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Showing posts from October, 2016

Beer Street And Gin Lane, William Hogarth.

Beer Street and Gin Lane are two prints issued in 1751 by English artist William Hogarth. Hogarth was an English painter and print maker, who started creating his first prints at the age of 13. Hogarth believed that art should always have moral qualities in it but was also known for portraying his humour in his etchings as well. In the 1700 alcoholism was common in the poorer citizens of London, and with gin being the most common poison, because it was cheap and strong, it was an easy way for people to forget there struggles and problems, i also found out It contained sulphuric acid and turpentine!.  Gin  Gin Lane, Etching and engraving on paper, 1751 As you can see this was captured in his work, i love all the detail in this, all he is saying. This is a scene of complete chaos and horror. The woman on the steps, who is so drunk that she has let her child fall over the rail, the man below her is skeletal, dying or dead! There is a man hanging himself in the top right corne

The Bauhaus School and its Influence.

The Bauhaus School or, Staatliches Bauhaus, was an art school in Germany that sought to combine Art, Craft and technology. It was famous for its approach to design that it publicised and taught.The goal of the School was to create a purer, practical, functional  and clean form of design without unnecessary  decoration. It operated from 1919 - 1933. While researching this i realised that anything i see that i consider classically modern like graphic design, fashion, apps and architecture ect, almost always came from a design from this School.  Curiculum Wheel of the Bauhaus School. The school existed in 3 German cities, Weimar ( 1919-1925 ), Dessau (1925 - 1932) and Berlin (1932-1933) And each time under three different directors, all architects,  the school ironically did not have an architecture department.   The Bauhaus was founded by  Walter Gropius and he ran it from 1919 - 1925, then Hannes Mayer who took over the school from 1928 - 1930 and finally Ludwig Mies Van

Blue self portraits ( body painting )

We have to do Self portrait in style of Picasso blue period with water colours. So of course i started looking at Picasso's blue period. He used monochromatic shades of blue. They were very somber and he would use subjects like beggars, prostitues and drunks. I first wanted to think about painting in blues, so i decided to just go for it in blue and get something down to start with... Since these are Self portraits i decided to then start, again, by thinking about me and what i was to portray. Since blue is a very powerful colour and these needed to be inspired by this blue period i asked the question am i a somber person? i would say no. But what i am is a deep thinker than can often be very self destructive. I felt a bit lost... One thing I really noticed is the effect colour can have, how sad it can make something appear... I read that Picasso was very depressed when he started this period, due to the death of a friend. I then wanted to put myself in an u

Picasso vollard suite prints

We have been asked to write a report on Picasso's Vollard suites prints. I found out these are a set of 100 Etchings makde in 1930 - 1937.The Vollard Suite  was named for its publisher, the famous Parisian art dealer and critic, Ambroise Vollard. I started looking at the prints, and i found it quite difficult to get good information online, it took a bit of hunting and then more to find the correct names and numbers for them... but when i eventually did this one caught my attention pretty quickly...   Figure 13. Sculpteur, Modèle, et  Sculpture Assise (Bloch 146) The reason for this is because while i was looking through all the prints, i noticed he used a verity of styles in these prints, and this one, i felt, was a good example of this. I think the woman in the middle is modeling, and the man is a sculptor and then the figure on the left is the creation. Why is the woman in the middle done this way? i am not sure. In my last report i looked at etching techniques a

Cubism Phases

Cubism is one of the most influential art movements. It was created by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques between 1907 - 1914. It Was hugely inspired by the works on Cezanne and was the idea that images could be created that showed multiple view points and by breaking down an object back to there geometric parts.  Cubism had two distinctive phases, the first being... The A nalytical Phase: (1907-12) The name Analytical suggests analysis, the close examination of a subjects in order to create flat shapes, lines and angles and overlapping planes. An example of this is :  Georges Braque Bottle and Fishes  circa 1910-2 Oil on canvas The painting above is by Georges Braque . He was a French Painter and one of the creators of Cubism. This painting is of a bottle, fish and plate on a table with a drawer. It looks very busy, fractured and broken. I know that  Analytical  cubism used a small range of dark colours like blacks, blues and greys and i can see it in this painting,I do

Dada

This week i have been asked to write a blog post on a Dada artist. Hannah Hoch Hoch was a German artist born in 1889, and worked with photo montage, a type of collage that uses images she used are actual photographs or reproductions that she got from newspapers, magazines and posters. She was an big Inspiration to other Dada artists, as well as surrealist artists and, of course, female artists at the time and still today. Her work was much more than just a random collage, her work challenged the status of woman in the social world, and promoted the idea of a "New Woman" in her time. Hannah Hoch's    Das Schone Madchen/ beautiful girl A great example of this is the image above " Hannah Hoch's    Das Schone Madchen/ beautiful girl" It shows stigma between cars and woman, this is shown with the BMW logo. It has a woman's figure to highlight the body standards of woman, at the time, as well as the hair. The light bulb says the modern woman