Conceptual Art...

6 more days of school!.... As much as I love BYU, during some classes it seems like the end cannot be close enough!   For example, my art history class... lately, we've been talking about modern art...... Ugh! I do appreciate it in terms of it's new ideas and the way it changed the art world, but I definitely don't like looking at it...  modern art pushes the message "art for arts sake" a lot, and I believe that. I enjoy my art of photography, but I don't think I ever expect anyone to call it art, or make classes sit through lectures about something they themselves can't understand because they didn't make it... if that makes any sense. :)  but going back to the school thing there is a few classes... okay, maybe just one... :)  like my photography class that I will be really sad to be done with. I've learned a lot in that class, my professor is great and I've even picked up a few words of French... :)  

The point of this post, conceptual art, is born from my professors photoblog takeoutphoto, recently, he posted about a "conceptual" project of his own. He has compiled lots of cool photos from Paris,  (pictured above) each of which has letter of the alphabet in it,  and turned this into his project called ABC Paris.   I love lots of the pictures and totally encourage everyone to look through his galleries http://takeoutphoto.smugmug.com/Art.  My personal favorite picture of his is called "Old and New Love on the Seine", and my favorite picture of this ABC project is probably the letter A (for Alex... :) pictured below.  So, part of the reason for this post is that I can now enter a drawing to win a print from the collection :)   and the other part of this post is that I have been thinking about what kind of project I could do... maybe I'll even use it as my final photo-essay...  As I was walking today, I came across three random smiley faces made out of cracks in the pavement, sticks and dirt, lots of things... and this is pretty common, I often see smiley faces in everyday objects, and so I said to myself, "why not!"   from now on, when I see a smiley face, I will take a photo and I'll come up with some snazzy name for it and all that jazz and it will be great!... 

One more reason for this post is to explain a little something I've been up to lately, for one thing, school is keeping me very busy and not able to take as many photo-trips or blog as much as I would like, and for another, last week was an incredibly big week in my life that I have been looking forward to for as long as I can remember. I'm almost positive that all of my readers are LDS because I know most all of you, but for any one who doesn't actually know me, I am a Latter-day Saint, and I have always wanted to serve a mission for the church.  Last Thursday I received that mission call. I found out that day that I will be leaving on July 21st to preach the Gospel to the Mandarin Chinese speaking peoples of San Jose California for the next 2 years!  I am thrilled to serve them, and to enhance my knowledge of the Mandarin language...