3 Artist, 3 Artworks and 3 Reflections

Arch of Hysteria, 1993

This is a piece is by Louise Bourgeois. I find it enchanting, beautiful, gross, torturing, sad, painful and very interesting. The choice of position for the sculpture clear reflects the name. The body is making an arch and it is just a radical position, it over the top and hysterical. The material is appealing because of it shininess so you are drawn to it, only then you see how boney it is and if it was a real human you would be repulsed by the thinness of it. I think it is a beautiful piece it captures the moment of hysteria and you feel the movement of the body. It has something very joyful about it but at the same time because it is so skinny you do not want to look at it.

Hoffmann von Fallersleben auf Helgoland

This is by Anselm Kiefer. I actually saw this in a gallery in Berlin. At first I thought it was just some paint splashed about, until I saw the perspective that Kiefer had painted into the canvas. It has a great texture, which makes it aggressive. But high lights in the middle of the painting give it a sense of hope. It reminds me of the trenches, with the destruction all around and the sun rising for a new day. It is a huge piece that engulfs you with its aggressive texture.

Woman descending the staircase

This photograph is by Gerhard Richter. The first thing I think of is how ghostly it is. The colour pallet is limited and the the woman is the centre piece. It is a simple portrait but Richter has made it into a piece of art by making ghostly. The woman is glamorous and dreamy and it is reflected in the photograph with the smudgy edges and the dark colours.

Oliver Jeffers and that Super cute Penguin

Oliver Jeffers' illustartions make me want to cry, they are that beautiful. I looked up his book 'Lost and Found' on YouTube. It was someone reading his story with the drawings as the background. I thought it was so beautiful I nearly cried. Although you see the characters only for a short while you still get found of them and you want them to be happy. Maybe we route for these characters because the main character is a child and the other is a baby penguin and we are programmed to protect children and we want them to be happy. 

I watch the video with the sound but since we are learning about visual communication, I want to see someone watch the story with out hearing someone reading out the story and see their reaction, because I believe that they would have the same reaction I had.









The drawing of the sad looking penguin has to be one of the most heart breaking, while the picture of the little boy and the penguin hugging is heart warming. Jeffers make his drawing small leaving so much space around them, that the small drawing is the focus of the picture. There is nothing that can distract us from the characters because if how simple they has been drawn and because most of the time the background is blank.We are completely focused on the characters, they have our complete attention. Which why Jeffers can use subtle but recognisable actions which effects the audience straight away. The drawing of the sad Penguin shows this well, you do not even need to read the text to know that this penguin sad. His head is only bowed a tiny bit but it makes all the difference. 

I can conclude that something as simple as the illustrations in children's book can be incredibly powerful art. Jeffers' work is a classic example as he uses key 2D themes, like compilation and colour and gives life to enchanting characters.

Visual Communication and Textiles

I have just finish the first part of my exploratory stage of my course, which was visual communication and textiles or 2D design, what ever you want to call it. We learnt about relationships in art. I had no idea what relationships in art meant at the time because with a pretty intense two weeks of drawing with your wrong hand and painting without looking at you paper, you surprising start to understand the basics.

At first I was pretty pessimistic since I my opinion the first couple of drawings we did weren't my greatest work. This is what I believed at first, however at the end of the two weeks I can appreciate the work I did at the beginning a lot more. Before these weeks I always thought I was quite free with my drawing and thinking, but this week has proved that there is so much more room for growth. Being free with drawing is not only holding your pencil in a certain way but it also is see and think more freely. 




Although scribbling with your eyes not looking at your paper was fun, what I enjoyed the most was doing the research into illustrators and graphic designers and looking at the disciplines of 2D design. The artist I looked at varied from Noma Bar, who uses block colour to Oliver Jeffers, who creates beautiful children's character full of emotion with so little. Both I have done posts on.

Above you can see a days work on one still life (top left), where we had to use a view finder to compose various thumbnails (top middle). We then pick our three favourites and draw them over a double page (top right). We then did a final piece on A2 (bottom). The exercise was to practice composition, but we also touch on colour. Which made prefect sense because composition works hand in hand with colour. Before my final piece looked like the picture it did not have any black in.  Most people's work did not have any black until we hung them all on the wall and saw that the ones with the black just made the piece look less flat. So we learnt that colour is key for a composition to work. You need a good colour pallet. Which brings me to the rest of the week where we focused more on colour.

Our homework was to create colour pallets from photographs.

This one came from a photo I took in the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. It is of a Warhol. I thought the colour pallet was great, because it use the secondary colours. It just goes to show that Warhil knew his colour pallets. 

When I took this photograph the weather was great so the blue works well against the warmer reds and yellows of the flowers. I never did a lot of work with oil pastels but since this course is all about experimenting I thought I would have a go at it. Since the colours in the photograph are so bright the oil pastels actually worked.

The first thing I thought when I saw this photograph was of a newspaper, because all the colours are a bit greyish.

Now I look at colours differently. Not only in drawings or painting but also in photography.

This is the last piece I did.

I am not completely sure if it shows all the aspects of 2D design coming together but it definitely shows something. They made us work into it after we were finished scribbling in various media. They gave use control back after forcing us to be free. I painted over most of the piece but you the get the basic idea of what it was at first.

I think that this week I learnt how to be more free in my thinking, not just my drawing. I got a wider idea of art and 2D design. I also learnt there is a lot more art in graphic design then I thought in the beginning. 

A Bunch of Ties

We have moved on to fine art, which means we have way more freedom! This makes it a lot more fun. At the moment we are drawing pieces of scrunched up paper, using shoe polish and masking tape. We us masking tape for pretty much anything. That is something else I have learnt that all you need for an art foundation course is a 4B pencil, a sketch book and masking tape. Anyway back to today, we now have more freedom in our ideas and we can control what we make, so it is the complete opposite to what we were doing last week. Last week we did technique and this week we are working on our freedom in ideas. Here is the result, a bunch of ties.

Lee Crutchley and our Inner Child

I was randomly given a book by on of my friends, because it reminded her of me. It is called 'Quoteskine' by Lee Crutchley and was a project 'with the simple aim of drawing for the love of drawing, using films, music, books and more as inspiration.' Lee Crutchley is a Graphic Designer and Illlusatrator, who was told by his art teacher that he would get an F. The idea behind Quoteskin is rediscovering your inner child. We become less creative as we grow up and we do not want to draw to draw anymore, when as a child we draw all the time and we are by default creative. So Quoteskin is the adult world meeting the childish nature of doodling. The book contains quotes from famous people, movies and songs.

Why so serious?

This is one of Crutchley's most famous quote doodle thingy. The concept is simple and it is a classic use of text and image. What is so clever about this particular image is that, because the quote is so famous and so is the make up of Heath Ledger's Joker, that even before you can read the text you already know what it is going to say.

The Office vs Peter Pan

This is personally one of my favourites, not because I am a huge fan of Peter Pan or the Office, I do enjoy them both but I do know the basic story of both. The idea of having Peter Pan say that he needs to grow up is funny on it is own, but since it is a direct quote from the Office it works just that bit better. Having Peter Pan, who is always a child combined with the Office, where the basic plot line is grown ups trying to get through the day by playing games or pranking each other, shows the while idea behind Quoteskin well. We do not want Peter Pan to say that he needs to grow up, because that is sad. We envy Peter Pan because he does not feel that he needs a job or a house or a family or money, he just wants to have fun. In this doodle he has decided that he is going to join us in the Office misery and we do not want him to leave those cute little lost boys, that would be sad.

Crutchley's work is charming and funny. Everyone can enjoy his work, simply because everyone can either relate to them, like the 10 things I hate about the internet poem.

Or maybe because the subject is super famous.

Fight Club

'I am after the maximum communication with minimum elements' - Noma Bar

That quote describes his work in the best way possible. Noma Bar is a graphic designer, who in my opinion is a genius. He was born in Israel in 1973 and that he graduated from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. 


The reason that his piece work is because they are simple but at the same time you need to have a good look at them in order to get the image. 

This image is called Red Riding Hood. You have that larger image which is the wolf, which is the first thing you see and then you look closer to see that the wolf's nose is Little Red Riding Hood. It communicates the fairy tale perfectly, with the wolf following his nose and Red Riding Hood at the same time. Not only is the way Bar has drawn it show the fairy tale but also his choice of colour. The earthy neutral background, as if it is the woods, the dark dominate colour of the wolf, the red, which is both the signature cape and the mouth of the blood thirsty wolf and the white, which highlights the innocent face of Red Riding Hood and the sharp teeth of the wolf. It all contributes to the final product. Even the placement of the wolf is important, the fact that we only see his head, as if he is hiding behind a tree, works so well. It is so clever.

Bar does loads of pieces based on famous cultural subjects, like:

Slumdog Millionaire 

Shakespeare: To be or not to be?

His other work is often more political, for example:

Iraq Oil

Nuclear Iran

I especially like the Iraq Oil. The scale of the large powerful hand squeezing/forcing the oil out of tiny Iraq, shows us how all powerful America forced Iraq into the state it is now because of oil. The hand clearing wearing a suit if you look closely. Such small detail finishes the idea of corporate, capitalist America squeezing 'black gold' from poor helpless Iraq, simply because we associate suits with the corporate world.

There were two other pieces that I in particular.

Banged Up

In both of these images Bar only uses two colours and the shapes are simple. I could not find the name of the one on the left, but it is one of my favourite ones. It is creepy, wrong and very affective. The legs are just standing, their not posing in any way and this small hand is creeping up and touching something which is not meant to be touch. As soon as I saw this one it became one of my favourites, it is so simple and yet so powerful. It is pure genius. The second one, 'Banged Up' I also find powerful because of the very childlike nature of the drawing. It has something of a children's cartoon, with the over sized head and tiny face. That tiny little tear that you do not see at first, because the first thing that you see is the keyhole, just breaks your heart. The positioning of the graphic bang in the middle of the image works, because not only does that show the position of the keyhole on a door well, but it also shows how small and helpless the little person is with all that space closing in on him. The person even has a little nose.

To conclude Noma Bar is recently one of the greatest artist/graphic designers I have seen. His work is inspirational and very clever. He shows how much someone can do with so little.

My New Love: My Sketch Book

I never had a sketch book until a week ago. Both A levels and GCSEs do not require a sketch book, all you need is your best and most perfect work. Neither did I keep a sketch outside of school because no one told me to. But if there is something that I really love about my new course it is my sketch book. Considering it is messy and unstructured and does not have perfect drawings but instead has childish doodles, it feels grown up and professional to keep all your mess in one place. You can open your sketch book and show people your sketches and random things you have stuck in and they are impress.  With a sketch book you can do what you want and be neat at the same time. All I want to do now is fill endless sketch books with ideas and things that I find interesting. It is so personal and unique, I think that is great. I love my sketch book and I think we are going friends forever, even when I have only know the greatness for one week.