Izzy Mac

Egg nog. Tiny dog. Illustration blog.

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no surrender

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Martin Creed babes x

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Sunday 12/05/19 Kingston

Sunday 13/04/19 Australia

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I recently visited martin parrs exhibition - Only Human. I have a huge amount of admiration and respect for his work in how he documents people. The photos were a humorous, honest and felt very familiar. It looks at Britain in a way we have all seen but often overlook.

Its given me motivation to continue documenting the people around me and hopefully to create some better quality images, trading up my potato of a phone camera for hopefully an actual camera.

On reflection i also felt like i needed to find something within my own work that was unique to me. Alot of what id currently been trying to achieve has already been done my Parr but way better than i ever could and this was abit of a kick in the face. If i can take inspiration from him whilst still offering something new i can continue to do what i am interested in whilst not being a shit rip off.

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The Friday sessions recently i feel have linked pretty strongly to some previous projects ive created. This is a video i made in foundation called ‘A Day in Colour’ where I documented snippets of the colours I saw throughout the day and edited them together in spectrum order. I find looking back, memories of time passing can be distorted and confusing so the video helped me to understand my day in a new non linear format. It also sparked the habbit of collecting colours.

I also liked to think of the sound snippets with the colours and see if they relate at all. If the colour were to create sounds would it be those ones?

Shoutout to the old lady in the end who walked past my purple shot wearing all purple, really took shit up a notch.

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Someone who i feel has a very down to earth and effective way of depicting people is Jon Cooper Clarke. The relatability and wit in his poems has always shone through. I particularly like the lines "your like a sucked on and spat out smartie : no use to anyone" and "youve got this slippery quality, it reminds me of phlegm"  in his poem Twat. A smartie and phlegm are not typically what you would use to depict a person and yet they help communicate a clearer image of who this person is than just physical discriptions. 

I wanted to take inspiration from how JCC paints a picture around the person and am doing this by grouping together words that rhyme as a sort of  poem (if  you can call it that) to accompany the portraits. 

I think the three line word collections worked better as the longer one didnt flow as nicely and was less concise.

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-aVtKEhpO0)

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Life drawing 22/02/19

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Maggies lecture focused on the senses. She explained how they work not individually, but sort of like a knott. This made me think of my experience when watching the film mandy, directed by Panos Contamos. I left the cinema in a weird dazed state that no film had induced me into before. I honestly felt high which was weird as it was a visual experience and im 90% sure they weren’t pumping narcotics into the cinema. Contamos’s use of limited and intense lighting was unlike any other film id seen and I was in awe of it. He did as maggie had explained - enveloped the viewer in a sensory experience that took the film to a really at times horrific place.

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Some more collections! Then putting the whole lot into time order. It seemed to tell a pretty gross story from start to finish. ‘Milk and vomit’is probably what id call it.

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Suggestion that we make these mandatory wear for location drawing

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Overall i felt as though organising and curating together my photos was really positive, ive always found it immensely satisfying to collate together the images ive taken in a way that feels natural and calming.

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Finally combining our two photo sets was exciting, i had already been making connections with my photos as i was going through justines and the broader selection meant the outcomes could be better refined.

our final set was laid out in a vertical line, beginning with an upside down tree with a continuous line drawing your eye up through the images finishing with the swans head. I liked the pacing and drama of the set with the swan being the end payoff. the reactions we got from the class was as wed wanted with most people finding it funny and reading it as a weird creature.

I loved the power of completely changing what an image represents just by placing it next to others.

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It was good to get some fresh images when we swapped with our partners. Justine had an incredible photo of a swans head that I thought really blew everything else out of the park. I made a mental note to try use it in the final line up of pics cos it would have been a massive injustice to deny the class it.

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Putting our photos in pairs was a satisfying way to begin the process. We were encouraged to explore not just the visuals but the content and narration within the photos.