Life Drawing

Third drawing

Second drawing



First drawing



In our life drawing classes today, Sam taught us to measure with the tip of our pencils and said that people will mostly be seven heads high. Meaning that how ever big their head is, the body is about 6 more of them. We also had to try and think of her as a collection of shapes rather than a person and draw what we saw rather than what we would expect to see. My first drawing was in biro and is very cartoon-like whereas the other are in charcoal and are much more sketchy.

Olly Moss

A lot of Olly Moss' posters are in a similar style to this piece and I really like it. The Evil Dead is about zombies and so the hand emerging from the ground captivates this idea. I love how there are two images in this piece, the hand from the ground is one, but in the hand is another. There are silhouetted, naked trees that cut off at the edges of the hand and beneath the trees and a man digging a grave next to the tree trunk. Altogether a very effective piece that captivates the viewer and also sets the scene for the film.

These are actually three individual posters placed together in a set. They are all posters for the Star Wars saga and are in a similar design as the previous poster. Each of the coloured shapes are that of a character from the films. Like Laz Marquez, Moss uses only three colours apart from he uses different tones of the main colour. There is black and white and then the colour apart from the colour of the paper he prints his work onto. Each of these are very powerful and can either be viewed as individuals or as part of their set, yet all will still look great.

Once again, only using three colours, Olly Moss creates the title of a film using what looks to be tooth picks. I know that Rain Man is about an autistic man gambling and most gamblers have some sort of personality that they put across by either wearing sunglasses in every game or chewing tooth picks and so such. I think that may be a relation to the title in this poster. I like the posible idea behind this piece and how it has been put across.

Laz Marquez

Laz Marques is a graphic designer who began studying at the Art Institute of Philadelphia with a focus in Graphic Design. He then moved to study at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, to get better at and build upon his abilities. At the School of Visual Arts, Laz majored in Graphic Design and Fine Arts, which gave him a better understanding of the principals of Art, even garnering him the honors of being a featured artist in the university gallery on numerous occasions.

His focuses on Entertainment Advertisement has given him the immense opportunity to work with some of the leading film studios on some brilliant films like X-Men: The Last Stand, The Grand, Miss Potter, Elvis & Anabelle and Goya's Ghost.

I really like this piece of his work. Although I have never watched the film, I am fully aware that one of the main scenes in Psycho is that of a woman being stabbed in the shower with horrible scratching music screeching in the background. After the attack, the camera focuses on the woman's blood running down the plug. Combining that imagery with the title is a clever and effective idea in my opinion. It's simple and straight to the point which doesn't waste time but still gets the message across in a very powerful way.

Another piece Laz has done for a Hitchcock film is The Birds. Again using simple colours and a simple layout, he still gets out the message. A common saying when describing someone with messy hair is to compare it to a birds nest. I think that Laz has taken a more literal approach to this saying by having birds actually coming out of the woman's hair. I really like how the woman's silhouette has still got texture in it and isn't just block black. I feel that it really adds character to the piece.

As you can now see by looking at all these pieces, Laz uses only three colours. White, black and red. I think this is effective and economicle as it would cost less to print them. I hope to use a similar idea for my T-Shirt design.
I love how the colours have been used to split up this image, it is simetrical apart from the words and the colours. It works really well and you can tell from the colours and the posture of the 'fighters' that they are on very different teams. I think that the contrast in colours represents the vast contrast in the characters in the film.

In his autobiography on his website, Laz says "Above all else, I have remained true to the on thing that I have understood for years, that I cannot live a day with out my passion to create."

A Critical Analysis on the Work of Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon was born in Ireland to English parents in October 1909 and died on the 28^th of April 1992. I have noticed that the majority of his work has a bland or empty background with only the subject. He is described as being a “figurative painter known for his bold, austere, graphic and emotionally raw imagery”. 

http://www.gerard-schurmann.com/media/bacon.jpg

            The first picture I have chosen to critique is one of a man with a twisted face, set on a pink background. The distorted figure looks to be aloof slightly, peering down from where he sits. There appears to be some sort of instrument sticking out of the sitter’s nose. It looks somewhat like a horn and I don’t understand what its function is. The majority of his paintings that I have seen are bizarre and I fail to find a meaning in them, yet can’t turn away because they are interesting and it makes me wonder what it could possibly mean, if anything.

            The white collar and black top suggests he is a business man of some kind and possibly important, which could suggest why he looks aloof. Pink seems an interesting colour to use as the background, while it doesn’t make the sitter stand out incredibly, it still draws attention to him. In my opinion, some of the colours used in his skin clash with this background and so it wouldn’t have been my choice of background. I do, however, find it interesting how he has severely distorted the features yet it still looks like a man. I have already attempted to recreate a piece of his work and wonder why it was he wanted to create this man in the way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Study_after_Velazquez%27s_Portrait_of_Pope_Innocent_X.jpg

            His painting ‘Portrait of Pope Innocent X’ does have a meaning to me. I know that pope innocent was found to have sent love letters to his brother’s wife and they were supposed to have been meeting in private behind his brother’s back. This, in any walk of life, is unacceptable… but for a pope it was absolutely awful. He was a very powerful man and there was another artist, who I can’t remember the name of, that painted Pope Innocent holding a letter. He had told the pope it was an important document to show his intellect, however its real purpose was to depict the letters he was sending and therefore what an awful man he truly was. I feel that this painting that Francis Bacon has created is related to this. He has painted him in the same position on the same chair as the other painting I have seen and I feel that it shows him being taken, screaming into black hell for his crime.

            The colouring in the painting is dark and, to me, shows evil. His skin is blue and lifeless, which lead me to think of his death and hell, while his open mouth suggests he is screaming. This is how I arrived at my conclusion. This is a very powerful piece and I very much like it. Though the theme is dark, I think it important that the pope has finally been depicted in art outright as a bad person, rather than the sneaky hints that were necessary for the artist’s safety at the time. If it had been discovered that the artist had intended what he had, he would have been executed. There is a splatter of red on his gown which could represent blood.

http://elitechoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/francis-bacon.jpg

            The last painting is of another distorted man on a black background. Unlike the first one, this man looks almost sad rather than aloof with confidence. The dark background really makes the sitter stand out as opposed to the pink of the previous painting, this make me feel that Bacon wanted to draw us to this sitter and look at him more carefully. The man is wearing what looks to be a black top with a leather jacket, deeming him less important than the other sitter, perhaps. Maybe we are meant to compare these men because they have been created in a similar style. If so, it would seem there is a real confidence difference between them. The first, in his shirt and blazer looked to be very confident, perhaps even arrogant because of it. The second, wearing more practical civilian clothes, looks as though he is unhappy and dissatisfied by something. It could possibly be his work he isn’t satisfied with. There seems to be a lot of discolouration in the man’s face. It almost looks bruised, though it could also be a distorted form of shading. This is the painting I attempted to recreate in my lessons, though even after completion, I still didn’t fully understand a meaning behind it. Not until I compared it to the similar piece just now. However, this may not have been Bacon’s intention.

            I enjoy his work and find it interesting how he can create something or someone that is so obviously a human without using typically human shapes. His work reminds me of Picasso in the way that the people are distorted; the difference is that Bacon uses more shading in his work.

Not so... Life-Drawing

Although we were asked to create a life drawing, we were given a skull to work with... I found this ironic.

I have used chalk and a charcoal stick and a hard charcoal pencil to create this. The proportion was rather badly done to begin with, so I worked to pull it back in. I'm still not completely satisfied, but this was the most successful of all the attempts I made to correct my mistake.

An Analysis on the work of Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud is an English painter that was born on the 8^th of December 1922. His early paintings were associated with surrealism and he usually used a thin paint, then in the 1950s, he changed to doing nude portraits in a thick paint. He usually does images of nude people lying across a bed or the floor and also did many portraits of pets and their owners. One of these portraits depicting a pet and its owner is “Girl White Dog”.

 The colours of this piece are mainly based around pale yellows and greens. The dog looks almost impatient yet at ease resting on its owner’s lap. The woman looks odd in her yellow dressing gown, revealing one breast… perhaps she was too nervous to be fully unclothed. In my opinion, the woman’s eyes seem slightly out of proportion and, while the rest of the portrait is in exceptional detail, this small thing throws the picture off balance. It really doesn’t look right to me. I admire his close attention to detail and shading in the rest of it and it’s an amazing painting, I wish I could work to the same standard he manages to create.

I feel that the colours of this portrait are warming in a homely kind of way, though this can make one feel like the image is welcoming, part of me feels like I’m almost intruding on this woman by looking at her in her home-like surroundings. Her quirky smile seems almost uncertain and perhaps a little nervous, which emphasises my previous idea of intrusion. I quite like this image really, but wonder why Lucian felt it necessary to have this woman exposing her breast.

His other portrait, “Leigh on a Green Sofa” is interesting. Though we can tell that ‘Leigh’ is obviously naked, I like how Lucian has cleverly covered him merely by how he is arranged on the sofa in a natural way, in fact, it almost looks as though he is sleeping. Everything has been covered, including his face. It is a little unusual to look at a portrait and not see a face, but I like it for this reason. I must admit that the sofa doesn’t look very green as described in the title; it seems like more of a cream. This makes me wonder if Lucian just hadn’t noticed that, away from the sofa he was painting, it didn’t hold much green or if he did it on purpose for the irony.

I like the way the paint has been applied to this piece. You can still see the brush strokes, yet it seems so detailed too. I like this technique and hope to be able to use it myself in time. It looks almost like he has painted and then lifted the paint off with a sharp object or perhaps even his finger nails.

Now, his portrait “Evening in the Studio” has all the things I know him to be famous for included in it. There is a naked woman lying across the floor, a dog on the bed (relating to the pet and owner pieces) and it looks like thick paint has been used in places. There is a vast amount of detail in this piece and, though I admire this, I can’t help wondering if there is any meaning behind this piece. I can’t understand the significance of having the one woman sat in the chair, fully clothed with a blanket on her lap, and the other strewn on the floor, completely naked. The walls, although a lovely use of colour, look rather grim for walls. The mismatches of colours show that the wall and possibly the rest of the house are in a bad condition. There is a lonely, hospital-looking bed randomly placed in the middle of the room with a dog lying on it, again, if there is a meaning, it’s hidden from me.

The woman on the floor, because of her size and how she is lying, has very interesting lines and shapes. I like how Freud has caught this in the shading of his painting. The woman have very similar hair in colour, length and style, apart from this and their skin colour, they share nothing else in common.

I am impressed with his detail in all his pieces of work, whether it is with delicate painting techniques or rather messy ones that don’t lose detail, they are both remarkable. As I mentioned before, I sometimes do not understand if there is a meaning behind the portraits or if he has painted these people in this manner and this posture simply because he liked the shapes it produces. He is a very talented painter and I can only hope to become as skilled in detail as he is.

An Analytical Review on the Work of Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville is an English Painter with a very bizarre interest in her painting subjects. She paints trauma victims, transsexuals, transvestites and surgery patients. Some of her work is of slaughtered pigs and of women pressed awkwardly against glass sheets.                          

            My opinion of ‘Closed Contact #13’, with the distressed woman squashed against the glass, is torn because it’s interesting and makes you stop and look, however it’s awkward to look at because she has physically distorted the sitter against the glass sheet. I feel that Saville sees the world in a different way to others and that she may be trying to show her views on people through her work. As I mentioned before, she does portraits of trauma victims, people that have just been through surgery and people about to have liposuction along with transsexuals. For this reason she could be portraying that people never think they are beautiful enough and are trying to change their appearance all the time to become the stereotypically ‘perfect’ person the media wants us to be. In the picture, she could be trying to put across the message that all this fiddling with our appearance could in fact be ruining us.

            The blue background works well with the colouring of the sitter where her skin isn’t pressed so hard against the glass, she has red/pink tones which contrast nicely with the pale blue background. She usually works with larger women because she likes the shapes their bodies provide and finds them much more interesting, this woman is an exception to that as she is not large, but her posture and how she has been so awkwardly pressed against this glass provides very interesting shapes and textures throughout this picture. To me, the way this woman has one eye open and is looking right into the camera is a way of saying help. She looks like she is incredibly uncomfortable and that makes me, as a viewer, feel uncomfortable too. The more I look at this piece, the more emotion it stirs in me and it makes it harder to look.

Her piece ‘Rosetta’ is another interesting painting. I really like the way she has distressed the paint throughout the whole thing. However, the thing I like most about this painting is the colour and the splatter around her cheek, which is why I used this painting’s colour scheme to recreate my own hand in my Life Drawing sketchbook. The way the sitter’s eyes seem to focus on slightly different points make it seem as though she may be either distant minded or perhaps blind, which is suggested by the bland colouring too. This woman seems troubled, perhaps, once again, something bad has happened to this poor woman. It seems apparent in the way that she looks distracted and her expression is pained.

            I like how the colour blue has been used throughout. The use of it in the background brings out the appearance of it in her eyes. The paint looks like it has been smudged using a finger, I used this technique while recreating my hand as I mentioned earlier. I found it very difficult at first but slowly got used to it, however I am amazed at how much precision and detail Saville has managed to get into this painting. The paint looks very think and, therefore, would be harder to smudge across a canvas as she has. I really admire her techniques and way of working and look forward to trying to work in a messier way as she does.

Another subject that looks as though they need help is the sitter in the portrait ‘Reverse’. I like how the oil paint is distressed along the canvas instead of smooth strokes, but they are still very controlled. The colours of this piece are very warm and angry. To me, they show pain and danger. Because of how her right cheek droops towards the floor, we can tell that she is lying down against something reflective. The way she stares blankly at Jenny as she paints looks almost as if she is unconscious or even dead. This idea is enforced by how she has used red paint around her face, which could lead viewers to assume it is blood; returning to the idea that the colours show pain. I like the way that the painting has been painted, but I once again don’t like what it’s about. The image is awkward to look at and each viewer could come to a different conclusion as to what has happened to this woman. It looks like she is covered in blood and as though she has been beaten from the way her lip lifts oddly. While her painting shows the side of people we try not to think about, I can’t help feeling she is being a little insensitive about this subject. Which ever the case, she still makes a large amount of money and publicity by doing these pieces and perhaps earning from someone else’s misfortune isn’t the right thing to do.

I feel that Jenny Saville’s work is, at best, disturbing. I enjoy looking at the techniques she uses and like the possibility that there is a deeper meaning to her paintings because it makes them easier to look at for me.