Here are a few portraits I've gathered as ideas for the Adobe Illustrator Project I will be beginning:
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| (Photo by Abby Doyle) |
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Monday, February 24, 2014
Artist Post 3: Harold Cohen
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| Harold Cohen (web site) |
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| (web site) |
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| "Coming Home" (web site) |
Harold Cohen is the creator of a program called AARON, which is a computer program "designed to produce art autonomously" (web site) with which he creates his works as a retired artist in California today. "AARON developed from a fascination with the process of line-making and how enclosed forms, or shapes, were drawn on paper; initially Cohen did not approach his programming as an artistic activity, but rather a disciplined research into the grammar of conceptual space. He initially saw AARON as a program that emulated what humans did; then as an autonomous entity" (web site).
How AARON works is that Cohen encodes the basic structures for the images into the program and uses its "knowledge" of relative sizes (of body parts for instance) to create the image. This is interesting in that each time the program is used, even with the same structures encoded, the art can come out completely different than before.
Cohen's work stands out to me first and foremost because if the striking colors and energetic mood that his pieces emit. I love the bright colors and the creative forms that reveal themselves to be recognizable objects.
I do not completely understand, however, the process by which these works are created. The information I have found about the AARON program was a little abstract and I would liked to have been able to find out some more a bout how the art is created. Nevertheless, the finished product is very pleasing to the eye and I like it quite a lot. I do not see much political, racial, ethnic, environmental, etc, importance in his works, which is also interesting to me. I just see a celebration of colors and energy. Pretty cool stuff!
Thursday, February 6, 2014
Artist Post 2: Beatrice Boyle
Beatrice Boyle is an artist who graduated from the London College of Fashion in 2008 who uses her exposure of the world of fashion to make a statement about what beauty really means in the consumer world.
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| Beatrice Boyle standing next to one of her creations. |
She does this by "[painting] over images of models to distort the message of consumerism in contemporary fashion magazines" according to the web site for her art, "Dazed". She claims to have an obsession with magazines, which is what inspired her creativity with this kind of art. She would rip the pages out of fashion magazines and distort them with the goal of altering the meaning of of the models in the magazines from being "a commodity to a work of art"(Dazed). She then began photographing the models herself and using her own pictures to distort and paint over.
I find Beatrice Boyle's art intriguing, especially since it is coming from such a young artist. I am curious as to why, having graduated from a Fashion University, she would end up defacing (in a sense) that very thing which she became so immersed in. Perhaps it was because she was able to see the true colors of the fashion industry and the ways in which is corrupt - eating disorders of fashion models, to give one example - and was searching for a way to express this dislike for the culture of modeling. The fact that she paints over these photographs is in itself a way of defacing beauty and the idea of visual perfection of the human body. Regardless, I think that this is a brilliant form of art and one that I like quite a lot. I also see a relationship between the art of Beatrice Boyle and that of Nancy Burson (I wrote about her earlier in this blog). They both have found a way to express the concept of beauty and ask through their art what beauty really is and how valuable it is in the consumer world.
What makes Boyle's work so strong is the way she combines two completely different mediums (photography and paint) to create an entirely different generation of art. The message she gives through them, that fashion is like a string puppet of consumption, strengthens the art even more. To me, this is reflected a lot in the way that she seems to consistantly "scratch out" or sadden the eyes in her artwork.
Links to photos:
Photo Correction
This is what resulted from playing around with the Photo editing tools in Photoshop. The top image is the original and the one underneath is the finished product after editing.
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Scanned Photo Collage
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| Here's my first Photoshop Collage! I played a lot with layering, orientation, and the use of different textures and colors. I used about a dozen different scanned photographs to create this image. Pretty fun to play around with! |
Monday, February 3, 2014
Experimental Scans
These are my experimental scans!
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| My face. The light from the scanner turned out to be brighter than I expected. |
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| Fake flowers |
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| An "aquaglobe", made of blown glass. It rolled back and forth on the scanner. |
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| Toby (my ukulele) |
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| Shells and sea glass cemented on painted wood that I made over the summer. |
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| Gold necklace |
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| The wall clock from my dorm room. Who said "time can't stand still"? |
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| A 1' tall, 5kg Nutella jar I got in Alba, Italy, the place that invented Nutella (yes, it's real!). |
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| Scarf |
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| Pressed-flower necklace |
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| Toby again, only this time when the ukulele was moved around |
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| And last but not least… who doesn't like chocolate chip cookies? |
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