ArtMode

Garden Centres  I started my I have decided to start my research for my new unit - Botanicals, by looking at garden centres and what they sell. Although i plan a trip to a garden centre soon i thought i would start today by looking online. I started with a place called Dobbies, the closest one to me is in Edinburgh.  At this point i am unsure what i will be doing for this unit, what i mean by this is what what direction i will be going e.g. fine art, textiles, photography, film, video etc. So i decided to just have a look and see what kind of stuff they sell and see where i can go from there.  So what do they sell? Online they sell bigger items like benches, BBQ's, gardening tools etc. but i did manage to get a look at some of there labeling for seed packets and gift cards.  I thought these were good to look at because they show what kind of imagery they use, very simple and what you see is what you get. I like that they are fine art...

For my new unit, i have decided to look at film. I was unsure of how to start this so i thought to myself what is film? It is a series of moving images.  I decided to start at the beginning, literally.  The Horse in Motion Horse in motion is considered the first film, a man named Eadweard Muybridge set up cameras to try and capture images of a horse to prove if all 4 hooves came off the ground at one point in its galloping sequence. He set up wires to trigger the cameras to take the photo along a race track.  I decided to give this a go for myself i started by taking a photo on my phone using the burst setting to capture a class mate walking.  I then put it on the computer and tapped through them to see it in motion.  I actually tried my hand at this before in some stop frame experimenting by drawing each scene or making models and moving the between frames. ...

Honoré-Victorin Daumier was a French printmaker, caricaturist, painter, and sculptor, whose many works offer commentary on social and political life in France in the 19th century. I found out that   Daumier joined a newspaper  called  Le Caricature.   It would show two or three lithographs usually in the form of political caricatures. I really liked this one: I found out  The name 'Gargantua' comes from a 16 th   century series of novels, which tells of the adventures of two giants, 'Gargantua' and his son 'Pantagruel'.  I found out the man in this is King Louis-Philippe, obviously he is sitting on a chair, which is actually a giant commode, It is very unflattering and he is obviously made him look very unappealing on purpose, the board leading to his mouth shows people ( assuming tax payers) carrying bags of money and paring them down his throat, to show greed and the way he wastes his subjects hard earned money.  ...

As soon as i saw these i wanted to know what they were about!  I found out William Hogarth produced a series of print by the same title in 1735, they told a story of the decile of 'Tom Rakewell', a man who comes to London, spends all his money on women, booze and gambling and ends up in prison and then a mental institution.  So what are David Hockneys ones? In David Hockneys’ prints he tell a different story of a man moving to New York, receiving money, dying his hair blonde, marrying an old maid, losing money and insted of ending up in prison, he is one of the the mindless masses of the ‘other people’,  You can tell who the ‘rake’ is by a small arrow above his head, other than that he is just another figure... with no identity or personality.  I read Hockney wanted to produce 25 etchings, as a book;but reduced it to 16 and printed as a series instead.  I really like these! i think they are a...