Blackburn museum project

You can find my work for the Blackburn museum summer task on this link.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17gz9CYQum9nF2po4HakkORo7yUXNm6EtaPuQ7vqaB_k/edit?usp=sharing
There may be some formating errors, paper copies available

Dolphinholme

On our trip to Dolphinholme, my first plan of action was to photograph the surroundings. I use real locations as backgrounds in most of my work so this opportunity for woodland photography and a river bed worked brilliantly for me.

Lake side, useful location for a background, possibly for forest based characters or swamp based.

Interesting texture, reminds me of Swamp Thing, a DC comics character

Light reflected in rippled water, useful study for any pieces with water I may do

Objects floating in water study, could be nice to draw or paint

Photograph of my view for watercolour painting

Mist covering the field, very eerie. Useful for any creepy scenes I might use

Inside our yurt, very old fashioned, could provide useful inspiration

I also produced a few drawings and paintings using ink, pastels and watercolours like I practiced in class with Richard. My landscapes didn't turn out quite as I expected and I'm not keen on them because they bled too much and you can't really tell what they are much, but I plan to work into them a bit more using photographs.

At night we listened to the music of Karima Francis which I really enjoyed and after the show asked her about her musical influences and compared a few bands with her work. The last event of the night was the midnight movie in which we watched the original 'The Wicker Man' starring Christopher Lee which I really enjoyed. It was a bit strange but fit perfectly into the film's themes of paganism and rituals. Finally after the film we enjoyed a nice campfire outside of our yurt listening to music and toasting marshmallows until the early hours. Honestly I didn't want to leave, or wake up the next morning.

Haworth Art Gallery

Here's a quick post but significant one.
Yesterday the 20th September 2014, my work was displayed in Haworth Art Gallery in their Open Exhibition. A proud moment for myself as it's my work displayed in a professional gallery which means so much for myself and my artwork. Firstly I have proven that comic book artwork has earned a place amongst other pieces of fine art so long as it is a professional fine art piece. This means that my intention of asserting comic books as a legitimate source of subject for fine art, along with the distinction grade I achieved on my work last year has been accomplished. Because of this I now also have more confidence in myself as an artist and I feel more comfortable in my own artistic imagination and can stretch my limits as an artist.

Here's some photos from my exhibition and to anyone reading this who likes my artwork please 'like' my Facebook page here https://www.facebook.com/LukeTomlinsonArt as it helps me a lot get in touch with my audience and gives a greater opportunity for feedback.

Me with my work

"Acceptance"

"The Man Who Laughs"

Nicole with my "Acceptance" piece, she's the model for my work

Finally in that I look for real locations to support realism in my work, Haworth Art Gallery... Wayne Manor?...

Second week

This week we were tasked with bringing in a collection of junk objects to produce a piece (or pieces) of art using them. I chose to arrange my objects into a still life set up, and after some wise advice from Richard, worked with ink and oil pastels to produce a line of work because ink is a fast drying and neither material smudges.

My set up

My first drawing

my second set up

My second drawing

Later I decided to change my subject because I wasn't enjoying the still life work to drawing portraits using the same materials. I enjoy doing portraits and it's the best kind of art I produce, so I produced some movement drawings using Ink and a white pastel to enforce my research on Jae Lee. I am happy with all the results and presented my work to the group.

 Mid this week we watched Rushmore in cinema club which I really enjoyed.
 It depicts a young man at a prep school who strives run his world around him, but doesn't focus his efforts on his school work. The film focuses on themes of love, failure, inadequacy and creativity and is a story that keeps you enticed the entire movie. What I found most interesting was how the story bounces around quite a lot focusing on individual small stories involving the characters for example if you consider the friendship building between the lead character and Bill Murray's character as one story, and the lead character and his teacher as another story resulting into a film intertwined by all these short developments. I think Rushmore deserves a second watch because after rethinking the film through I noticed a lot of dialogue from early in the film that might have seemed unnecessary played out later into the film, an example of this is the mention of Bill Murray's character being in Vietnam and the film ending on a play set in Vietnam.



Group Crit Feedback:
After discussing my experimental work with the group, Jamie and Richard suggested I look into the Kitchen Sink Art movement. This links into the subject I use of starting from comic books to make my fine art paintings blend between surrealism and realism. The Kitchen Sink movement depicts the times in a post-war Britain where angry young men would be dealing with cramped rooms and drinking in grimy pubs as part of their everyday life. This form of communication is often portrayed in British soaps of today and also in films of the 50's and 60's. The credited artist for creating the movement is called John Bratby. Personally I'm not keen on Bratby's work, not that it isn't good, but I have seen artists with similar technique but better results in my opinion.

John Bratby
1954
Still Life with Chip Friar
Oil paint on hard wood

This Bratby piece is a representation of modern 50's kitchen appliances and produce of a man of the Kitchen Sink era featuring items like Corn Flakes and Colman's Mustard. This scene symbolises Britain after the war and provides a context of everyday life. The colours are really bright and bold focusing heavily on the primary colours, yellow in particular as it's very strong and used often in the piece.  I quite like the style in which the glass is painted with the hard white edge but to me the piece doesn't share the realistic paint quality I like in a piece of art. It's not photo realistic work that I like, but between the realms of looking like a painting and looking believable. I understand why this movement was suggested to me, but it's more of the historical context that I like about this movement than the actual pieces.

Edward Middleditch
1956
Oil Paint on hardboard
Flowers, Chairs and Bedsprings

This piece by Edward Middleditch is more so the kind of paint quality I look for. With comicbooks being my interest for subject matter, it's important for my work to find good examples of traditional artists more so than comic book artists. This helps me better portray how I want the characters to be represented rather than how they've become carbon copies essentially. This piece to me is better aesthetically because it has that medium I look for between paint quality and looking realistic although I don't like flowers as subject matter and see them more as an exercise tool for still life work. The work that I do is very much American based and the kitchen sink work was an opportunity to look into British influence, but I think I'd like to stick the American art side of things for the time being with my own interpretation of crossing over into British culture. I try as often as possible to use real locations in my artwork for backgrounds, particularly I often look at a building and think to myself "that's... (Wayne Manor, Gotham City, etc)" to relate these characters to myself, places I've been and that are fitting. An example of this is last year I stood up to my thighs in water to photograph a small waterfall that I believed would work perfectly as the entrance to The Batcave so there's British influence I can use in my work, but I don't think the still life scene works for me which led to me switching from still life drawings to portrait drawings this week. I would like to explore history a bit more and this is where Kitchen Sink may come in useful as I'm hoping to produce more pieces based around significant events interlacing with the comic book subject. I began to work into this narrative theme last year in hopes to continue this development and the 50's and 60's of Britain could be something for me to explore as there's a good share of UK based characters. I plan to look into photojournalism this year, looking into really well known photographs and events that I can use as my spring board into putting these characters into an appropriate environment.

Artist Research - Jae Lee

Often I won't look to comic book artists for my inspiration because unless they have a fine art style to them like the work of Alex Ross or Dave McKean the comic book style of art generally looks the same. Jae Lee's work stopped me in my tracks however. It does share a similar style to most comic book illustration with his ink drawings looking similar in tone to Frank Miller's Sin City work, but the difference I've seen in his work however is how human the characters are. Most artists draw a character like Batman or Superman and that's what the outcome is. If I were to quickly draw Batman, it would look like the character in appearance and background but with no care put into it. Jae Lee's interpretations on the characters takes them into a sense of reality. Superman is often portrayed as a man built into the image of a god, exadurated muscles, big chested and strong. Lee's interpretation depicts him with more of an ordinary, believable build and with a subtle sense of muscles and strength. To me this is how the character should be depicted, the costume itself is a uniform that defines him as a higher powered being, the powers and abilities do that job for the artist. It's as if Lee's interpretation emphasizes the "man" in "superman" where other artists would work the other way around. Lee clearly uses models for his work which is a trait that we share, and his attention to material is really impressive.






His artwork has a bold illustrated style and it clearly a hand crafted piece which is probably why I like it so much. Like I said there's a sense of realism within the pieces because of the facts that the characters are treated humanly, looking at the way he's drawn Batman's cape and how it flows in this piece gives you an idea of the type of material he envisions it's made from. They are drawn at interesting angles as if it's a camera angle from a photograph. If I could take anything away from Jae Lee's artwork it's the emphasis on the human side of comic book characters and thinking away from the normal way they are perceived. I need to think about how to effectively draw and paint materials like this Batman piece to convey how I perceive these characters.

 Finally, Composition. These three pieces are examples of Lee's cover artwork. You can see there is a theme to his work in that all the characters are predominantly centered and not quite, but almost symmetrical. the colour palletes generally match up with the objects and they all convey strong contrasts of dark and light.

Week 1: Induction week

On our first working week of FAD we had two lectures, one demonstrating the use of a blog which I've been using from level 3 anyway and the other one was about hand prints and hunting. To elaborate on this it goes back to some of the oldest pieces of art in history. The two pieces are cave paintings from Chauvet-Pont D'Arc, one of colored pigments spat onto the hands of the cave people and pressed into the wall as acknowledgement that these people existed and were here in the world in a different point in time whilst the other was a cave painting of the animals that would be hunted in Neanderthal times which in a similar sense prove that they (the animals) were here at a different point in time.

Hunting

Handprints

With these two pieces in mind it asks the question of who the artwork is made for. Is the piece a hand print piece to make a mark on history to prove that you the artist created this and existed, or is it a hunting piece to show others of an event that happened or a message you want to convey to others. I took this notion into my two final pieces of last year, 'The Man Who Laughs' and 'Acceptance'.
My 'Man who laughs piece' is a hanndprint painting because it is a piece I wanted to do to show my skills and practice as an artist but something I wanted to produce for the personal pleasure of painting my image. I have reflected on my artwork to find meaning relating to myself behind it as a capture of time and personal feelings. The painting reminds me of dark times I have had in the past that are my inner demons and I have captured those feelings of my past into the painting as a reminder of how I could see some of my past and to act differently in the future. The 'Acceptance' piece is different however in that it is a parallel towards racism in the 50s exploring that point in history. It is a modern communication that the events of the Little Rock Nine happened and a reminder of how times used to be for those to reflect on it in times today, therefore this is a hunting piece. Some pieces can be considered both and with more thought I could class both as both hunting and hand prints when reflecting on why I create my type of artwork or my target audience and intentions, but this exercise shows the artist themselves how they perceive their work.

"The Man Who Laughs"  Handprint piece

"Acceptance" Hunting piece

The task we as a group had this week was to create triangular murals based on the areas of Blackburn to be presented on the side of the new college building in a project by Blackburn Is Open. To do this we collected objects and photographs from the town (my trip taking me up to corporation park) and creating a patterned mural for the project. This gave us the opportunity to work as a team and get to know the group and the tutors. Here are development photographs of us putting the piece together. We used charcoal, soft pastels and collage.

Nicole adding colour to our mural

Our finished mural (pre-cut)

Me adding colour to the mural

Flower collected from Corporation Park

Me colouring the bollard inspired corner

Bollard for inspiration

Pattern collected on our search around Blackburn

More patterns chosen from around town

Leaf we used for our collage

Flower after leaving it on the table

 

Our mural mounted up to the bigger triangle

Finished mural side 1

Finished mural side 2

Finished mural side 3 featuring our pattern on top