Japanese Theme

      In freshman year I started a project that I never got around to finishing. It was my only art project that I really did not get done so I brought it in to finish it. It was a drawing and it was supposed to represent my grandmother. It is the Japanese Rising Sun flag and in the red there are mostly bad memories and in the white memories she thinks of.

Japanese Rising Sun Flag

In the right hand corner I drew a picture of my grandmother and my grandfather, it was their wedding photo.

My Grandmother And Grandfather's Wedding Photo

In the top right hand corner I drew the Vermont flag because that is where my grandfather is from. On that same side I put 1996 and 1961 because those are the years of my birth and my mom's. The left hand side has the man-of-war Jellyfish. When my grandmother was little her brother got stung by many man-of-war Jellyfish and she has been scared of the swimming ever-since. To the right of the Jellyfish there is a tree because, like me, my grandmother was a little trouble maker. When she was little she tied her brother up to a tree because he was bothering her. So the tree represents that moment that she thinks fondly of. On the bottom left hand corner there is a close up drawing of the Japanese wood block painting of "The Wave" and the pages of Beethoven's music floating in it. My grandmother loved Beethoven as a child and she remembers listening to it with her father.

The Great Wave

Next to that I put a Singer sewing machine because this is a memory that she has with her mother. Because her mother taught her how to sew.
        The part I needed to finish was the middle. Before I had the solders in Hirojima lifting up the American flag. But I did not like the idea of war in the middle of her life so instead I drew a lady holding a samurai sword. For some reason this image reminded me of women's rights in Japan because men were the ones that went out and fought but this women looked like a samurai. My grandmother told me before that women's rights in her time was much different than it is now. And that they were just suppose to stay home, cook, and raise the children. I also tried to paint similar to the Japanese wood block paintings. To the right of the women I drew a line of people traveling thought the mountains. My grandmother has had a different life than a lot other people and she has traveled a long way to be where she is today. So this picture represents the journey of her life. I drew both of these in the island of Shikoku in which she was born and raised in.

Around the Island I wrote worlds in Japanese such as "Japan", "Mimi", "Emma", "Paula" "Jack" and "Shikoku".

The Final Product

     The start of the new term started the next project. For this term I really want to get more done then I did last term. Which means small projects. This next project I got from a website called Pintrest. It was a quick process that I got done in two days. The first day I painted a black tree (without any leaves). The next day I mixed some paint to get a pink color and I took a plastic Coca-Cola bottle and dipped it into the paint and then placed it on the paper. The final result made the painting look like a Japanese cherry blossom tree.

The Final Product Of The Japanese Cherry Tree