The Art Effect The Power of Art in All It’s Forms
An interview with
The Kerouacs
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What inspires you When you are writing music and lyrics “For me, it’s when I have stumbled upon a way in my head to really honestly and accurately describe something I am feeling, usually negative feelings for some reason, but I guess those are the ones I feel I need to explain to myself. If I have a melody in my head, I want it to become something. Usually I am just trying to sort myself out on a peice of paper, and my guitar. I don’t really make any statements or say anything political.” -Pete “It deffinetly helps you understand yourself better, and in a way, you articulate feelings that you feel that someone else can’t articulate, and when they hear that, they connect with the music. That’s when music connects with people.” -Elias “Those are my favourite kinds of bands, like teenage kicks, bob dylan, light mares, big lonely, and especially the small local bands that we have taken acception to. There are very few of them, because there are very few bands that can understand that or can do that. Relating to someone in a practical way of explaining something is, in my opinion, the best thing a writer can do.” -Pete
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Why did you start playing music :
“Somethings you are just cut out to do. You can’t even explain it, you just kind of do it. I started playing guitar cause I watched School of Rock. Its inexplicable, I just like to play the guitar, it was like anything when your a kid. My parents probably didn’t think I was going to stick to it, so that’s why it took them a while to buy me a guitar. I was effortlessly dedicated to it. I wouldn’t have to go into my room as a task to practice.” -Pete
Did it ever get to a point of it being a necessity “It never got like that. I don’t need it like water, but ya, it would sound really cool of me to say it was. It was like that with skateboarding. It would feel like that after a few days of not skateboarding. But I wasn’t as good at skateboarding as I was at guitar. I was just way better at guitar.” -Pete “But that’s with playing music. Listening to music; I would say I need that. Everyone needs music, If there was no music, then life would be so boring. Music is just so beautiful, and there is so much of it, and if there was none, then it would just suck.” -Elias
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What is the best compliment that you have received “Thankyou.” -Elias “Ya, that’s the coolest thing. A few times people have just been like ‘Thank you’. I feel so not worthy of that. I usually don’t even know what to say in reply.” -Pete “A lot of times people say “Oh my God, you are so good at guitar” or “You write music so well”, but I never think those things about myself. I probably don’t play guitar as much as I should, or try hard enough to write music, so I don’t feel like I can accept those compliments. But a simple ‘Thankyou’; That’s the best.” -Elias “They are saying ‘Thank you’, because they can’t really thank anyone else; They got something from you. You are the only one who could give that thing to them. When someone says “You’re an awesome guitarist”, you think, “Well there are other awesome guitarists”, right? But when they say ‘Thank you’, you know it’s more personal.” -Pete “It’s great when people really listen to the words we are saying, and they are trying to really understand them. It’s nice when they come up to us and talk to us about them after.” -Elias “You could write a good rock song, but what are you writing it for?” -Pete
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The Art of Photography Thoughts from Kaitlyn Mullally, Marechal Koop & Eli Willms
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Eli Willms Film Photography
I like taking photos because there are some things I don’t always notice, that I can find through the camera lens. There are small details I missed in moments, like someone laughing right as I take a group photo, or a bird hiding in the background of a landscape shot. A picture captures a thousand words. I could write an essay describing how a sunset looked but you probably won’t know it if you had not been there to see it. Photos are a way of sharing the moments. Moreover, I find film photographs reveal more truth and beauty to the image. Digital pictures can lose some type of life to the picture. You can edit the image until it fakes it, but still, something is missing. My advice to the person behind the camera: First take the picture without the camera. Look around, see what’s around you, and enjoy the moment before distracting yourself with a camera. My advice to person looking at the photo: Ask questions, because here is usually a story.
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Kaitlyn Mullally Film Photography
With film photography, the outcome is always a surprise. You can always experiment with things and learn how to improve all the time. I guess that is how it is with anything, but I personally love doing it with photography in particular. When I take a picture, it becomes something that’s my own. I find it hard to write music even though it is something I love, but with photography things are kind of already there for me to capture with my camera . You don’t really have to create anything from scratch, but you can be creative with how you capture them. Every picture you take is unique, because, no one else has taken that exact photo before. Elements that I look for when taking a photo are colours that go well together, and details. I enjoy photos of really ordinary items that are close-up so that you can look at every detail or even notice things you wouldn’t normally notice.
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Photography is an easy way to express yourself and show people how you see things and what you notice when you look around at the world. It is also a way to show other people something you want them to focus on. Photography is so individual and unique, therefor everyone has different ways that they do it. It’s a form of art that I love and I can be proud of the photos I take.
Marechal koop Digital Photography
I like to take pictures because when I’m out in the world with my camera, I see things differently; everything looks like art. It opens my eyes to the beauty around me. I especially love macro photography. It’s amazing how many tiny things you pass by or walk on every day and don’t notice. There are beautiful details that go unnoticed in everyday objects. I feel like I’m discovering new things when I’m looking through my camera. It makes me feel good because I’m taking time to “stop and smell the roses”, per say. I like to go to places I’ve never been before to explore and take in the details of the place through photography. Sometimes I bring music with me when I go out, but I like it to be just me and the world.
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What is your process when painting an art piece “For my process I usually start with something very architectural to weigh the painting down. I find that laying down some kind of building gives me many shapes and interesting arrangements to work from. I usually paint with multiple layers of washes; continually adding and removing elements to create a scene. I never get attached to anything in the painting because, I find with my process, something I was really proud of one day is gone the next.�
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How does painting Affect you? “Painting affects me in a number of ways. It has basically taken over my entire life for I can not stop thinking about it when I should be doing other things. This is very frustrating. When I am actually in the process of painting though, I feel that nothing can touch me. I feel alive; almost as if I am channelling something beyond me. When you really get into a painting everything feels okay for once.�
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How do you prepare to start painting? “I just start thinking about things I have seen that had an impact on me. Scenes that I remember while walking down the street or on may way somewhere. Example: The feeling I had one day while driving my car to work at 5:30 am, on a Saturday morning, in early December, before Christmas, just outside of Vancouver, on an empty road, while drinking coffee, looking at the sun come up, the day after I read something about the size of the Universe. I try to recreate how I felt there at that moment through painting. If I take a picture of it I find it just doesn’t have the same feeling. I almost have to study the scene that affected me by spending many hours painting it.�
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What does it take to be a good painter “Honesty.�
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Interview with
Selah Schmoll
Baking, Cooking, & Italy 15
Is Baking an art? Ya, Absolutely. I think it’s a way, at least it is for me, to express creativeness. I can express myself through baking a cake for someone, especially if it is for someone I know. They give me an idea of what they want, even if it’s little cookies that they want their names decorated on them, and I want to just give them the best thing I can. It’s a great way of expressing creativeness. What you put into it is what you are going to get out of it.
When you were in Italy, did you learn anything about cooking or baking that you did not know before? Ya! So I want to go to school for cooking, and I thought before I just wanted to bake, because that is what I was passionate about. But I found, when I went to Italy, that there was this whole other world of cooking that was actually really beautiful. I lived with this grandma, who is tough as nails, but has a heart of gold. She is probably my biggest inspiration right now. She told me her story of how she started doing what she was doing, and I was learning things like cooking with what you have. You keep everything like stale bread, for example, they can make soup out of that. You don’t have to have this fancy idea of cooking. It can just be fun and you use what you have and that is creative. Not just the end product, but the in-between part of it. Who knows what you can add and create? A recipe is just a guideline as far as I see. You add whatever you want to add and sometimes it turns out great, sometimes it doesn’t, but you learn from that.
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Art In all its form 17
Rachel Meissner Art has always been part of my life. Mostly in the form of music, but in other ways too. I remember my dad coming home from work with boxes of scrap paper he managed to gather at his office, just so me and my siblings could sit and draw pictures of our favourite animals, dream houses, our imaginary friends, and whatever else we could dream up. Drawing pictures was always exciting, but taking pictures was even more interesting to me as a child, even to this day. There was always a picture to be captured. It was the same with music; there was always a song to be created. I remember sitting at the piano as a child and playing Mary Had a Little Lamb. It’s the only song I knew as a 7 year old, but there was always something so fascinating about the piano. How can someone carve out a melody from all these black and white keys, which at the time I knew no difference between except they all sound different. It’s amazing how art can be so limitless. There are infinate amounts of pictures to draw, photos to take, or songs to be written. No two pictures are the same. Everything is uniqe. You can’t run out of things to create. It’s great to make things that are nice to look at, listen to, or even taste, but what is even more fascinating, is the effect art can have on you.
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“Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand.” - Stevie Wonder
There is something about art, in whichever form it may be, that digs deeper than the surface. When I sit at the piano, I feel like everything else around me doesn’t exist. It’s just me, and my piano. When I play, I feel like I am creating a journey on the keys, which is a journey that I have never traveled before, or I have but, somehow, every time is different. It’s not often that I choose to read sheet music. I enjoy playing spontaneously because it is more exciting for myself. I am not restricted to playing only what I see
on the sheet in front of me. There is something beautiful about playing a song that never existed before and will only be a memory once I am done. It relaxes me and it makes me feel good. If I am feeling sad or frustrated, I can sit at the piano and let my emotions pour out over the keys where they can turn into music that somehow perfectly defines how I feel in that exact moment. Music, or art in general, is a way of turning what you feel inside, into something people can see or hear, helping them experience what you were feeling as you created it.
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Rachel Meissner April 2015