What I've Been Up To...

Recently (and not so recently) i have been scribbling and drawing away trying to capture feminine beauty.

My focus on facial expression and form is still developing...never having been any good at portraiture I really just wanted to try it out, and I quite like the results!

Need some more refinement and I think my proportion is way off...but all of these things can be learnt in time. I have been working alot with ink, artline and just a good ol' sharpie...not as much colour as I have used in the past. I'm trying to deviate away from my usual scribbles and try and get a more structured and neat form.

Love the work of Audrey Kawasaki, her detail is incredible and i love how resolved all her pieces are. Her hair is also fantastic...i have a fixation with hair at the moment. The white shadow on wood is very enigmatic...although not an overly new technique- the drawing on wood creates a wonderful depth and strength, don't you think?

 Here's some of her loverly pieces:

The Cinema: Art?

Once Upon A Time: She Was Meant To Be My Unicorn

So this is the second post of my endeavor here…..so many exciting things are rushing through my mind at the moment, and I’m not sure whether I’m going to be able to get it all down into one coherent post. First things first:

“The Cinema As Art”

Views? Well I think that video is a legitimate form of art…what with the readily developing world handing us platters of technology and scientific advancements, why not adapt and ultimately ‘exploit’ new things? The idea of sound and image becoming a pulsating and tangible installation in a gallery really excites me. Photography and film have been discussed heavily in the arts field…often called an ‘imitation’, a mimicry, or a mockery of real life. Ralph Stephenson wrote in “The Cinema As Art” that even as imitation, art will show us the true essence of things more clearly than we could see it for ourselves. An interesting point. I think that an image , especially a moving one at that, is very confronting and almost forces us to acknowledge what we are being shown. People flock to the cinema daily to absorb culture, to watch other people doing things that either disgust us or make us jealous of their lives….virtual reality is a huge part of our lives. So taking this idea and translating it into a more opaque and questionable form of communication, video and sound in art can be a huge influence and an entirely different way for artists to get their ‘voice’ or their message across.

George Méliès

A new find I’ve stumbled across in my “Art As Cinema” book is Méliès. An extract from the trusty ol’ Wikipedia….

“Georges Méliès, full name Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès, was a French filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest cinema. He was very innovative in the use of special effects. He accidentally discovered the stop trick, or substitution, in 1896, and was one of the first filmmakers to use multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted color in his films. Because of his ability to seemingly manipulate and transform reality through cinematography, Méliès is sometimes referred to as the First "Cinemagician."

Some seriously wacky, weird and wonderful themes and observations of an adapted reality….since learning about exposure and the effects of manipulating it in photography, it is really of interest of me to see this concept modeled for me in an older style cinematography. He seems to have a fantastic imagination, and his use of cinema as art is a perfect example of what I have been researching. A surrealist aspect really cements it for me as ‘art’, if you can really catergorise or label such things. The commonly argued topic of “what is art?” I won’t get into now…but I strongly believe that art in its simplest form is just a means of expression; and film is a great and rather easy was of enabling one to show the audience something. Plus I really love the idea of a black and white movie not relying on the modern special effects and going back to basics of manipulating and understand the FILM as opposed to manipulating the image once it has already been shot, adding things in or super imposing…this is all about layering; and there are so many different layers of life itself its easy to draw parallels from life to film….even if it is film about an alternate reality.

"Art and all it encompasses..."

"Who dwells in a realm, magical and barren, Without a before, or an after, or a when... To be forever; but never to have been."

Art is fantastic, and i've stumbled across some real treasures recently. As a form of expression it is not merely a practice of putting pen to paper...something flows and stretches and blooms before your very eyes. I think that something which appears strage or mundane to another can express so much. What was that saying, "a picture says a thousand words"? Well, it does. You can shout and scream and cry or just evoke a calm and cloudless serenity.

Here's a couple of treasures I have unearthed for your viewing pleasure........

Dimitre Zajtsev

I love how colour and dreams collide to creature scenes of abandonment, a sense of loneliness and isolation. I feel like he is transporting you into his dreams and challenging the senses of gravity and logic.

And the winner for courageous political statements and wonderful stencil details is the mystery man, BANKSY. Recently saw a film on him (which was actually more about a mad french man who accompanied him everywhere with a video camera and then let fame eat away at his soul and thus became a commercial sellout), and it really opened my eyes to the wonderful possibilities that street art offers. The public display and the semi-permanent, "disposable art" is very interesting.....the sense of attachment that one usually feels to their creations must be let go of in street art. Some council worker could just paint over it with an off-white Dulux paint at any point. I mean, even though they are mastered and beautiful drawings, we can't be polluting the young minds. Plain old white walls are obviously a lot better, a lot more educational and eye-opening. Cue sarcasm.

"The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages"
— Banksy