Ben Tran Art

Wooden Snake Planning Sketches Small Scale Model Final Result                At first glance, this sculpture looks a lot like a snake, but it tells a story of growth and struggle. The sculpture stands tall and looks confident and ready to face the world. However, the sculpture can fall over, exposing a part of the sculpture that at first might be alarming or weird but over time it becomes beautiful. This is representative of how change can be alarming but allowing oneself to find the positive side of the change and allowing time to grow can turn something scary into something beautiful. It also ended up looking like the snake is taking a nap instead of stringing its prey. On a different note, the original idea was just to create a sculpture that was visually interesting but as it was cut and carved it began to tell more of a story and really came to life.                In relat...

 We Absorb Things Like a Napkin My Silly Little Emotions Food has always been important to me. I can remember cooking in the kitchen with my Nanny and learning the knowledge that I have today. I also remember the few times a year we got to see my Vietnamese grandmother and enjoy Vietnamese food. It is interesting how different yet similar the style of eating between both sides of my family were. My Vietnamese family would all gather around a table with food on massive plates in the middle. We would all pick off of those plates and put them in our bowls of rice. My American family would do something similar with our potlucks, but we all had the food on counter and then take the food back to a separate table.   In high school is where my relationship with food changed. I think about how I hurt my grandmother because I didn’t eat her food because all I wanted was to be skinny. I remember the comments people made to me that hurt my relationship with food. But what I remember most ...

 Sketches Progress Final When we are kids our toys are our best friends. We hug them and take them on long car rides. While this troll doll was not something that I had as a child, it still is symbolic to me of my childhood because I loved the Trolls movie and other cute toys like it. I acquired this troll doll from Future Friends at a career fair that I hosted last semester. They had a toy machine like the ones that hold gumballs, and they had quarters to get the toys with. It was such a nostalgic experience that took me back to toy machines at the dentist or shopping trips to Walmart. As I near the end of my last semester here at Flagler I sometimes think about how quickly we grow up. The troll doll is a reminder that my childhood is coming to an end and my future as a real adult quickly approaches.   In relation to the sculpture, I started the process by diving right into working with the clay, making flowers and other fun shapes to learn how the clay molded and became soft...

 Sketches Process Work Final Result Artist Statement The process for this project began with sketches. After playing around I remembered a technique that is used in packaging design to create rigid box structures where you do not fully cut the material and it allows you to create curves and corners. With this technique in mind, the sketches shifted into pieces that utilize this technique. As I kept sketching, I decided on a design that was inspired by a squid. Using a sharpie, I traced the shapes that I wanted onto foam and cut it out using a box cutter. I then used a drill with a sanding attachment to help clean up the edges of the foam. From there, I started layering on plaster and used mesh to help attach the rounded edges together. After the plaster had dried, I used sandpaper to smooth out the piece a little, but I really liked the texture, so I did not make it fully smooth. Finally, I was ready to paint the squid and used red spray paint to bring the squid to life. However, t...

Artist Statement This work was inspired by my perceptions of the movie Inside Out . I was particularly drawn to the idea of acceptance. With the theme of acceptance in mind I decided that I would create a work that displayed the five stages of grief. The stages of grief being denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Denial is expressed through the purple section. When doing research, I found that purple was symbolic for denial and it also fit perfectly into the color pallet for the movie. Additionally, the two empty bowls were another way that I found to express denial as I was thinking about denying oneself food as a way that people often grieve. Next, the red section exemplifies anger as well as the lighter which was a way to carry the idea of the heat and pain that anger causes. The green section was meant to simulate the idea of business men playing a game of poker while getting ready to bargain a deal out of their opponent. To add to this, the green color is meant to ...

Artist Statement This work was inspired by the space. It has somewhat of an industrial feel and I particularly thought that the way the light reflected added interest into this space. I wanted to wrap the model in a way that would not necessarily come across as being human. The way that I posed the model created a parallel to the light and mimicked the bend of the pipe. This work was inspired by the theme of loss. I took loss as being a loss of self. With that idea I was thinking about my depression and how lonely I oftentimes feel. A sense of the loss of self is portrayed through how the model isn't easily recognizable as a human. The model was on their hands and knees which acts as a way to further express the idea of the pain of loneliness and how it can defeat you.