Drawing - Journey write up

For the Journey project I decided to focus on photography, as the images gave me plenty to work from and also through taking the photos they showed a journey themselves. I used my photos from travelling around Indonesia, a walk around Leicester, and a journey to an old train station. I used a mixture of photos and videos for these and used them as a starting point. I then began to look at collage artists such as Mark Bradford, who used images, things he found and other different materials, to create large collages. This inspired me to use my photographs and experiment with painting over the top. I started drawing head shots of children’s faces from Indonesia, mainly images of them with a blank expression, then painting them over the top of collages of photos. I think this could have worked better if I made the backgrounds more textured and the portraits more detailed. I wanted my work to represent what you see/what you miss when you are out, people who you don’t know and what their stories may be. 

Paint - Write up

I chose to go with ‘the body and/or self’ and within this I chose to go with ‘expressive’. I began to look at different styles of expressive painting mainly of portraits. While researching different artists I came across Paul wright, who’s art work is very textured, as he paints in a messy style, with different strokes almost blurring the face, it influenced my work into moving into ‘blank expression’. I wanted to paint portraits of people with a ‘blank expression’, so the audience has to read into what the person may be thinking or seeing. I also looked at Catherine Hennessey, who works with water colour and ink; she creates very meaningful images that bring across an emotion, often without showing the whole face. I liked the style and media she used for her work, and this ended up being similar to the route I have decided to go down. An artist similar to this that I also looked at was Agnes Cecile, she mainly paints with water colour and ink, some of her work is very expressive and loose, where as other pieces are precise. She uses a lot of colour, drips and splashes. 

Lens

Agnes Cecile

Agnes Cecile is one of my favourite artists, her work is so skilful and different. There are many artists who use water colour and inks for portraits but I think her work is some of the best. All of her paintings are different in colour, expression and meaning. Some have bursts of colour where as others are lighter and use only a few tones and colours. She also uses pens, white and black, to give outlines, highlights and shadows.

Some of her paintings are very detailed and intricate, whereas others are a loser more expressive style. I also find her speed painting videos on Youtube inspiring as you can see how she builds up the paintings and creates the marks. These are a few of my favourites –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g857UNIKQsM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xryN4wT-XeA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cUv4csQw1o

Lens - Stop Motion

I wanted this video to show how a person can get fed up, over worked by the hectic life styles some are made to lead in busy cities such as London. The pressure has built to much and he's just stopped. To create the video I used a video of London projected over the man, I ended up doing about 4 shoots of it, then used photos from the different ones to put together to create the video. 

The London video was by a friend who is a 2nd year Photography student at dmu, he gave me permission to use his video. This is his video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhU9U5VcJDc

Seminar Presentation

Paul Wright

Paul Wright’s art work is inspiring due to the amount of colour and tone he uses to create the face. Mixtures or blues, reds, purples, and greens are just a few that he uses to give the portrait depth, using dark lines to mark out the structure of the face. He’s painting style is very loose and he works with oil paints.

This painting almost looks as though the face has been caught while moving, the different lines give it a blurry effect, the eyes really stand out in this painting. The paint strokes/marks make the painting more visually interesting to look at.