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More Than The Sum Of Its Parts – Part 3

If it’s all looking a bit disparate with uncongealed ideas; If you’re still following, I commend you! And I forewarn you – it’s maybe gonna seem more scattered before it starts coming together – but bear with me…

Yester-post I was explaining how the combined doodles that emerged from the Zak Smith – Dominic McGill ideas were the raw ingredients for my silk screen design.

Next step was to dismember and re-member them into new shapes and surprises. Photographed and scanned, reduced to monochrome, printed, chopped, rearranged, photocopied, resized, rechopped, glued back together. Began to look like this:

It’s taking on mappy qualities, and I like the metaphor of this too. It’s a journey of loops within loops. Mapping the ineffable unmappable.

Part number next: the silk screen printing.

Next exciting installment coming up soon 😉

More Than The Sum Of Its Parts – Part 1

There’s a project I’m working on, a commission that’s a continuation from a college brief last year (I’ll share that with you in a future post), which has led me on to begin a series of self portraits.

Pre- art school days I would have seen this as a self-indulgent vanity, but, (of course) the art school years have shifted my perspective. My subject is simply the face I’ve seen the most often. (Although I’m mainly on the inside looking out, but that’s another discussion for another time.)

Inspirations that bobbed up my horizon and found their way to develop the style for this came from a London gallery trip a little over a year ago. Firstly, Zak Smith at the Saatchi gallery. I was quite entranced.

Things I Drew and Pinned to the Wall – Zak Smith

Do love me a bit of monochrome! And the boxy, graphic-novel-layout going on here. This picture tells a story, and it looks like a story.

Girls in the Naked Girl Business: Mandy Morbid (II)

Girls in the naked girls business is a series that speaks to Smith’s parallel career in adult movies. Splashes of vivid brightness in the field of mono. More metaphors.

zak_smith_girls_detail5 — 100 Girls and 100 Octopuses (detail)

100 Girls and 100 Octopuses is just that, and visually combines the storyboard layout with the chunky blocks of color. Largely blue.

One of the reasons I was so enraptured was the instant association with an artist I’ve adored for such a long time. You’ll know this image, even if art isn’t your thing

The Kiss - Gustav Klimt (1908) — The Kiss – Gustav Klimt (1908)

A century on, Smith’s images resonate the essence of Klimt‘s in visual language and sexuality. Completing a circle perhaps.

printmaking

It took me a while to really get printmaking.

Messy, colorful, layered up, can’t really go wrong…

…funny, it had all the ingredients of something I’d usually love, but it didn’t get me

But something kept drawing me back to the studio, and suddenly I was hooked. These are a mix of lino & mono printing. (And a few branches)

colorful excitement!

Hey folks!

Today I took a bunch of my stuffs into college to use the photo studio – so I now have some properly lit pics to show you! There’s nothing to beat having a real expert set up the lighting and lend you their really good camera!

I’ve been invited to show some of my textile work in a little local exhibition,

so this is a little preview of what will be there!

memento mori

My big project this term is entitled Memento Mori. Considering mortality.

The aspect of mortality I’ve chosen to illustrate is the fading out and tapering off that some lives go through toward the end; The detachment and fragmentation a person sometimes encounters in their final days, months or years.

I’ve created a series of prints and drawings, portraits of my mum, taken from a photograph of her on her 16th birthday. They are abstracted and distorted, a little surreal. Her final years were spent largely in a dream world, she’d tell me of her fantastic adventures and travels, peppered with memories and enriched by a life time of reading and absorbing information and ideas, as her mind escaped from the body which no longer worked.

The following short animation is made up of some of the images I created in the process.