Pathway Roundabouts: Week 1

Fine Art:
With Richard, we were introduced to the work of three artists; Hughie O'Donoghue, John Stezaker and Gerhard Richter.I also researched the work of Dave McKean, a comic book artist who uses the same art style of Hughie O'Donoghue to create the cover art for the 'Sandman' books.



Hughie O'Donoghue:

The general theme of O'Donoghue's work is of a rust-like colour pallete. He mainly focuses on shades of yellow and orange and has really dark, gloomy kinds of images. He uses photographs as a working surface and paints on top of the photo's to a varying degree of how much he leaves transparent and how much is opaque. I prefer his transparent pieces as they hold more of a subject to them, I'm not a fan of abstract art other than as a texture or surface to work on. His work reminds me of the surrealist dreamscape artists like Salvadore Dali, but more akin to the work of Vladimir Kush and because of this I have a few ideas where I can go with this.

John Stezaker:

Stezaker is a different appropriation artist to O'Donohugh. (appropriation means to use someone else's images) He instead only work with clipping photographs together without any other use of media. His work looks similar to surrealism in his landscape/portraits and are similar to optical illusions I think. I like how he cuts two faces together to make one and it reminds me of the techniques used in some movie posters that do the same. I have an idea where I can go with this artist's work too.

Gerhard Richter:

Richter works in the same sort of fashion as O'Donohugh but his work has a much brighter colour palette. He heavily enforces bright reds and yellows and his paint is thickly applied. You can see he uses various paitining techniques in his work such as smearing the paint into shapes and dabbing paint onto the photograph based on the strokes you can see in the work. I thought Richter would be the only one that I wouldn't find inspiration from in my work but then I came across the top photograph where the red and the black invade the photograph like a virus, which gave me an idea of how I could work in another character.



Dave McKean:
This is an artist whom I researched in my last couple of years at college. He is a graphic novel artist who's main significance comes from his work on 'Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth' and Neil Gaiman's 'Sandman' series. His work is a compound of the styles of Huey O'Donohugh and Joseph Cornell's Art in Boxes. He creates a similar the Cornell and fills it with various items such as foliage or chains and positions them inside the box. He also overpaints photographs and collages onto them to create the main focus of his work. He then insert the photograph into the box and photographs the overall piece to use as cover art.

The development progress

My pieces:

Before

During

For these pieces I used acrylic paints, powder paint, wood varnish and photographs.

Monoprinting:


I've tried my hand at monoprinting over the past two years and it's been my preferred style of printmaking. I learnt a new technique this time round of drawing in negatives by wiping away ink from the surface and printing onto it. My main issue with monoprinting this time around was time, because we used a water based ink which dried faster than regular printing ink. Monoprint is something I'm sure I'll use to support my development, but not something I'll be focusing in.

Delos Campos:

Delos Campos is a monoprint artist who works in an expressionist style and focuses on portraits as a subject matter. His images are fairly abstract as they are heavily based on line quality, but it is noticeable that there is a face in the work.

Clara Lieu:

 

Falling Study XI

 Lieu is another monoprint artist who works with figure. Her approach is more based on movement and contrasts. Her work is more life-like than Campos' abstract approach and she works uses scratch effects to convey movement. She also creates a tone for herself by only smudging away some of the ink to give her a grey tone as opposed to just black and white.

My work:

 I weren't too happy with how these came out because I have produced better monoprints in the past. I put this down mainly to the ink we used drying fast. I didn't have the time to put the information into the piece that I wanted so the results were either unsuccessful prints due to drying, or rough pieces produced poorly due to work faster than the ink drying. I would fix this problem by using regular printing ink.

 

In the cinema study we watched 'This Must Be The Place' which I didn't really enjoy. I have quite a high tolerance of films that I enjoy, Alongside mainstream films, I've watched silent films in the past such as 'The Man Who Laughs' which influenced my work last year, and one of my favorite films is Clerks, an indy comedy film from 1994. To me 'This Must Be The Place' didn't seem to know where it was heading in terms of story. It begins fairly lightheartedly where you see Sean Penn's character 'Cheyenne' going about his daily meaningless routine until he learns of his father's death. After going to see his dead father he learns about the holocaust and that his father was looking for the Nazi officer who humiliated him. Immediately this lighthearted tale takes a dramatic turn by adding the Holocaust into the film, to me this is where the film spirals downhill. The film can't decide whether it's a comedy film or a drama film and the balance between the two is constantly in flux making the film really offputting.

Finally on Thursday I got a book out from Blackburn Library about comicbook art which is so far proving useful and opens with the exact same notion of work, how comicbook art can also be accounted for as fine art in some cases. Here is an extract
"Comics have smuggled their way into art books before. Invariably they have been there, however as an aside, a digression, to demonstrate the inspiration for the 'proper' art that constitutes the bulk of the book. Just take a look at any of the numerous tomes available about Pop, Graffiti and Outsider artists, and there they are - present, but unacknowledged as anything other than convenient pop culture prop."
It then goes on to state the purpose of the book how it will fill that void other art books have and focus entirely on comic book art as an art form in itself. I've been scouring through the book as it's split into different eras of comic book art and had a discussion with Richard about the work. We discussed which type of art in the books we preferred to which I said the modern pieces due to their painted approach and more adult themes, whilst he preferred the older work like the crime comics of the 50s. This manifests as a result of the times we live in how I prefer the comics of my generation and he prefers the work of his. We also looked at various comic artists he's interested in and compared the fine artists working in comics that I like. Lastly he put it to me which field of expertise do I want to follow in, Illustration or Fine Art. This stumped me because I've always considered myself a fine artist who uses comic book characters as a jumping off point for my work, but because I use these characters in my work it's also classed as Illustration. I've always considered Illustration to be the kind of artwork you see in newspaper cartoon strips and comic books in general, but now that I've been looking into it I'm not so sure. My artwork is very painterly and I'd like to consider them as gallery pieces, but perhaps I would benefit more making my work more commercial. My fear of this though is that I will lose artistic freedom and I would rather produce work I set myself that work set for me. I plan to look into this further but for the moment I place myself between the two fields as both a fine artist and an illustrator.