Alyssa Stroud’s Gilbert
This is Alyssa Strouds art piece. Alyssa Stroud is an undergraduate student at Cal State Long Beach. She is working towards her BA in the School of Art’s Ceramics program. Alyssa told me that she aspires to one day become a jeweler and share her art with people so that they have beautiful pieces of art hanging around their neck. Alyssa’s art piece can be found in the LBSU Art Gallery. Alyssa stated that her favorite piece of metal to work with is copper, mostly because she has a lot of copper and it is cheaper to buy, but because she simply likes the color, how easy it is to work with, and it’s simplistic appearance. Alyssa says she is very proud of her art work and happy to be studying art. She enjoys creating art pieces like this, although she states they aren’t very good.
Her art piece was a class assignment, in which she would have to create a little container that would fit another small piece of the little container and make it so that it looks the same all around. Her artwork is small and made out of copper. Since it is made out of copper it has a brown color to it. The surface, apart from the bumps she added, looks very smooth and very shiny, because it is made out of metal. Alyssa’s piece is small enough for me to come pretty close to it just to make out the details. It was until after I took the picture that I was able to make out the form of the piece a little bit better. I did not want to touch it out of respect for it’s possible brittleness and I did not feel like Alyssa would have wanted me to touch it. The Shape of the overall piece put together is more of an oval but with bumps here and there on the surface. The smaller piece that would have to go inside the bigger piece is the shape of a squashed football. The smaller piece would have to fit the hole in the bigger piece, but the hole was a tiny bit too big but it still looked good when pieced together.
When asked about the ideas she hoped to convey in her artwork she could not really tell me any. This is fine, as it does seem like a hard thing to truly express any ideas or to truly find any meaning. She stated that this was mostly for the assignment but it was a hard assignment. It was hard in the sense that she couldn’t really connect with her work when she was told to make it as homework. Alyssa told me that in order for her to be inspired she needs to be given free rein where her mind can roam free, as is the case with many artists. Her only inspiration I guess we can say is the name that she came up with. She said that her art piece “seemed like a Gilbert Globorin” to her and she gave it that name. Although she could not really tell me any ideas she wanted to express a few ideas came to me as she said the two pieces were imperfect. As she said that, I immediately thought to myself nothing is perfect. We may want things to be perfect no matter how hard we try, but it is their imperfectness that makes them beautiful pieces of art creation. Whether it is us or things we create as beings, nothing is perfect and just because some things are imperfect, does not mean that they messed up.
How her piece connects to me is weird. On the one hand, to me this is homework, junk, but at the same time, when I pondered about it during our little interview and after I left the gallery, I thought about the idea of imperfectness vs perfectness, and how we all want things to be perfect in order to make people happy or to make ourselves happy. To me this sounds reasonable since I could be like that at times. Sometimes when I play basketball with my friends, I am the one to make the LeBron James pass. But when I drive in, the ball sometimes hits my knees and I sometimes lose the ball. Even though I recover the ball and give us two points, I hate that the ball hit my knee or that I didn’t have the speed to get the defender off me, even though I made it in the hoop. Alyssa’s Gilbert was truly a great piece of work, regardless of what Alyssa thought about it.
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