Photoshop Edits-27th January

On Thursday, I decided to create some photoshop edits of my paintings, which will hopefully inspire me to add text onto my work, to create an element of context to my work. As you can see below,  have tried to display the “two sides to every story”, as I feel that it is important to remember that a photo doesn’t necessarily reveal the true emotions of one’ self, due to that fact that it is merely a snapshot of a split second. In the work below, I have tried to incorporate appropriate items, which represent the migrant crisis in Calais, as thousands of immigrants are attempting to sale over to start a new life. The most vulnerable affected in the crisis are children and I feel that the use of the life-jacket in my work is symbolic to the idea of clinging on to hope and of course; survival.

Below is a photo of my Fine Art teacher’s son called Noah. Before  painting him big, I decided to add a African landscape to the backdrop, which I quite like and could be potentially suitable for when I add text.

In the past, I have created some partially- painted portraits, which I personally think, look effective as you can see below.

From creating the paintings above, I became inspired to use a different media to re-create something similar. Below are the early stages of an illustration using Adobe Illustrator. Personally I really enjoy using the programme, as there are so many different possibilities and outcomes,which can be fulfilled through using the variety of tools. I hope to develop this particular illustration, as I feel that it could have some potential and I want to bring it closer to my ideas about children and the contrasting dangers they face, depending on where they live.

 

Sketchbook work-25th January

As part of my work in my current unit, I really want to capture the idea of danger being inflicted upon children everywhere, no matter where one lives. As I mentioned in my previous blogs, I wanted to try and incorporate current affairs, which would give a suggestion of what the child is supposedly going through. And so, I began to read through a variety of different news papers, before cutting out some of the headlines, which appeared to be the most striking. As you can see in the image above, I incorporated my own painting of a child into the composition.

Furthermore, I gathered some of the drawings of the different children,which I had been sketching and created a sort of montage- style piece. Ultimately all of this work is going to push me to create my big series of oil paintings, which I have been working on for a while now.

About a month ago, I created a set of paintings which were partially painted to demonstrate the emotions of a child, as they are constantly changing and morphing into different expressions. As you can see below, I have took the paintings and give it them an appearance of being decayed as well as adding a bold headline, which has supposed relevance to the child in the painting.

(The quality of the images are terrible because the macs at college are so slow, that I can’t download even a good quality image)

After I had completed the above, I went on with the idea of distortion, as I love the idea of viewing the face in a completely different light. Jenny Saville has inspired me in the past to challenge the pre- conceptions of what the body and more importantly to me; what the face represents. I believe that if one gets the opportunity to look at the image of a young child, who represents vulnerability and naivety, they can immediately gather the dangers which they face due to the possible manipulation of their face as is displayed below and above.

Tomato Sawada- December 12th

Recently, I have been looking at Tomoko Sawada, a photographer and Performance Artist, who has taken over 400 photos in a photo booth, to create a sort of School Yearbook. Tomoko was born in 1977, and has been included in numerous group shows in Japan Europe and the USA. In 2004 she was awarded the prestigious Kimura Ihei Memorial Photography Award for Young Japanese Photographer as well as the International Center of Photography Infinity Award in the category of Young Photographer. Sawada uses photography and techniques of performance art to explore ideas of identity, status, culture, individualism, and conformity through traditional and contemporary cultural methods of portraiture. Sawada’s photographs are each part of a themed photo series in which she makes use of make-up and costume to dramatically alter her identity, such that each photograph appears to represent a different individual or group of individuals, when all subjects are Sawada herself.

As you can see above Sawada also takes Class Portraits and if you look carefully, all the different students are of the same person; Sawada. Personally, I really like the work and it’s amazing how Sawada changes her appearance so dramatically that you can’t tell the pictures have all been taken of the same person.

As you can see, the sheer scale of the pictures, which Sawada has took is immense

Life Drawing- 6th December

This week, we tried Life drawing using blue, white and orange pastels along with ink. As you can see below, I have flicked ink onto the back-set of the model.

I have also decided to replace the first piece of my second series, as I thought the portrait of my cousin was too illustrative for my envision. I also decided that I definitely need to stick with Oil Paint rather than Acrylic, as I am more advanced at that method.

Michael Eden-30th November

An artist, called Michael Eden came to talk about some of the pieces he has created during his professional career. Michael attended QUEGS, where most students went on to study politics and business, however Michael decided that he wanted to combine the subjects, Biology and Art but unfortunately this was not a possibility and so he left. Michael came to Blackburn College to study his foundation, where he found so much potential in everything he saw.

Michael then went to Leeds Politechnic, where he studied 3D design. At Leeds, he decided that he liked the idea of following things through and seeing the end process, however the teachers did not like this idea and so after a year, Michael left.

Michael joined a conservation society in the Lakes  and continued with forestry and garden work, after he decided that he didn’t want to go back to study. Whilst living in the Lake District, Michael met his wife called Vickie, who ran a pottery business. Over the years, he and Vickie supplied pottery to Habitat and other big companies.

After coming back from travelling, Michael was asked to write a book, which then led onto creating a gallery, and so this gave him the perfect opportunity to explore geometry and challenge that perception of what one might expect to see.

For practical reasons, Michael created a website to display his work and show prices, and this gave Michael the chance to learn how to write code, which was completely different to creating pottery, as the code had to be correct for it to work and be effective. From learning code, Michael realised that he could make anything and so he went to study at the Royal College of Art, so that he could explore the world of code, combined with pottery more thoroughly.

After creating a piece of ceramic on Cad/Cam, Michael created a real-life’s model for the first time, which encouraged him to try and “create the impossible”. Michael was greately inspired by Wedgewood, a man, who was an innovator for the pottery world and this inspired him to try and create a piece of pottery using 3D printing,  which appeared to have been constructed from bones; playing on the idea of “Bone China”.

After putting on an exhibition, with the Royal College of Art, he got offered to display his work in numerous galleries, and went onto create a piece, which was based around everyday life. Michael continued to go on and create more dramatic and bold pieces , which were based around the distortion of reality and technology in todays’s society.

Below I have inserted some of my favourite pieces of work, by Michael, which were both 3D printed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First Study of Series Two -24th November

Today I began a new series of paintings, which are based around my cousin’s image. As I said initially in the planning of my work, I wanted to create series of paintings, which are all related. In this series, I would say that my painting style looks illustrative and for once, I am fairly happy with what i’ve done so far.

As you can see, I have documented the process of my painting, so that if i go wrong, i can see where I made my mistakes.

 I decided to add a complimentary blue background, which usually looks good with the tones of colours, which I chose to use for the skin colours. Below is the finished piece, along with some close-ups of the detail.

I might decide to go on and take this painting onto illustrator and add more effects onto the image as a sort of experimentation.

 

Lecture with Sean Dower – 8th November

An artist called Sean Dower came to talk to us about the work, which he has accomplished throughout his life. He had worked with a variety of different medias throughout his life, despite studying a degree for sculpture.Around the time of when Sean was carrying out his foundation, he spent some of his time touring around Europe with a performance art group, where he learnt a lot of useful information. This meant that he worked not only as a musician, but he also helped to construct the instruments and the stage, which was all part of the performance. One of his performances included travelling up the river Thames in a rig, which had been elaborately designed, where he got to play his musical instruments, whilst performing in an abstract manner.

Pholography is also something which Dower has focused on and one of his main pieces of work was based around taking images of bathrooms, during the time of when he hitchhiked to Spain and other countries he’s worked in such as Poland and America.

In 1991, after leaving Camberwell, he set up an exhibition with some of his fellow students, called HIJKLMNO. Dower took canal water and placed it into some of his sculptures, which were based on his bathroom photos. Sean then applied for a residency programme in Amsterdam, where you get your own studio, and tutors came and visit to look at his work to advise. Dower felt that he could almost re-invent himself, seeing as no one knew him and he immediately began a new project, where he captured lots of images of incidents and then grouped them together into sets of three.

Dower then went on to glue spirit levels onto his own head before looking into a monitor and trying to keep his head as level as possible. He filmed this process and showed us the video, which suggests that just because something appears to be not moving or very still, there is always movement but we might not notice it.

In 2012, Dower broke his leg, which meant he couldn’t work for nearly a year, but despite this challenge, it allowed him to go through his archives and find old material what he thought he would have never shown to the public.

In 1996, Dower was invited to curate with some other Artists for an exhibition, who sent him instructions over fax with how he wanted his work to be set layed out. During the construction of the exhibition, he created a video of pedestrians making their way through the city, along with a figure, which he had created. He also took some photos, which did not turn out as well. This project reflected the way in which Dower had been recently watching people; he discovered that many people’s actions were unexplainable unless one would be aware of why they were doing it. 

Overall, I found the lecture to be insightful and it has inspired me to think about the reasons for my own work.
 

 

Unit 5 Research Continued- 3rd November

On Thursday, I continued working on a mood board, which I am going to be presenting next week to my pathway group. I came across an interesting photo by John Deakin on the left, which I think might work well in the form of a painting.

David Bailey

I also came across a really interesting portrait of Mick Jagger on the right, by David Bailey. I feel like this idea could work well if I was to take some really intimate, close- up pictures of different people, before going on to create some oil paintings.

I was also drawn to this caricature, by George Cooke as I liked how the artist had decided to add a tiny body, which adds more humour to the piece.

After some thought, I decided that I would go back to the original portrait photo’s by Saulty Maude, which I discovered and go on to look for some more artists, who are well- known for taking flamboyant images of people holding props.I came across this illuastration, which strongly reminded me of Saulty Maude’s photo, as you can see below.

I am interested in looking at distortion and I became quite excited, when I saw this picece of work below,by John Cheever called The Swimmer. I might try and cut up different images, then go on to create a painting in a similar sort of style.  I like the idea of bringing different images together to create a different outlook on what the face represents.

Max Speilmen, Film developments – 21st October

On Friday, I decided that I would try and get my film printed at Max Speilmen, as I was eager to find out what the process had turned out like. I must say that most of the pictures where quite grainy, but I feel that this added interest. As you can see below, I captured a diverse range of different people.

In conclusion, if I was to go and take some more photos of people in Blackburn, I would try and shoot people looking oblivious to my camera, as I feel the end result might be different to this recent set of images.

Film Camera- 20th October

On Wednesday, myself and Lauren got the opportunity to use a film camera, so that we could have a go at trying to capture some pictures of Blackburn. The camera looked similar to the one pictured below, and I found it relatively easy to use however I was aware that it would be a difficult challenge, when it came to capturing an image with the correct light exposure.

As I had decided that I wanted to explore the diversity of Blackburn, specifically the people, Lauren and I approached a variety of different people and asked if they’d be willing to have their photo taken. Despite some reluctant people, most were willing to participate and so we gathered a set of about eighteen images on film, which were ready to be processed.

After some research, I also came across a well-known American photographer called Robert Frank, who also used a 35mm camera, who took some amazing portraits of people as well as capturing the day- to- day life of the working class, which I thought would fit nicely into the theme of Document The Day and more importantly, inspire me to portray a true sense of movement and dynamism in some of the pictures, which I will take in the future. Below I have inserted some images of Frank’s work, which I thought applied to my own work the most.

Later on in the day, we began to process our film, which was a long process and much more complicated than I presumed.

As you can see above, Lauren had to remove the film from the roll before inserting the film onto a spindle, which is quite difficult when you are unable to see what you are doing due to the fact that your hands are inside a black tent.

After we had contained the film in a light- resistant container, we exposed the film to three different solutions, whilst repeatedly unsettling the container after a specified amount of time throughout the process. We then washed down the film and dried it before making a test strip in the dark room, to find out the optimum exposure time for producing photographs with the film. As you can see below, after the third test sheet we discovered that the best exposure time was about eight seconds.