Visiting Artists (Day 2)

Alec Acevedo is an Illustration major in his senior year. Alec showed us his work, which mainly consisted of assignments he did in school. He focuses on fantasy illustration, and wants to work on graphic novels. I wasn't aware how heavily the major was reliant on painting. Looking at his collection of work, you can tell that Alec leans more towards a darker style of animation. The most interesting thing Alec showed was his sketchbook: it really showed his skill as an artist and how he worked through his ideas before creating a final project. The level of detail in even his sketches shows that Alec is passionate about what he does. Graduating this semester, Alec emphasized the fact that illustrators have to promote themselves in any way possible, whether it be a website, postcards, email, or getting connected with a local gallery. Alec plans on working freelance after he graduates, but he is also going to be working on a graphic novel with the company he did an internship with.

Shimpei Shirafuji is a graduate student in art photography. Instead of setting up scenes, Shimpei instead shoots from the hip: taking pictures of anything that might catch his eye. His work didn't really appeal to me because it looked like not much thought was put into the images, which Shempei even admitted himself. Shimpei said that sometimes when he is going through the pictures he has taken in a day, he doesn't even remember taking some of them. This makes it seem like anyone could have the same level of work as Shempei as long as they just walk around shooting pictures. Before graduate school, Shimpei said he mainly took pictures of objects, and didn't particularly like photos of people, but he now has a balanced work of both. Shempei recently had an exhibition up, and he showed us a smaller scale of how the photos were arranged on the walls of the room. His work is printed on normal paper, and tacked to the walls, not mounted or framed. This is because Shempei says that the individual photographs aren't really worth that much to him, and I agree very few of his photos are things that are overly interesting.