Final
First of all, I am sorry for such a long post, but I think it is so much easier to see a progression in an art work when you can just scroll up and down. Rather than having to add all these different images together in your head. Second of all I am sorry for some of the quality, focusing (or lack of), and the position of the image. I took them with my camera phone. Nevertheless I wanted to share. I get a bit annoyed when I see beautiful polished work on blogs, its nice. But I also want to see the crap and hard work and how it looked before it turned out great. I think its important to see stages of a work, and also learn how different people solve different visual issues.
This is a personal piece that I started and finished recently. I was really inspired by Melanie's work, you can't see the crazy things she thinks up and creates so much on her blog, which is a shame. But in real life she is crazy about hair. Human hair. She makes giant skipping ropes out of it and braids balloons together with it. She has a scary work place at COFA filled with hair sculptures and hair objects which happen to be horrible and beautiful at the same time.
Very strange.
From her I got a strong image of a guy with this giant beard simply extending down off his face and consuming his neck and chest, as you can see that never manifested itself. I tried: and it looked shit. Also a while after I started I went to the MCA drawing show and saw Laith McGregor. My internal image wasn't exactly the same as his bearded men, but they were very similar so I was a bit disheartened to follow through with my hairy man.
In the end however he turned out being devoid of hair, which I found quite amusing.
This was done in charcoal on canvas. And if the last one looks a bit funny it's because I didn't grayscale it and I was trying to be quite delicate with the levels tool, it is amazingly hard to get the tonal values right.
Hope you enjoy, I will be putting up more phone camera process images later.
I love what you're doing with charcoal, and very interesting to see the battle within the process. The drips and the roughness is very appealing, gives it a tactility.
ReplyDeleteThank you Jonathan,
ReplyDeleteit's lovely to receive feedback
especially from an artist I admire.
I will attempt to put up more images
of future battles. Hopefully they will be
as appealing and interesting as this.
cheers,
jess b