#visualresearch2

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Textures

Source : https://www.tate.org.uk/art/student-resource/exam-help/texture

Texture refers to surface characteristics and appearance of an object given by the size, shape, density, arrangement, proportion of its elementary parts. A texture is usually described as smooth or rough, soft or hard, coarse of fine, matt or glossy, and etc.

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/1483261?seq=1

Sixteenth century Italian mannerist paintings, characterized by juxtaposed figures in angular poses with limbos and torsos flattened in the

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Mark Making

Mark making describes the different lines, dots, marks, patterns, and textures we create in an artwork. It can be loose and gestural or controlled and neat. It can apply to any material used on any surface: paint on canvas, ink or pencil on paper, a scratched mark on plaster, a digital paint tool on a screen, a tattooed mark on skin…even a sound can be a form of mark making. Artists use gesture to express their feeling and emotions in response to something seen or something felt – or gestural qualities can be used to create a purely abstract composition.

The impressionists used mark making – in the form of separate brush marks or dabs of paint – to add life, movement and light to their paintings of the things they saw around them. Later artists working in an expressionist style such as Willem de Kooning also created representational artworks using mark making. In his Untitled drawing of 1966–7 de Kooning uses rough charcoal lines, marks and smudges to suggest the movement of the people he draws.

Source : https://www.tate.org.uk/art/student-resource/exam-help/mark-making

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Netflix Series - GLOW UP

Glow up is a BBC series based on make-up. I wanted to include these looks into my studio practice as these were made using clay. I really liked the cracking effect that was created.

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Social constructs of beauty

ORLAN

Orlan is a French comtemporary artist best known for her work with plastic surgery in the early to mid 1990s. Orlan is known as a pioneer of carnal art, a form of self-portraiture that utilises body modification to distort ones appearance. Orlan uses her face and body as malleable tools for shifting identities. She quoted “I have been the first artist to use aesthetic surgery in another context—not to appear younger or better according to the designated pattern. I wanted to disrupt the standards of beauty,”.

She altered her cheekbones, brows and lips which has a strong connection from my photos from my photoshoot as I used a magnifying glass to enhance features from my mums face. This is linked with todays society of people using instagram filters and having cosmetic surgeries which is becoming more and more popular today.

Source : http://www.artnet.com/artists/orlan/

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Surrealism

Surrealism is a twenty century literary, philosophical and artistic movement that explored the workings of the mind, championing the irrational, the poetic and the revolutionary.

Surrealism aimed to revolutionise human experience, rejecting a rational vision of life in favour of one that asserted the value of the unconscious and dreams. The movement’s poets and artists found magic and strange beauty in the unexpected and the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional.

The word ‘surrealist’ (suggesting ‘beyond reality’) was coined by the French avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire in a play written in 1903 and performed in 1917. But it was André Breton, leader of a new grouping of poets and artists in Paris, who, in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), defined surrealism as: pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.

Many surrealist artists used automatic drawing or writing to unlock ideas and images from their unconscious minds, and others sought to depict dream worlds or hidden psychological tensions.

Attractive to writers, artists, photographers and filmmakers from around the world who shared this aggressive rejection of conventional artistic and moral values, surrealism quickly became an international movement. It exerted enormous impact on the cultural life of many countries in the interwar years and later.

Many argue that surrealism, as an identifiable cultural movement, ended with the death of Breton in 1966. Others believe that it remains a vital and relevant force today. While ‘surreal’ is often used loosely to mean simply ‘strange’ or ‘dreamlike’, it is not to be confused with ‘surrealist’ which describes a substantial connection with the philosophy and manifestations of the surrealist movement.

Source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/surrealism

https://youtu.be/wtPBOwE0Qn0

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The Pictures Generation

The name pictures generation was given to a group of American artists who came of age in the early 1970s and who were known for their critical analysis of media culture.

These artists were born into a sea of images : the media culture of movies and television, popular music, and magazines that to them constituted a sort of fifth element or prevailing kind of weather. Their relationship to such material was productively schizophrenic: while they were first and foremost consumers, they also learned to adopt a cool, critical attitude toward the very same mechanisms of seduction and desire that played upon them from the highly influential writings of French philosophers and cultural critics such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristen that were just beginning to be made avaliable in translation.

Among these thinkers’ central ideas was that identity was not organic and innate, but manufactured and learned through highly refined social constructions of gender, race, sexuality, embedded within society institutions and achieved their effects through the myriad expressions of the mass media. Barthes infamously extended this concept to question the very possibility of originality and authenticity in his 1967 manifesto “ The Death of the Author” in which he stated that any text (or image), rather than emitting a fixed meaning from a singular voice, was but a tissue of quotations that were themselves references to yet other texts, and so on.

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Drawing surrealism

Drawing surrealism explores the significance of drawing and works on paper to surrealist innovation. Automatic drawings, exquisite cadavers, decalcomania, frottage and collage are just a few examples of processes invented by surrealists as means to tap into the subconscious realm.

Drawing today is in many ways indebted to the expansive and innovative approach to artistic creation and the primacy of drawing encouraged by surrealism. For contemporary artists, drawing is a process more than a medium; it functions as a metaphor for experimentation and innovation that defies any strict material definition.

Source: https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/drawing-surrealism