Studies

Colour experiments

In these studies I continued to make portraits, trying to focus on experimenting with different colour combinations and schemes, as well as using a more limited colour palette.

oil and dry pastel on textured board (mainly red + blue)

I used the forehead eye like in one of the previous sketches, so that it would cover up the normal eyes - this represents the mind, or the "inner eye".

 

 dry pastel and charcoal on textured board (mainly blue + yellow)

oil and dry pastel on board (mainly blue, orange and yellow)

 

 

 oil pastel and charcoal on two boards

First sketches

Looking at Bryan Charnley and Bryan Lewis Saunders, I decided to try out the self-portrait theme. After doing a few smaller sketches, I tried out a variety of media.

 white chalk on paper

oil pastel on paper

 

 charcoal and oil pastel on paper

 masking tape

 pen and watercolour on styrofoam

 watercolour on styrofoam

Wassily Kandinsky, Bryan Charnley, Bryan Lewis Saunders

I started my artist research with a few artists whose art I thought could really relate to my theme.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

A Russian born painter, teacher and theorist.  He spent many years studying the properties of colour. In his later work, he abandoned the use of subject matter completely, only loosely relating it to the outside world. He believed that art should have direct impact on the viewer's soul and not be restricted by the materialistic world.

Often basing his compositions on music, he tried to use colours in such a way as if they were instruments, basically trying to show what music would look like if it was made up of colours instead of sounds. For example, he would associate red (a very confident, glowing colour) with a tuba or a deep cello. A cooler colour, such as blue (which was Kandinsky’s favourite colour, representing peacefulness and spirituality) would be the flutes, cellos and organs. Black and white represented different types of pauses and silences.

 Bryan Charnley (1949-1991)

Growing up in London, Bryan Charnley suffered many nervous breakdowns during his life, that later made it impossible for him to to complete an Art course. He was diagnosed with acute schizophrenia around 1969. 

His later paintings mainly address his inner life, dreams and mental states. In his Self Portrait Series he experimented with painting under varying doses of medication. He committed suicide in July 1991.

 

 

Artist's note:

" I feel like a target for peoples cruel remarks. Especially negroes.  What is going on?  I had sweet talked a girl to  suicide because I had no tongue, no real tongue, and could only flatter. This is very much involved with why I am ill.  The nail in the mouth expresses this. The people around me cannot understand how I was so stupid and cannot forgive me.  I can only say that I cannot socialise at all because of my weakness verbally and this is been, produced a tragedy. Thus I am a target. The nails in my eyes express that I cannot see whereas other people seem to have extra sensory perception and I am blind in this  respect.  Love hurts. I keep well way now from women on the advice of my psychiatrist.  On two Depixol tablets plus two tablets of anti-depressants, Tryptisol."

Bryan Lewis Saunders (1969)

Born in Washington, Saunders is a performance artist, videographer and performance poet known for his disturbing spoken word rants, tragic art performances and stand-up tragedy. (CLICK)

Artist's statement: 

 "After experiencing drastic changes in my environment, I looked for other experiences that might profoundly affect my perception of self.  So I devised another experiment where everyday I took a different drug and drew myself under the influence.  Within weeks I became lethargic and suffered mild brain damage.  I am still conducting this experiment but over greater lapses of time. I only take drugs that are given to me."

10mg Ambien

 

 15mg Buspar (snorted)

 1 sm Glass of "real" Absinth

http://bryanlewissaunders.org/drugs/

http://www.bryancharnley.info/1portriat.asp

 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/wassily-kandinsky-1382

Final Major Project

For my final project I decided to look at the subject of Imagination and the Human Mind. I want to explore different ways in which our imagination can alter reality.
To start off, I created a mind map of some of the things related to this subject that I might look at:

- dreams
- fears (e.g. fear of darkness)
- fairy tales, stories, books
- schizophrenia
- interpretation
- artists: Wassily Kandinsky, Bryan Charnley, Bryan Lewis Saunders, Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse
- abstract art
- colour
- form
- state of mind
- desires
- ambitions

File extensions

 

File extensions let you know what program the file was created with and what program is most suitable to open them. Files created with a certain program will have specific properties, depending on the software that was used to make them. So, if you try to open a file with the wrong program, it may not work properly or even crash.

 

File types:

 

JPEG - stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group and is a compressed image file format. Unlike GIF images, JPEG images are not limited to a certain amount of color and therefore can be udes for compressing photographic images. However, JPEG is a lossy format, which means that some of the image's quality will be lost when the image is compressed.

 

 

GIF - stands for Graphics Interchange Format and is a compressed image file format. They are based on indexed colors, which is at most 256 colors. This reduces the file size and they can be quickly transmitted over a network or Internet. They are great for small icons and animeted images, but lack the range of color for high-quality photos.

 

PSD - stands for Photoshop Document and is a layered file created in Adobe PhotoShop. PSD allows you to work on the images' individual layers. You can use Photoshop to flatten the layers and change the images' format to .JPG, .GIF, .TIFF etc. Once the format is changed you can't work on individual layers and the image cannot be changed back to PSD.

 

TIFF - stands for Tagged Image File Format. Created in the 1980s, TIFF was meant to be a universal image format across different computer platforms. It can handle color depths ranging from 1-bit to 24-bit. Since it was introduced, people have been making changes to improve it. Recently, JPEG became the most universal image format.

 

PNG - is a compressed raster graphic format. It was introduced in 1994 and includes many benefits of both JPEG and GIF formats. Unlike JPEG files, it uses lossless compression and, unlike GIF files, it supports 24-bit color, so a PNG image can include over 16 million colors. PNG format also supports an alpha channel, or the "RGBA" color space, which provides 256 levels of transparency.


http://www.webopedia.com
http://www.techterms.com

Final piece