An eventful couple weeks!

Hello everyone! My apologies, I'm aware it has been longer than the promised weekly update after my last post! So, wow well the last couple weeks since my last post have been eventful to say the least! Halloween, workshops and of course the election. Starting from the beginning, Halloween was a great weekend full of great costumes, plenty drink and a fun opportunity for all of us at school to finally spend some time together outside of classes which was great. I tried my best to dress at Tipi Hedren (the birds) but was to tight to buy a new green dress or a blonde wig so I attached birds to myself and instead went as a 'murder of crows.' In class, we are still carrying on with still life studies, dealing with all sorts of different issues from how translucent material deals with light shining through it to painting an insanely bright set up and trying to keep the intensity while maintaining the correct values! We are moving on to painting the figure next week which I'm very excited about. One of the best opportunities at NYAA is the master classes they run; they get in some of the worlds best painters, draftsmen, printmakers and sculptors working today to do weekend workshops with us. There was a lottery at the beginning of the term to determine who got which class, I was thrilled to be able to add my name to Vincent Desiderio's (which will take place in Dec). Last weekend, however, some places became available in Noah Buchanan's workshop, ever the opportunist I joined in and I'm so glad I did. We got a fascinating introduction to indirect painting - the building up of a painting with a series of under painting and glazing effects. I'm very excited to experiment more with all these techniques! And lastly, the election. I have spent the last few days pouring over this with my friends with lots of hugging, venting and just trying to understand what happened and what will happen next. Having lived here for almost 3 months now I can tell you there was a very notable air of despair that seemed to sweep over the city the day after. Everyone looked heavy and not quite sure of what to do with themselves. All I can say is that now is the time to pull together, make sure our voices are heard and most of all look out for one another the best we can.

I also want to remind you all that I am on Instagram (@siansmith2) and Facebook page (Sian Smith Artist), if you want to see more frequent images and updates from me! Sx