For this I wanted to keep it related to my art, so I’m going to use it to help my painting project as well. I’m going to look in to the sciences and physical way that a human ages over time. (I wanted to look in to cancer but I know a lot about this so I decided to go for something I know less about).
How A Person Ages Over Time – online research
The cognitive function (to start getting “old”). changes a lot within our bodies. What I want to research is growing old but I want to focus on blindness.
Presbyopia (Age Related Eyes Sight Lose)…..
its where the lens of the eye will stiffen, so it wouldn’t be flexible enough to focus on close range objects. This starts around 40s and increasingly get worse until around 65s year old.
Another eye condition is Fuchs’ dystrophy. This is less common but also can be caused by aging and drugs. This is where the outer layer of the eye thickens leaving the eye with a cloudy look to others.
This interested me because it could show how in hindsight ,when we are older, we regret things from when we where younger. This would help me show a humans lifetime within my work as it links the young and old together.
This is a video talking about how it feels to lose vision over age, it focuses on how one made got a lot of anxiety over this.
I found this interesting, This is an artist who talks to blind people to create what they think their loved ones look like. It shows how blind people see without their eyes and its not far off the true look of the subject.
This is an article from The Newyork Times about a person who had gone blind with age. It talks about how he has struggled with it, They also give some ways to help the blind from their view of having it.
Artist Research – using time and aging in their work…..
Marna Clarke – “Time As We Know It”
Marna Clarke is a photographer, she lives in new York. she has a project called “Time As We Know It” this is a project where she takes photos for aging. The main subject of the photos is herself and her partner.
The Project…..
She started the project around 5 years ago. The whole point was to document her “growing old”.
Keith Salmon
Keith Salmon is a blind artist. his work includes bright colours to make landscape pieces
These stood out to me as they still give off the look of a landscape yet he is blind. The vibrant colours and brush work really make this piece put together and creates texture.
For this I want to start working with a sketching how I can use and manipulate the background to add more ideas with time and Egyptian religion. I am going to sketch out some ideas and then try to start adding them on. but i also might just experiment with random ideas that I don’t want to use encase they work better.
Things i want to work from:
1
2
3
4
I want to take inspiration from these because:
I really like the positioning of this one. due to the fact you can not see the middle of the flower making it look more natural instead of being angle and placed.
I liked the idea you can see the middle so it would help to paint/ draw the middle of the flower if i wanted to. it does also look natural as well.
I chose this one as I love how you can see the colours of the petals but it also shows how fragile they are due to how they give the look of nearly being transparent.
This is a beautiful painting from Egyptians of their blue water lotus, I want to try and include this into the painting as this is where it has come from and I think it would be very respectful to add in some type of their style of painting.
Me Doing My Sketches:
These are some photos of me while making the sketch page from the inspiration photos I found online. I used as many different mediums as i have assess to right now (expect paint, as I don’t have any paper that can handle paint)
At first I thought I wasn’t that keen on the style the Egyptian art but now after using different style I do quite like it. Both of the flower style caught my eye. this means I want to experiment with both and see if I can involve both.
The Final Look Of The Sketch page……
This is the final look of the sketch page. this page helped a lot, just to see how each different material would look when using it for the same thing. i do like the black and white drawings but I do feel like it defeats the point in having the blue and yellow symbolism. so I feel its best to stick with a colour approach and also I feel the coloured pencils worked best even though I still really do like the felt pens
the next thing i can do is try and add them to my works within the studio as i want to use the background to influence the position of the flowers and i cant do that by practice. so for now I am going to do what I have done here with some of my other ideas.
A big part of my art is finding ways to express what I want to, but I also love looking into peoples cultures and finding out about their arts and beliefs as I find this really interesting. One that I have really loved is looking into is the Egyptian beliefs and the stories of their gods.
I have looked in to this a lot in the past and i find their belief of the after life interesting as a lot of people believe there is nothing. I am not sure what I believe, so I do like to get very involved in others thoughts as they do help me to be more open minded.
This means my art could take two different views, as I could do a persons life through time leading to nothing and then I could do a life leading to the after life.
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The Afterlife…..
For me to fully understand the after life I feel I need to look into the reason or beginning of the belief. For this I’m going to look deeper into the first tomb we found that shows us about what they did for the afterlife
Kha and Merit…..
Kha and merit were a husband (kha) and his wife (merit) who lives within a small village that was located between the desert and the river Nile in Egypt about 35,000 years ago. Their tomb was discovered and explored within 1906, They then moved everything within the tomb to a museum in Italy.
Within the tomb was all of their belongings from food to perfumes and more, this did also include their mummified bodies. This is the easiest form of preparing for the afterlife we have found (I think).
The belief of the afterlife was so strong that most of their life the people of this belief would make sure their hearts are not full of sin, as this would be detrimental for them in the journey through the under world.
What Happens within And Before The Afterlife…..
Egyptians loved life and they believed in life after death. For this they would have to lead good lives with no sin. They believed that the afterlife was like crossing the Nile and that living after death would be life their normal life, but only perfect. This is where they would become immortal.
To be prepared for the afterlife they would be mummified and put into a tomb. This tomb would be filled with all their belongings, for them to use within the afterlife. This could be from chairs to perfume to food and wine and a lot more.
Within the funeral all their belongings will be put into the tomb but there will also be a retiral called the “opening of the mouth” this is where a family member will use a tool to touch against the dead’s mouth. This tool is called a adze. (it was a special chisel)
Other parts of the retiral would include:
A band playing music – to open the persons hearing.
Dances – to open up the persons sight.
Perfume and scents – presented to the persons noise to open their smell.
The best food/wine – to open the persons soul.
This would then prepare them for the afterlife.
Their view on dead is a temporary thing before immortality. To be able to get to the afterlife and live within the perfect immortality, they would have to take a dangerous journey through the underworld. This would involved many different tasks that the god make but the most important one is the last test “the weighting of the heart”. This is where the god Osiris tests their heart for sin.
A heavy heart is a sign of sin and that their where bad within their life, a light heart means they lead a good life. If you are found to have a heavy heart this would lead for your heart to be through to a beast.
To help a person through this journey there was a book that was made called “book of the dead” this book was full of magical spells to help someone make it to the afterlife. this book was made on papyrus
Painting (looking into realism and positioning (linking to book of the dead in Egypt))
Alyssa monks is am American painter who does very realist paintings normally of humans. her amazingly real artwork catches the eye to be a photograph. When painting the person she loves to use water and steam within the painting image. This has lead to a lot of her art being people bathing or in baths and showers.
these are some of her works. I really like these are the colours she uses are not too bright and are very natural. One thin that Alyssa monks aims for is the idea of you being able to put yourself in the persons position. I don’t think I can relate to the second and third image, but I do find it hard to look at the first image as the water being in his eyes makes me feel weird as I know I hate that feeling. so I cant look at the image in a combatable way.
I want to use the idea of realism painting within both my abstract and a new idea I have had. i want to have a painting of both a water lily skull and person on my abstract paintings I want to see how each one looks and works with the abstract so I’m going to do a lot of abstract backgrounds.
I also want to do a more refined piece where I want to do the idea of generations a lot more and have a realistic paintings of different generations. I do also want to some how involve a water lilly into thiese as well.
Both of these ideas need to have a lot more work put towards them as they are not ready so I want to focus on experimenting with these a lot more. So from here I am going to so two post on me developing both ideas and what I want to get out of them.
For this I wanted to create a paint about my mental health and now I feel. I decided i wanted to do something that I don’t do often so I wanted to make an abstract piece of art.
For this I did think of Jackson Bullock. I have seen his art before but never truly looked into him. So this is some what inspired by his work, but also something I was thinking of doing anyway. (I have looked into Jackson Bullock more)
My Piece…..
i started by cutting a massive piece of paper that was bigger than a meter by meter as it was much bigger than me. Then I taped it on to the wall.
I started with adding black to the painting. For this I used left over black house paint. i used both a cup to hold the paint and mix it with water, and a spoon to mix it and splat it on the wall. I did also use the spoon so smudge the paint around on the paper.
At this point I completely forgot to take photos but it got very messy. i started getting different coloured paints to mix with water and start flicking it on the wall. Some of the colours I would just use the cup to splash the wall. other I could just throw the cup at the wall. this would give me different effects.
This is a photo of when I had finished throwing the paint onto the paper. I didn’t quick like it and I felt like there was something missing. so then I grabbed a big paintbrush and dragged the dry brush down the paper to create brush marks. This is how it looked afterwards.
I really like it now and I feel the brush marks make it looked more finished and put together. Rather than just painting splatted on the paper. I feel this does show of mental health and how it can be so simple to feel it but also so confusing to understand it.
This is not finished as I think I am going to add a two faces into this piece and it had also give me an idea to do another one and then draw some life drawing on to it.
While doing this piece I had an idea of putting paper on it and pulling it off to see what prints I could make from it. Right now I have no idea what i will do with these prints but i do like them so I decided to keep them.
These are some of the prints that I took of the painting. I might use some of them as practise to draw the life drawing and faces on.
I am going to post the finished pieces onto my blog when they are done but no one this post.
For painting this week I had to bring in a black tub of house paint and a white tub of house paint. I also needed a big paint brush and a squeegee. I didn’t have a squeegee so i used cardboard instead.
I cut out two piece of paper around 1 meter x 1.5 meters long. Then I tapped it to the floor. I had 30 mins to paint on both piece each. I had to pick a reference image to go off of. so I decided to use the drawing I did of the photo I found online.
(the photo and image is in one of my other posts (a man screaming in black and white)
So before the teacher could tell me to not draw on the paper I had already done this, so I just made sure I didn’t do it for the next piece. Due to having 30 mins I forgot to take photos, as I just wanted to get paint on the paper and fill the whole paper.
This is what I manged to get done within the time I had been given. i really love this piece and how it had turned out.
The Background…..
For the background I just painted around the person with black paint. I also painted the black into he bottom where I knew would be pure black. then I loaded up a big paint brush with white paint and i splatted it onto the paper. when the paint would not splat off the paint brush anymore I would make some brush marks onto the page.
The Mans Chest…..
For this i had already painted where the pure black marks are and then I used the cardboard to get both white and black on it and then I scrapped it against the paper so it would make a gradient from black – grey – white.
I really like the marks this has made on the paper and the look of how it had made the shading. This was one of my favourite bit of the paintings.
The Mans Face…..
I had not really done this bit as I ran out of time but I wanted to do the eyes so I quickly put them in. For this I put down some white paint and then used my figure to add some black on to the white to create a more grey shading for the eyes. Then I used my figure to add a black line for the eyelash line.
I really love the look of his eyes and how I have done them. due to this I decided to leave the rest of the face unfinished.
For his fair I just used a piece of cardboard that didn’t have much paint on and dragged it over the hair line this then left the print of the bumpy floor. This was a really good technique as it gave the texture and look if the hair.
All The Random Marks…..
For most of the marks I used paint that was loaded onto the paint brush to flick paint onto the paper and then dried brush to make the brush marks. Then I used a roll of masking tape top load up paint and then roll it over my painting.
I really like the technique of rolling over the paint as i used this to leave the painting white in-between the lines.
I was then asked to invert the paintings so the colour are the opposite way around. I don’t like this one as much as it too simple for what I like also I had to go do something do I didn’t have a lot of time.
For this I just painted on the black where I had pure white on the last picture. Then I used the card board to create a gradient of the black to white again. I then decided to add in thick white to where the shading would have been on the forehead and eyes. By this time I had ran out of time.
I really done like this painting but I do like the idea of it and having to think of how to invert the painting. because I am not keen on this painting but i really liked my first one I want to make this one in to the collage.
Collaring them…..
(I ran out of time to do this so I am going to do this on Monday so I will up date this when I have finished it)
One idea I have had for this piece is the ides of Immortality. For this i have had more of the idea of generations and how someone can live on through others, rather than one single person.
This can be like how my grandma had my mum, this means that a part of her will always be within my mum weather than genetically but also habits and little things to do with my grandmas personality. Then my mum had me so not only will i have some of my mum in me but I will also have some things from my grandma, this is then how my grandma lice both though her self but also through the lower generations of the family.
so for this I am going to do a painting looking into families and also generations but also add in a Egyptian aspect to it.
cant find a link to this photo. it is off the internet.
One thing I have noticed about the way that Egyptians paint is in a story board way this then gives the look of a story I really like this idea as I could use it to show the development of the family and show that person can live on.
This could be a good way to present my work as this does have a good look of passing through time. So from this I am going to be looking in to using this positing to present my work. but I don’t think I am going to use their painting style. For the style I am going to look into abstract painters as this will develop my work with the massive black and white paintings.
Symbolisms within nature to represent Egyptian belief…..
One thing I know about the religion is there beliefs around the Nymphaea Caerulea ( the blue water lily) this lily has a very big meaning and also is link into a story behind one of their gods. the flower has a very big link to both creation and the idea of re-birth. the story of the flower is:
At the very beginning there was murky dirty water and nothing else. within this water a lotus flower grew about the water to then bloom. As the flower bloom the beautiful colours of the blue turning in to the golden yellow was said to release the God Ra (the sun god). Ra also created two Gods that swam away into the waters and this upset Ra, after a while the two gods Shu and Tefnut (Tefnut is the god of rain and moisture while Shu (Tefnut’s sister) is the god of air) came back and this feel Ra with joy. This made Ra cry and these tears became humans.
So the lotus flower looked like the sun coming out when it blooms so the lotus flower created the sun gods bringing life and light to the world through Ra.
Story of Ra…..
Ra is the god of sun within their beliefs, time has worn him down from being the greatest god at one point. As the sun god he would have to cash away the darkness and bring light. the god is a man with a falcons head. on top of his head is the sun disk. to make this better he would cross the skies and take away the darkness on his sun boat. in turn this would then light up the whole world. As everyday would pass their would always be nightfall and this is where Ra would sail into the waters and have to pass through the 12 gates of the underworld. The nights are made up of 12 hours so it was believed it would take Ra an hour to get through each of the 12 gates.
There was not only gates but their was mainly two other things he would always do one of which was seeing Osiris (the god of the underworld(he would decided if your heart was full of sin or not). Ra would visits Osiris and pay him respects. Another thing the god Ra had to do was fight Apophis (a snake god who is the god of evil and darkness). every night when Ra would make this journey Apophis would become a little closer to destroying Ra’s sun boat. One night the god manged to swallow the sun boat causing a solar eclipse. This is due to the snake not being able to hold the sun boat within her stomach so Ra got free.
There was another god called Set (God of destruction). Set was condemned to travel with Ra on the sun boat to help him defeat Apophis and travel through the underworld. The reason he has to do this is because he was lost the extreme thrown to Horus.
so I could use this within my work to show how parts of someone can be re-born within a younger generations and also how over times things can get better.(e.g how the world was just dirty dark water but over time something small grew and then changed the world for the best).
For this I want to look both into colour and how we use it to express ourselves, and also start working on ideas I have with this and how I could do them and present them.
Colour Theory…..
This is a mind map I made to show what each colour means both within emotions and also within cancer. I decided to add cancer into this as I am really interested in it( I knew that basically every colours has a connection into caner). I don’t know if I’m going to use the idea of cancer but I do want to look into it for the idea of physical health over time.
I did find doing this mind map interesting as, it showed how even thought colours can be very different they can also mean the same thing. (e.g. brown and blue can both be seen as loneliness even thought I would never see that in blue).
From this I am going to make lots of different abstract drip works to be able to express different emotions using the mind map, I have just made and then ill use this to see what I like. The last painting I am going to do with be involving loads of different emotions all in one to see how they work all together. I am going to do:
Calm
Loneliness
Tranquillity
Anger
Nothingness
Joy
Down to earth, love, loneliness and nothingness
My Plan…..
For this I’m am going to do a painting on 7 different A4 sheets to create each emotion ( I will be using my mind map of colours to create each piece). Then I am going to look what I like about them and what I don’t.
I am going to lay a sheet in A4 paper into a box and then poor watered down acrylic onto the paper. Then move the box around to add different textures and effects. ill partly dry it with a hair drier and then move it out to dry more.
Photos of making the pieces…..
Making the watered down acrylic
poring it onto the paper
Poring orange on the paper trying to make different patterns
What the blue looked like when all paint was pored on and also the box was moved around.
My A4 Abstract Art Works For The Experiments…..
These are the final out comes that I have made. I am going to look into the colours and what I like, but I will also look into if I think it conveys the meaning it is ament to and if not what I could do to help that.
Calm (Brown And Green)…..
like: I actually really like this one. I did not think I would due to the colours but I love the way the move together. This was from having the paint really watered down and then tipping the whole box. This meant I had control over the direction of the paint but not over the pattern it would make.
Meaning: This piece is ament to be calming and in a weird way this does make me more calm, as it remind me about nature and being outside. This is a peaceful place for me. I can also see how the colours mixed might not be calming.
Loneliness ( Blues)…..
Like: I really love the patterns on this piece and how they look more water like. I think the colours work very well together and move around each other.
Meaning: the meaning behind these colours is ament to be loneliness and in a way I understand how it can show loneliness but I feel that to make it better I could have made it more simple so it would be more lonely. I feel how busy and the amount of movement within it takes away from the meaning of loneliness
Tranquillity(Brown, Orange and green)…..
like: I am not keen on this one as I feel like the colours are a very weird mix, and I don’t really like the patterns as you can see where I started to move it. This did teach me to use the side of the brush to push and drag the paint around, instead of the end of it to make scratches.
Meaning: I do not think this conveys the idea of being tranquil . I feel if anything it just makes me confessed as the brown colour throws me off and I don’t think this would make people have the thoughts of down to earth and calming feelings. I defiantly don’t think I would use these colours in this way but I do feel I could change it and make it look better with other colours added to it.
Anger (red)…..
like: This really shows how I have used the said of the paintbrush to move the paint around. I feel you can see the anger through these movements and how the red in the background can be shows as normal anger and then the black I have moved on top is the anger that explodes. I feel this shows it very well.
Meaning: I think this piece really shows anger very well, I really love this piece and how I have used the black to show the explosive anger that we show unlike the underlaying anger we can hide (the red)
Nothingness (black and grey and white)…..
like: I really like this piece from both the colours and the marks behind it. i feel with this one I was a lot more expressive and experimental with using the paintbrush to make patterns.
meaning: the point of this painting is to express nothingness. I feel this does have this meaning but also I do feel it doesn’t as there is a lot going on in this piece. i feel it conveys more of being sad. I would not change it thought as i do also think it conveys nothingness,
Joy (Orange And Yellow)…..
like: I don’t like this one as I feel its two simple and for it I could have used the colours a lot more to convey its idea. I defiantly think I could have played more with yellow and making it a lot more happy by having a lot more yellow or a yellow base to make it a much brighter work
Meaning: joy is the meaning behind these colours, I defiantly think I could have used the colours a lot more to show this. I could have use a lot more orange then I have yellow and I feel thing makes the piece a lot more darker than what it should be showing. I think if I had sued a lot more yellow and had a yellow base with orange mixed in then it would be a lot better to the meaning.
down to earth, love, loneliness and nothingness (pink, grey, black, green and blue)…..
like: I think I don’t like this one because for me it is way to messy and I don’t like the colours together. this is just a personal opinion of mine though I do like how some of the colours have made patterns though. i really like the dots of yellow within the green.
meaning: This was ament to show how someone can fill loads of different emotions at once. This piece does have the look of being confusing and a little bit overwhelming with the amount of different colours and this is good as it shows how that person can feel overwhelmed. so for me I like the meaning ad how it shows it but I don’t like the colours put together.
Next Steps: I am going to do some big scales experiments in the studio with all colours and emotions I feel that day.
Jackson Pollock was an expressionist artists who lived in America. within this movement he worked very closely to abstract. (1912-1956)
These works are very colourful with burst of different vibrant colours. This really gives off the idea of how emotionally he could feel. For example the one of the left could be seen as more happy due to the idea of the yellow being a prime colour within this piece and on the other side you have a more dull and black and white look. This gives me the feeling that he was more natural and now really happy.
These are some of the images that really do inspire me. Within the drawing class, doing the massive paintings (I did a person in black and white) i really likes letting go and wanting to work in a loser style that was also a lot bigger than my comfort zone of A4.
From this i am going to use his style of dripping dragging and splashing paint on to the paper and see what I can make from this. I want to make a lot more than one so i can experiment with them
by painting objects onto them where i think they would fit.
collaging them
moving the paint to make an image with on it.
using the splatted paint to create an image.
This is some of the things that I want to try out within this part of the project. I want to see what works best and what I like.
