Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Jenny Goldsmith's Winter Term Project

For my winter term project I completed five acrylic paintings and focused on teaching myself to paint without a brush. The tools I used to create my paintings ranged from my own hands to a tennis racket to Crayola crayons. My tools came from drawers and boxes in my house and from sales racks at Goodwill. I practiced different techniques with all my objects on acrylic paper and used 6x6x1.5in stretched canvases for my final paintings.

While painting, I tried to stay aware of how I thought of different ways to use the objects and how I learned to get the techniques I wanted. Some of my ideas came from past experience. In high school I took a painting class where we learned to use crayons with watercolors for a wax resist technique. It took some trial and error though before I finally had the right mixture of paint and water so it was watery enough for the wax to repel but still rich enough in color when it hit the blank areas of canvas. It seems I was using trial and error to learn more than anything else but I did learn a couple things by accident. When I started playing around with the tennis racket, I kept trying to put paint onto the strings and then press them onto the paper to create a grid-like pattern, but the paint would dry to quickly and it wouldn’t spread evenly on the strings. When I set the racket down to wipe off the paint, I ended up smearing the paint across the tennis racket and leaving little squares on my paper. In my painting of the pink and purple flower I modified my discovered technique and set the racket on the canvas then sponge painted over the strings to leave textured squares when the racket was lifted off of the canvas.

My favorite painting of the five is “Freak Out” because I based the painting on a photo that I took at the county fair in my hometown and I felt like a little-kid again while working with the crayons. I plan to continue using the techniques I discovered during this project in my future artworks and will also keep exploring new ways of putting paint on canvas.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Kristine Kuchta's Winter Term Project

For my Winter Term project, I taught myself how to use 3 statistical packages that are free on the internet. The first was R Commander, a powerful addition to the popular package R. This was my favorite overall, because I was able to easily create boxplots, histograms, and scatterplots of data. Gretl and PSPP are very easy to use, but have less visual outputs. I would suggest PSPP for beginners. To wrap up my month of study, I collected data on the price of single family homes in the Oberlin area. I used a linear regression model to find that one can predict the price of a home in Oberlin from the number of bathrooms and the size of the estate. I really enjoyed my Winter Term because I was able to do something I was interested in!

~Kristine #6

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Hello Clarice

Academy award winning director Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, and more recently, Rachel Getting Married) was on campus Monday for the world premiere of his new documentary I'm Carolyn Parker.  Carolyn Parker is a community activist in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward.  Demme's daughter graduated from Oberlin last spring; he is also a member of Oberlin's Friends of the Apollo.

Friday, April 15, 2011

What's A Yeoman?


Check out President Krislov's account of his trip to London and a brief history on Oberlin's (somewhat confusing) mascot.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Athlete of the Week

Congratulations to Katie Baldonieri who was named Domino's Pizza Athlete of the Week!  In six games, Katie is hitting .455 with ten hits, two doubles, and seven RBI.  She's also been doing a great job defensively as she's been shuffling around between center and second.  Keep up with Katie and the rest of the team as we head off to Florida on Saturday!

Friday, March 18, 2011

Best New Artist

Grammy winner Esperanza Spalding, the first jazz artist to win Best New Artist, performed at Oberlin College last week.  Although we had practice at the time and were unable to attend the show, we only heard great things about her sold-out performance here at Finney Chapel.  (Finney Chapel, by the way, can hold nearly 2000 people!)  As is customary when artists or speakers come to campus, she held an informal Q&A with students in the new jazz studies building earlier in the day.     

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Yum

Once again, Oberlin has been named to a "Top....." List.  This time, we've been named #5 on bestcollegesonline.com's list of the "Top 20 Most Conscientious College Dining Halls."  With 1/3 of our food coming from local sources; our reusable container policy; food made from scratch and prepared to order; our composting of kitchen scraps and donating used cooking oil to area farms; and the opportunity for students to buy, plan, and cook their own meals in through the co-ops, our dining options are amazing!  I can say, without a doubt, that our chefs need to market their honey mustard dressing, as it's the best I have ever tasted!  As a non-vegetarian, their vegetarian options (tofu burgers, vegetarian chicken patties) are out-of-this-world.  And as a well-versed dessert eater, I delightfully sample at least two cookies and a piece of cake every day.  Check out all our dining hall info.