Life Drawing

As something offered in art AS level I am currently taking part in life drawing classes after school. I took part in one life drawing class in lower school and in a previous project compared my images to life drawings seen in the Hermitage art gallery in Russia. Although we have the option of presenting our life drawing at the end of the project, I have decided to incorporate some of my drawings into my pre-Raphaelite project. As part of their aim to present the beauty of nature, pre-Raphealite artists often presented their woman in the nude. I felt that this therefore gave me a lucky opportunity to experience something the pre-Raphaelites themselves would have often been drawing. The three drawings I put in as part of my project were all selected to show poses which I had seen in my own research.

Colour Development

As a form of development with my photos and flower photographs, I did an exercise placing flowers onto a page and photocopying them, to make the petals looks like key areas of the face. This then encouraged me to practice my painting technique, however moving away from my usual style, I tried painting simply with large areas of block colour- similarly to how colour is shown in my photocopies. This exercise reminded me of work by Giuseppe Arcimboldo who painted faces made out of fruit.

On top of my interest in art, I also have a similar interest in fashion and follow many fashion blogs. Today I saw the following photos from a fashion editorial, and similarly to the Arcimboldo work I was reminded of my own experimentation.

Flower Images

Sorry I have not blogged for a while, however it is by coincidence that this post and my last will play an interesting contrast. As it is now spring the flowers are out in my garden! In my book I collected some detailed drawings of flowers and have responded by taking my own photos and attempting to present them in a similar way to the collected images. I have also done a painting of one of my photos, interestingly, on a piece of paper used for when laying carpet. The paper was interesting as it was highly water absorbent which meant that you had to be careful in that paint left little markings but when watered down the colors appeared quite strongly. Here are a few of the flower photos now in my book.

More Images of Nature

Today I took photos of some plants in my garden- as it is Winter there is a lot of greenery, and very few flowers. However I find the way that the roots twist and entwine beautiful. These images directly correlate with the natural backgrounds in all the image research I have done.

Pre-Raphaelite Photos

Here are a few photos from my pre-Raphaelite themed photo shoot. I used quite dim lighting as a lot of the pre-Raphaelite photos that I have researched are painted in this way, in order to represent the natural, nature based environment of the images. Pre-Raphaerlites loved to work with nature, as they aimed to present the natural beauty of the world, as done before the new art movement following Raphael.

What is Art?

Today in art we wrote Manifestos and a page entitled 'What is Art?'. I felt both of this were difficult tasks as it it very difficult to verbalize my feelings about art. Personally, I enjoy art as a form of relaxation. In a busy, modern world I feel it is important for me to have a subject which gives me the freedom to express my emotions and ideas in any form I want to, not just in a structured essay. In relation to the 'What is Art?' page, I also feel this is an extremely difficult question to answer. As I could not fully verbalize my feelings, I put many images on this page. I felt that this correlated with my opinion that art is down to interpretation, and that there are many different types of art. Although all the images I presented were paintings, they were all done in a variety of different techniques, showing the variety of skill that art can present.

On a school trip to Russia last February, I visited the Hermitage museum of art. I remember very clearly looking at two images presented together: Matisse's 'Dance' and Othon Friesz' 'Roof and Cathedral in Rouen'. I find both these images fascinating as although both use quite simplistic techniques, they are still extremely famous pieces of art. This may be down to their historical context, they may have been innovative techniques at the time of their creation. This furthermore supports my idea that all art is down to interpretation.

Mystery and Imagination

My first blog entry! So today we were given the theme for our second art project; mystery and imagination. After reading the exam book my initial inspiration bubble came in the form of mythology, and artistic rendering of mythological stories. However having been studying the pre-Raphaelites in my English lessons I was then drawn to this idea, as I thought the pre-Raphaelite artists similarly liked to present classic English stories such as Ophelia into their paintings.

Ophelia is the fictional character from the play 'Hamlet' by William Shakespeare who tragically commits suicide by drowning herself in a river. This is the most famous artistic rendering, by John Everett Millais.