Friday, May 22, 2009

Process

















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.



2 comments:

  1. 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.

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  2. Thank you Jonathan,

    it'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

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