Day 40 - Benefits of being outside of contemporary 'Art training'

 The session was introduced with some work by Richard Hamilton's Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956) - this is cited by many as the start of 'Pop Art' in England. Rod also showed some works that referenced Hamilton's critique of consumerism including work from US artist Martha Rosler.

Our work/exercise was to be about a collage set in a room.

On Wednesday Rod also spoke to us about  Graphic Designer David Carson who rose to fame in the 1990's -


David was active in the surfer community but had no formal training in Art, rising to become a respected figure through such magazines as Beach Culture .

In fact there's a nice video of David talking here.

What I felt from finding out a bit about Carson was that the narrative about him is putting him forward as a maverick 'Surfer dude' who rose to the top on a special talent.

He is an intelligent man who is a graduate and paid his dues through his work - it seems rather sad that now artists are expected to have graduated Art school - Francis Bacon   and Jean-Michel Basquiat are two artists who became world respected figures via routes that are disparaged these days.

Of course there are examples of genuine 'unschooled' artists who have proved popular in recent times, aboriginal  art of Australia or Alfred Wallis who was adopted by the circle of artists who congregated in Cornwall - are they lesser artists for not knowing the canon of European art?

The Bauhaus and Black Mountain   approaches to Arts and Crafts have dominated for many years - maybe there's other styles we can imagine?

In terms of the collage we made Rod suggested we use room as a starting point - I certainly included that and also wanted to use a theme I'm thinking about 10 commandments/7 deadly sins - and text reflects this, here are some of my outputs.

Rod provided us with distorted/changed versions of our collages (from copier/copying process) which also pushed our ideas in other directions.

I liked the combination of colour along with B/W, and thought that Green highlighted some degrees of envy, also the use of text from a magazine was pointing towards some semiotic interpretation.


The starting collage (no tree).


Accentuating the documentary by using black and white text .



 

Protecting the innocent? - there's something about making the people anonymous.


Green for envy?

Another split with Black & White and green

I suppose my outputs point me to stopping when there are enough elements that can be contained  - I quite like the tree that I added early but this symbolism might be a bit clichéd?

I also experimented with different scale for some elements...

Here I felt colour and different scale ended some of the 'harmony'.


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