Week Three

This week I finished the Berliner Dom (except for maybe two more add-ons I want to make), the Fernsehturm and two strawberry stands. I also arranged how I would like the Pergamon Museum to look and will try to paste it down tonight (although that can take anywhere from 3-4 hours so we will see).

After finishing the previously mentioned items, I kind of took a step back. Janie made a suggestion to create small-scale cut-outs of the buildings to practice arranging them. This definitely helped but I still feel like it doesn't give a true representation of how it will look, especially because of all the details I plan on including in my final piece (ie: cyclists, tons of children, perhaps historical references like the presence of JFK and books at Bebelplatz, which is where the 1933 Nazi book burning took place, etc.) Regardless, here is an image of the cut-outs I made to very roughly simulate a future possible compositional arrangement. The "grass" and "streets" were added in Photoshop, although I foresee the grass and streets in my mural as being much more colorful and patterned than merely green and grey, respectively.

I also checked out some books on the history of Berlin to help guide my project and provide more context for the place I am creating, essentially. Currently I am reading David Clay Large's, Berlin. The book provides a historical account of Berlin, beginning roughly with the Bismarckian Rule and ending with present-day. It's very well written because it keeps me engaged and I am learning that many things I witnessed while in Berlin (people gathering at restaurants and bars outdoors at all hours of the day, for example) were also true more than a century ago.

I also checked out Belonging in the Two Berlins, by John Borneman; Historic Berlin: Pictures tell the story, by Paul Wietzorek; Berlin: Culture and Metropolis, edited by Charles W. Haxthausen and Heidrum Suhr; and Was War Los in West-Berlin 1950-2000 (roughly translated, "What Was Wrong in West Berlin between 1950 and 2000), by Jürgen Scheunemann and Gabriela Seidel. I also got a VHS (vintage!) from the AAEL about Berlin, narrated in German, so that, too, should be informative.

Throughout this process, I have continually been looking at artists--most notably, Romare Bearden, but also Hannah Höch and just today Erica told me about this artist, Wangechi Mutu, who will be speaking at Penny Stamps in November! Mutu creates beautiful figurative paper collages and I plan on going to her website to check out her work.

So, to break things down, this is the amount of time I spent on "things" this week:

• Bookmarked, scanned, Photoshopped, printed and pasted samples of Romare Bearden's and Hannah Höch's work into my sketchbook: 3.5 hours
• Worked on Berliner Dom, two strawberry stands, the Fernsehturm (television tower) and the arrangement of the Pergamon Museum: 11 hours
• Read books: 45 minutes
• Went to libraries and checked out books: 1 hour

My next plan of attack is to continue making buildings but do so while I read more about the history of Berlin. My goal is to have two more facades done by Tuesday.