BAC Teen Gallery Opening Night at the DY Art Center

Hey Everyone! Here are some great photo's (taken by our favorite photographer DFlo!) of our art opening last week. As you can see, there was a lot of LOVE (life is art) in the room. A big THANK YOU to everyone that came out and made it a night to remember!

Carla and "Carla"

What does art do? And, is art worth doing?

Diana's family

Lots of OSP Love!

Don't ask us ask the intern!

Jay gives his speech...

Diana speaks about her process for the past three years...

Go Justin!!

BAC EXHIBITION AT THE DY ART CENTER

Hey everyone! Last week DreamYard's OSP groups - BAC, BAE and the Hip Hop Rhyme Factory celebrated an evening of art, theater and music. Our current exhibition titled The Who, The What, The How features over fifty pieces of artwork, transforming the DY Art Center into a teen gallery.

Diana's oil paintings pay homage to family, while Sol and Jose's remind us of what is home. Justin's larger than life self portrait asks the viewer- who is in control of your life? Lorena's twist on the Chutes and Ladders game questions what brings you up and what takes you down? While Jay's powerful shadow installation made of paper guns states "no one can censor art." Rounding out the show are Raheem's playful installation's and video's reminding us what's underneath the music, and Christopher's humorous up-and-coming (almost launched!) website: www.WhoTheBookAmI.com.

Over seventy people were in attendance and it was a great evening. Here's a glimpse of the show, which is going to be up for a little while so come on out to the DY Art Center if you haven't had a chance yet!

DreamYard OSP Festival

EMPOWER! CREATE! CONNECT!

DreamYard's OSP family will be sharing their work all week with events at the Art Center. Join us in celebrating the 2010-2011 work by our participants!!

May 4 - OSP Mini-Sharing at 5:30PM

May 5 - BPP/Rhyme Factory Open Mic 5:30PM

BAE Opening Night Performance is at 7PM

May 6 BAC Gallery Opening Reception will be from 6 - 6:45PM

Followed by another performance by BAE

May 7 Action performs at 4PM

For more info contact Evelyn Bojorquez at 718-588-8007 ext 206

or email evelyn@dreamyard.com

We hope to see you all there!

String Man

BAC participant Raheem creates a site-specific drawing at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, for DreamYard's art exhibition titled: One Hundred Billion Times Yes!!

Indy Projects Part II

BAC workin in the studio

Hey everyone, we're back with another update! BAC artists have been focusing on their independent projects for the past several weeks. The personal, universal and socio-political have intersected. BAC is creating an exhibition of this work for DreamYard's upcoming OSP Festival...more info on this event soon! In the meantime, check out the photo's from our most recent studio day...

Raheem's String Man...

Justin's larger than life self-portrait

Christopher's web design character studies

Here Diana's workin on a family portrait in oils

Jay's paper gun projections

BAC Indy Projects

Raheem Garriques, Study for an installation, Elvis Has Left The Building

Hey everyone, BAC is back with an update! BAC participants are currently working on independent projects for upcoming shows at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the DreamYard Art Center. We have lots of exciting stuff going on, and our artists are hard at work preparing their pieces. Here's a preview...

Christopher Aracena, Final Character Design for Indy Project

Jahvorn Young, Sculpture Study for Indy Project

Justin Cuevas, Self-Portrait Study

Oil Painting Lessons

In BAC, we have been learning about the history of oil painting and it's painters. We've looked at artworks by Cezanne, Matisse, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Titian, Manet, Monet, Goya, Velasquez, and many more ...(to name a few).

We first started out with color theory, where we mixed different tones (shades) of every color (red, blue, green, violet, yellow, black, white, etc). We also discussed the meaning of colors, and complimentary colors.

Oil painting is very different from painting with acrylic. Acrylic paint is water soluble. Oil based paints stay wet for a longer period of time, which means you can work into them more, and you need a medium - linseed oil and turpentine, to use with the paint.

We were given a lesson on how to begin an oil painting. We talked about composition and placement a lot. Beginning a painting is different from a drawing. Drawing is linear. Painting is different, you're dealing more with area and an underlying structure, that you then layer paint on top of.

To begin painting we focused on observational studies of fruits and vegetables. We just looked at something and tried the best we could to paint it. A lot of times it was hard to paint "exactly" what you saw, so you had to interpret that into paint and color.

A few painting techniques we learned were:

Glazing - thin transparent layers applied on top of dry areas of paint

Scumbling - dry brush applied on top of dry paint.

Wet on wet - working wet paint into wet paint.

Below are snapshots taken during our painting studio sessions:

Beginning a painting

BAC artists working in the studio

And here are some of the finished master pieces!

Christopher Aracena, Two Petals, Oil Paint on Canvas, 9X12" 2011

Diana Perea, Two Parts To A Lemon, Oil Paint on Canvas, 9X12" 2011