. Sure I have had a blast curating the current exhibition at the museum, but I will only be there for one more calendar year before my contract is up there and I will need to find something new to do. There are a few places I am thinking about putting my résumé into, which I hope having this strong background in Art History, research and curating will help, as well as my own creations I have done and the time I have spent in the art world,

Yet, with that mentioned, I do have some news. I did have the experience to curate the latest exhibition at the Quayle Museum. That was a fantastic experience. I loved the gathering of the work and reviewing it. Making sure it all went together and the research behind each piece I chose, the book that it came from as well as the artist that created each piece. This exhibition I was fortunate enough to create, focuses strictly on the illustrations in the bible, and includes the King David tapestry. The works though are outstanding. It was a shock to see all of the work that I did back in the work room. No one had a clue about what exactly we had. Some of the artist that have been included in this exhibition (and some of it is original works by the artist, other were reprints that were done during the artist life time) are William Blake, Albrecht Dürer, Jost Amman, "Petit" Bernard Solomon, and Gustave Doré just to name a few. It is a shock to find these works, like Blake's 1st edition Book of Job from 1825, that Blake published himself, from his home, in the collection. As well as the Nuremberg Chronicles, which has wood cuts designed by the then VERY young Dürer in the from 1493. How did a tiny, two room museum in a one stoplight city ever get priceless works such as these? Why has the University not used these works to their advantage and publicized them for scholars to come see? It is questions like these that just puzzle my mind. Yes, some local media have picked up the exhibition, like the local Fox News station, thanks to me and a friend that I know who works there, but out side of that, the school has been unresponsive to this amazing exhibition.

in other news, I am starting to look for graduate schools. I am thinking England will be the best choice for me, and I have narrowed my choices down to really three universities there: Leeds, York, and Reading. Each program has its own very special aspect to it that has appealed to me if the field of Art History, and I hope that one will accept me for my studies. I think that is what I will be doing after I am done at Baker, but I will be done in December of 2014, so next December, and those graduate programs do not start up till late August or early September...so I have time I will need to find employment and save up as much money as possible.

For art news, I think that is all that there is at this moment. I will update more as events happen.