Critical Issues in Illustration and Animation 2016/17

A collaborative blog by Kingston University BA Illustration / Animation students

[kuillanim1617]

Kew gardens

[kuillanim1718]

The Cartoon Museum is a London museum for British cartoons, caricatures, comic strips and animation. It has a library of over 5000 books and 4,000 comics relating to the subject.

FUTURE SHOCK: 40 YEARS OF 2000 AD

25 January‒23 April 2017

Future Shock: 40 Years of 2000 AD celebrates a British publishing phenomenon, with a display of eighty pages of original artwork from each decade of ‘the galaxy’s greatest comic’.

[kuillanim1617]

Jo Brocklehurst celebrated subculture in 1970-90s London, Berlin and New York

House of Illustration exhibition until 14 May 2017

Drawing live in fetish clubs, punk squats and on the performance scene of 1970-90s London, Berlin and New York, Jo Brocklehurst's artwork is a unique record of subculture.

Her figurative paintings from fetish clubs document experiments with sex, androgyny and couture that later inspired the mainstream fashion collections of Jean Paul Gaultier, while her best-known portraits from the 1980s offer a raw, beautiful and female perspective on punk.

Co-curated by her model and muse Isabelle Bricknall, the exhibition also features her drawings of Berlin’s 1990s performing arts scene for the Berliner Zeitung newspaper, alongside clubland-inspired interpretations of Alice Through the Looking Glass.

[kuillanim1617]

VFX, Games & Animation Festival 7th - 9th Feb @ Rich Mix

[kuillanim1617]

John Baldessari at Marian Goodman Gallery and Gavin Turk at Newport Street Gallery

In connection with the “imagetext” seminar, two current exhibitions that play with the relationships between text and images.

Gavin Turk’s show Who What When Where How & Why is a retrospective of his 30-year career. His playful approach the the development of his public and artistic identity, as seen above and in his numerous works that use his signature as a recurring motif, means that this should also be of interest to anyone thinking of developing the themes of self-branding discussed in the “Collected, Curated, Branded” seminar last term.

John Baldessari’s Miró and Life in General presents a new body of work in which the Californian artist has combined and modified still from black and white Hollywood films and sections of paintings by Joan Miró, each of which is accompanied by a single word.

[kuillanim1617]

The first UK exhibition of Laura Carlin's work

Check out the Laura Carlin exhibition at the House of Illustration in relation to craft and folk art.

[kuillanim1617]

I chose Leroy Almon Sr’s ‘Hell’ carving (1990) as a piece of work which has been inspired by folk art. The religious and evil elements are strongly related to the Papua New Guinea, 19th Century mask, below. Masks such as these were used to depict ‘bwongogo’, the spirits responsible for activities such as fishing, gardening, hunting and warfare, and were used as part of a dance during ritual performances. 

The faces in Almon’s work are not dissimilar, being almost mask like themselves. It is the spiritual element however, which is the real link between these pieces, as well as the handmade, carving approach of both pieces. 

[kuillanim1617]

Ki Yore is a Korean designer/illustrator who usually works by hand-drawn, very detailed drawing. Her characteristic is beautiful and detailed decorations over the main theme, and it is usually influenced by Russian folk art’s patterns, and Russinan folk dresses.

[kuillanim1617]

Lizzy Stewart is a British illustrator who makes charming/naive images. Inspired by Eastern European folk art and medieval painting, her drawings are flat and full of simple shapes.

[kuillanim1617]

Stacey Rozich’s illustrations live in the woods of our imaginations, in the tales of our ancestors and the drawings that have come out of our folk traditions. Through her contemporary take on tradition she has created her own mythology, her own stories that borrow freely from the indigenous tribes of America to the traditional costumes of the Balkans from West African tribal masks to the matryoshka dolls of Russia.

Her work varies from bold folk art in watercolor and gouache,to simple pen and ink line drawings in which pattern and textile design predominate. It is art inspired by the likes of early German woodblock prints, Paul Gauguin, Egon Shiele, Gustav Klimt, Henri Rousseau and Dan Clowes.

[kuillanim1617]

Mattie Lou O’Kelley (1908-1997)

Mattie Lou O’Kelley is American folk artist who begin to paint at age 50.

In her art, she pictured nostalgic views of the countryside she had lived during childhood in the early part of the 20th century; barns, farmers, animals and gardens filled with flowers and vegetables.

She worked on canvas in a tight style suggestive of pointllism with tapestry-like surgace. Her themes are mainly about harvest, birth and death, local festivities simple pleasure of rural life. 

[kuillanim1617]

Marcell Jankovics (Hungarian Folktales, Johnny Corncob) is a Hungarian animator and graphic artist who’s produced a large body of work focusing on Hungarian folklore, children’s tales and other traditional cultural elements. Several motifs derive from colourful nature imagery typical of Hungarian embroidery, and are repeatedly used in his animations. These motifs are most prominent in his characters’ costumes and his heavy use of floral patterns and symbols in backgrounds and abstract animation sequences. His fluid, colourful animations channel the essence of traditional, decorative crafts and illustrations that predate animation but still express a sense of movement and emotion.

[kuillanim1617]

Natalia Goncharov 

She was a major figure of Russian art in early 20th century and is the most priced  Russian artist in history. She was inspired by historical and traditional aspects of Russian folk art.

[kuillanim1617]

[kuillanim1617]

Miroslav Tichy and Thomas Ruff

Miroslav Tichy was a Czech self-taught photographer who photographed numerous women in his hometown with his homemade camera. Originally a student at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts, he was a promising modernist painter until the imposition of Communist rule in 1948, when the authorities insisted its students followed Social Realist modes. Tichy refused and quit the faculty, though the regime kept him under surveillance and made periodic attempts to ‘cure’ him — forcing upon him short stays in psychiatric facilities. His photos were of chance, fleeting encounters, yet the imperfections of shooting real life on his crude camera made out of cardboard tubes and tin cans were what really made his photos special.

Thomas Ruff is a German photographer who was one of many artists who cited Tichy as a source of inspiration. His most famous work was a series of portraits taken in 1986. Monumental, highly detailed and immaculately finished, these were unglamorous portraits of ordinary people, devoid of expression. The Porträts suggest that it is impossible to photographically represent a subject's inner life, positing instead a more democratic, socially based mode of representation.

[kuillanim1617]

Henry Darger and Dave Portmer

[kuillanim1617]