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.