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draft rewrite of compare and contrast

In this essay I would love to focus on to compare and contrast are two of my favourite artists from one of my favourite art movements called surrealism, these artists are Yve Magritte. Both artists focus on the themes of dreams and the mind to make atmospheric pieces that focus on landscapes and portraits that completely distort reality for the viewer yet often uses muted elements to not distract the viewer from the main elements that are the bizarre objects. 

I will start with the French surrealist artist Yve Tanguy as he’s my favourite of the two, his work just makes my eyes happy.  Yve Tanguy was a French born artist who was well known for his repetitive pieces that always focused on one simple yet effective painting theme, largescale landscapes that focus on a seemingly simple looking desert that’s full of these abstract objects that stack on each other, melt on each other, and overall, clearly cannot exist due to the abstract and wild nature of them. He had a unique style that was uncommon at the time of surrealism, he shaded realistically and used dry brushstrokes to get a more cloth like feel to his objects to add even more to that even stranger element to it due to these objects clearly being hard stone like objects. He didn’t always want to be a painter, that all changed however when he came by a painting by the artist Giorgio de Chirico which he was deeply inspired by and decided to become a painter due to it. It which it isn’t stated which painting he saw exactly but Giorgio’s work isn’t that similar to Yves other than it seems to be this semi surrealism piece.

  Azure day (1937)

 This piece looks like at first looks like it has a completely muted colour palette at first, however on closer inspection you can see all these yellow, oranges, blues and purples that really helps his piece stand out and gives the piece a bit more dept. not much detail is given into the background of this piece, it seems to just be a simple gradient that has some cloud textures in the background which could be because the artist doesn’t want to distract from the objects in the foreground. There’s slight texture in this piece, like the soft watered-down paint for the clouds and dry brushstrokes to empathise the shading of the objects. The use of oil paint allows for smoother looking blends and shapes which really helps with making the background and foreground that more pleasant and realistic looking.

A thousand times (1933)

 This piece uses a lot of reds and maroons in this piece which colour possibly show us that the artist at the time of painting this had a lot of dark thoughts? Maybe the artist was going threw an anxious time at the time of painting this piece. There’s a lot more texture in this piece than azure day due to being more focused on the sky and fog which means he uses a lot more of that watered down oil to add a blurrier look. Even though the objects in this piece aren’t the main focus of the piece he still uses a lot of detail to highlight them like thin black shading and lines.

  The invisibles (1951)

 This piece uses a ton of light and muted blues and whites, this clearly represents the calmness of the mind as of now, the objects are even floating in the sky for this piece, maybe representing at the time of painting this the artist was feeling this overwhelming calm and feeling of weightlessness. These objects don’t have a lot of texture in them, again most of the texture is purely in the clouds which allows these objects to look even more bizarre, they’re like paper planes in the way they’re shaped which has this childlike energy to it.

      Mama, papa is wounded! (1927)

 This piece was made right around the time he first saw the painting of Giorgio de Chirico which clearly shows, his objects started off making much more sense and appear to be based off of actual objects that exist in real life like the cactus and the jar in the background. The title of this is very bizarre? It suggests maybe a traumatic memory for the painter, but I couldn’t find much on that other than his father died when he was very young, eight to be exact.

  The other artist Rene Magritte was a Belgian born surrealist artist who became popular due to his more thought-provoking images that influenced other movements like pop art due to his unique themes that he would paint. Rene has had a harsh life, when he was 14 his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the river, this wasn’t the first time she attempted suicide. His early paintings which where around 1915 where in an impressionistic style, a style which was characterised by thin, small yet visible brushstrokes which often showed off a normal subject matter which is of course a huge polar opposite for what surrealism is and is what surrealism is agents. He moved from movement to movement a lot, going for more abstract movements with each change like, impressionism to futurism to cubism to then finally settling on surrealism which was the most abstract of them all. He starts surrealism painting when in 1922 he saw the reproduction of the painting “the song of love 1914) which brought Rene to tears, he stated this was “one of the most moving moments of my life: my eyes saw for the first time”.

    He had a more kind of down to earth style to his surrealism, it very much reminds me of surrealism, he adds a veil of realism to his pieces, like a beach or a man in a suit looking at the camera to get painted however then he adds a random factory to really push his surrealism. It doesn’t have to be a big change, but the small change really makes you feel like your dreaming, like a door in the middle of a beach bleeding into the sky and that man I mentioned earlier having his face covered reminding me of how the brain cannot make up a face in a dream suggesting that this man doesn’t actually exist, like he was made in this painter’s dream.

  The Son of a man (1964)

 This piece is straight out of a dream, I mean I believe the art with Rene’s work Is you can semi relate to it, you will always find a piece that will remind you of a previous dream you had. The colours in this piece are very vibrant, the bright juicy green of the apple helps draw the viewers eyes right into it showing the viewer how bizarre this world really is that we have been drawn into. Everything’s so clear in this piece, this could be due to the slight well blended shading and texture the artist applies helps small details like the bricks pop more.

The Glass Key (1959)

 This piece is simply just amazing, I have no idea how the artist done it but if it wasn’t for the floating rock in the middle of the two mountains. I think the artist may use both a dry brush and sponge to apply the texture to the mountains to get that gritty look. The palette in this piece is taken exactly from nature so it can look as realistic as possible.

  The call of peaks (1953)

 This piece makes me super happy, just how the clouds and background melts into this easel. The colours used in this piece are all vibrant to empathise this calm atmosphere the piece is trying to show. I love the shading on the floor and carpet that also adds his cons of what is real and what isn’t real.

Golconda (1953)

 This piece is straight out of a dream, just how all these hundreds of strange suited men levitate in the air staring at the viewer as If the viewer done something to them personally. The muted palette of this piece just grounds it more in reality which contrasts wonderfully with the complete bizarre floating men in the sky.

  Both of these artists are very talented in they’re surrealism and paint completely different things to empathise the nature of the mind, however I believe they have enough in common to contrast them both. Below is one example of each artist’s work which ill compare them to.

   Le Beau Monde (rene margitte)              

 indefinite divisiblity (yve tanguy)

Both of these pieces use very similar shading, slight black out shading to create harsh shadows to empathsise the light point to make the pieces more life like. Both artists appear to use dry brushstrokes to get a more softer look for they’re piece, however, rene uses this softer texture for his clouds were yve uses this to make some of his objects soft or to add texture to the sand and background sky. Both artists use a similar palette, mostly consisting muted colours in their pieces , hoever, rene likes to go for more vivid bright colours to pop out and look more dream like where yve goes for more muted colours but likes to add more colours to his palette than rene. Rene has a much more simplier way of making up for empty space, often just blocking in colour for empty spaces like the floor to give his pieces more breathing room where yve tends to add more texture and shading and texture to make every place of the piece busy. Yve has the stronger metaphour of the artists, I believe his pieces are a visual reprecentation of whats happening in the artists head where I think renes is mostly just about dreams. In conclusion I love both of the artists but I do prefer yve’s pieces as they just have so much going on them and they don’t have to make sense.

draft done (1673 words in total)

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Tried out this kinda taster with the new format? Feel free to take a look

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Took some notes on essay writing just to get them stuck in my head

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photo’s used for essay

these wouldn’t let me link in with essay so here they are.

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this is very much outdated now but i shall keep it up as it works as a good reference point.

essay on yve’s tang and rene magritte (W.I.P draft)

The artist I have chosen that really does inspire my work is the French born artist Yves Tanguy who was a surrealist painter who was and is well known for his abstract landscape pieces that just make me happy looking at? He has a very unique style of painting which was unusual for the time and was completely different from other surrealist art at the time. Yves didn’t start off wanting to do art, like most of us he kind of floated around in life not knowing what to do, he joined the navy in 1918 and afterword’s into he took up jobs until he came by a painting by the artist Giorgio de Chirico and was deeply inspired by It and was inspired to become an artist due to it. He got right away to painting, fully being absorbed right into it like it was his calling he was waiting for. He would only work on one piece at a time which could probably be due to how small of a studio he had at a time which would only have enough room to work on one piece. He was introduced to the surrealism style by his friend prevert showing him the work of many surrealism artists who revolved around André Breton.

His style is very unique and distinct, a far departure for what other surrealist artists were doing at the time, his pieces show off mostly empty vast landscapes that are mostly occupied by nonsensical objects that maybe act as a metaphor for the brain. The brain is normally shown to be a calm desert so maybe these objects represent thoughts? He uses a very limited colour palette in his pieces, mostly consisting of normal colours for the sky and sand but more unnatural colours are used for the abstract objects so they stand out way more than the desert its self. Due to these colours, they stand out way more which is good as the abstract shapes tend to be either small in the background or super close in your face with the angels he paints. He either paints his objects as very loose, fabric like making them look like draped cloth and in contrast he paints a lot of objects also that are ridged with very strong looking structures that make them appear almost like concrete or clay. What he does with these shapes is very unusual, with his cloth like shapes he tends to make them either bend in the non-wind almost like they’re stretching to the heavens and with the ridged shapes he tends to leave them as is most of the time which helps contrast form between the both of them.

The colour in his pieces is also placed oddly too, most of the time there’s one colour almost bleeding into another, for example: in the piece Through Birds, Through Fire, But Not Through Glass 1943 he tends to make the orange red in the highest top object slowly shift into a bright yellow which is just subtle enough that you don’t notice on first glance but really start picking it up when you look closely. He tends to go for very heavy shadows, not adding much in the ways of transitioning into the darker parts of the shadows, he literally just tends to block in a thick layer of black to empathise his shadows which allows them to appear almost like a second object in itself. He paints a lot of sky’s in his backgrounds, I’ve noticed he really tends to like painting in fluffy light clouds or either a very slight fog which you also might miss on first glance but they help create both a calm relaxing atmosphere for his pieces but also a mysterious type of ambiance like anything could be hidden in that fog. I’ve just noticed he goes with the three main colours way of kind of selecting a colour palette, for example in one piece he will use faint blues, yellows and reds are his three main colours which has been a common reoccurring element in his pieces. Some of the objects he paints will sometimes not follow the laws of gravity and just float, this really helps further the dream motive of his pieces, almost like these objects are floating off into the white abyss above almost like a passing memory. Another thing that also helps with the motive of these objects trying to reach the great above are the objects that are the objects that seem to have a ton of blob like webs that almost look like they’re climbing up the structures and assembling into their own version of that object.

Another surrealism artist that I like is Belgian born artist rene Magritte. Rene was a surrealist artist who was mostly known for his lighter more humorous pieces but also his more down to earth pieces which helped people think on issues and often depicted regular objects in strange areas. Rene has had a harsh life, when he was 14 his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the river, this wasn’t the first time she attempted suicide. His early paintings which where around 1915 where in an impressionistic style, a style which was characterised by thin, small yet visible brushstrokes which often showed off a normal subject matter which is of course a huge polar opposite for what surrealism is and is what surrealism is agents. He moved from movement to movement a lot, going for more abstract movements with each change like, impressionism to futurism to cubism to then finally settling on surrealism which was the most abstract of them all. He starts surrealism painting when in 1922 he saw the reproduction of the painting “the song of love 1914) which brought rene to tears, he stated this was “one of the most moving moments of my life: my eyes saw for the first time”.

He paints a lot of surrealistic stuff, he’s mostly well known for the portraits he would do with the objects covering a person’s face; however, he also created a lot of lesser-known abstract landscapes which often depict a lot of nature. He uses a lot of blue greens and browns to create a very earth like piece, he uses a lot of earth like imagery in his work which creates a much more intense dream like feel with his use of the vivid blue sky and soft fluffy clouds. He tends to focus on one main subject when he’s painting his surrealistic pieces, for example his most famous piece a man’s face being covered with an apple or a Boquete of flowers that’s ends are actually a bunch of old-fashioned pipes. With his pieces of people with they’re faces covered it might be referring to the fact that the brain cannot make up peoples faces when dreaming, we always have to see someone even for a second to see them in a dream so these pieces could maybe represent the unconscious brain trying to make up a face on its own. He uses a lot of clouds in his pieces to further the dream motive, they help his pieces also look a lot calmer despite all of the abstract pieces in his paintings.

He tends not to add a lot of visible brushstrokes to his pieces, he opts to make pieces with thick well blended paint to go for a more realistic feel to contrast the abstract with the more realistic style of painting he goes for. The brushstrokes that he makes visible is to add texture to objects like rougher brushstrokes for bricks and lighter drier brushstrokes to help empathise the fluffy clouds he’s going for and even drier brushstrokes to help empathise the dry dirt and sand he paints. He’s very hyper detailed with how he paints, even for most realism artists he really pushes himself, for example he adds the tiniest of bumps and cracks in order to make a huge rock painting and the tiniest pieces of disturbed sand in one of his landscape pieces to add just that little more life to his work.

Comparing both yve’s and Rene’s work, Rene is the more realistic painter of them both, Rene opts for more minor details like details in the sand he paints where yve goes for a smoother look to his piece which makes his shapes more abstract but sacrifice detail. Rene also has a more verity to what he paints as he doesn’t just paint one thing like yve does, however, yve doesn’t really need much verity to his work as his unique trait really is that he paints mostly the same subject over and over again. There’s a lot more visible brushstrokes in yve’s work, he uses it a lot in the sand to add contrasting colours in it and he also uses it in his more fabric-based shapes to add a fabric like texture to them. Rene’s use of brushstrokes is a lot looser in application to Yves, but he makes them count, only adding them to the objects that could use the extra layer of detail like his use of sand and fabric. They both go for I believe the representation of the subconscious mind, yve’s with the thoughts in our mind and the passing emotions and Rene with representations of dreams and showing how bizarre they really can be.

 In conclusion, I very much prefer yve’s more simplistic surrealism, I just find it a bit more unusual where I feel like Rene’s just makes a bit too much sense for my liking, I prefer work when its at its weirdest and yve hits that spot.

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Notes from today.

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Research from today

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Ernesto neto

Ernesto neto is a Brazilian sculpture artist who began appearing at Scottish exhibits and started having solo exhibits abroad around 1995. he was born in rio de janeiro in 1964 and studied at Escola de artes visuais do parque lange during 1994 to 1997. He had one of his most major exhibits with the Museo de arte contemporaneo de Monterrey in Mexico and ever since his popularity has spiked and now, he is featured worldwide and is mostly the major feature for most exhibits he’s in. in 2018, he made a collaboration project with Fondation Beyeler called “Gaia Mother Tree” which stood at the Zurich train station which was made for a month-long education programme which took place inside the actual sculpture but now permanently resides at Tate gallery in London. His sculptures we’re made to help people come closer using other senses like touch, feel, smell and see, the artist has said himself “I believe in the sensual body, and it is through the movement of such body-minds that we connect the things in the world, in life-the way we touch, the way we feel, the way we think and the way we deal”.

 his sculptures have been described as “minimalist” and “abstract” and are often very large and are always soft. It’s very clear he uses fabrics in his work with how easily it can disform and they are also probably stuffed to add a little weight and further keep that smooth form. One of his exhibits in New York’s park avenue armoury manage to fill the hall which was around fifty-five thousand square foot, this sculpture was called “anthropodino”. He uses a lot of string to hang his pieces which to me gives them web like feel, like they’re being held up by the ceiling by a strong spider web. They almost look like a fungus called Clarthrus ruber which has all these holes and looks like a web itself, which gives his sculptures more of a nature like feel like you’re stumbling towards these giant overgrown fungi’s. some of his sculptures are designed to hold people in them like the blobby looking chairs he makes which look comfortable and cosy due to they’re soft textures but also seem uncomfortable in the way they actually hold people.

 If I had to make a rough guess on how he makes most of these sculptures I believe he hangs up this very stretchy fabric where he will hang to the ceiling and then drop these premade fabric balls that could either be made of stuffing, fabric, string or a mixture of all three to weigh down a certain part of the fabric in order to create these semis suspended droplet like shapes. He obviously uses a lot of hooping and rope techniques in his more rope focused sculptures which also are hung from the ceiling but these ones tend to retain more of a shape when being held up which either suggests the base has been made structurally inflexible which may have been glued to keep shape or the rope itself is glued to keep its form or the rope is a very thick climbing rope which keeps its shape to prevent accidents or even all of the above.

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Location planning

I tried to come up with a few ideas for “sets” of where I could 1. Publicly display a sculpture and 2. Draw, these are what I came up with, I was pretty lucky in the way that most of my locations I already thought of where out of the way of people so I don’t have to take caution when I’m going there due to the virus.

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photo’s used for essay

these wouldn't let me link in with essay so here they are.

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essay on yve’s tang and rene magritte (W.I.P draft)

The artist I have chosen that really does inspire my work is the French born artist Yves Tanguy who was a surrealist painter who was and is well known for his abstract landscape pieces that just make me happy looking at? He has a very unique style of painting which was unusual for the time and was completely different from other surrealist art at the time. Yves didn’t start off wanting to do art, like most of us he kind of floated around in life not knowing what to do, he joined the navy in 1918 and afterword’s into he took up jobs until he came by a painting by the artist Giorgio de Chirico and was deeply inspired by It and was inspired to become an artist due to it. He got right away to painting, fully being absorbed right into it like it was his calling he was waiting for. He would only work on one piece at a time which could probably be due to how small of a studio he had at a time which would only have enough room to work on one piece. He was introduced to the surrealism style by his friend prevert showing him the work of many surrealism artists who revolved around André Breton.

 His style is very unique and distinct, a far departure for what other surrealist artists were doing at the time, his pieces show off mostly empty vast landscapes that are mostly occupied by nonsensical objects that maybe act as a metaphor for the brain. The brain is normally shown to be a calm desert so maybe these objects represent thoughts? He uses a very limited colour palette in his pieces, mostly consisting of normal colours for the sky and sand but more unnatural colours are used for the abstract objects so they stand out way more than the desert its self. Due to these colours, they stand out way more which is good as the abstract shapes tend to be either small in the background or super close in your face with the angels he paints. He either paints his objects as very loose, fabric like making them look like draped cloth and in contrast he paints a lot of objects also that are ridged with very strong looking structures that make them appear almost like concrete or clay. What he does with these shapes is very unusual, with his cloth like shapes he tends to make them either bend in the non-wind almost like they’re stretching to the heavens and with the ridged shapes he tends to leave them as is most of the time which helps contrast form between the both of them.

 The colour in his pieces is also placed oddly too, most of the time there’s one colour almost bleeding into another, for example: in the piece Through Birds, Through Fire, But Not Through Glass 1943 he tends to make the orange red in the highest top object slowly shift into a bright yellow which is just subtle enough that you don’t notice on first glance but really start picking it up when you look closely. He tends to go for very heavy shadows, not adding much in the ways of transitioning into the darker parts of the shadows, he literally just tends to block in a thick layer of black to empathise his shadows which allows them to appear almost like a second object in itself. He paints a lot of sky’s in his backgrounds, I’ve noticed he really tends to like painting in fluffy light clouds or either a very slight fog which you also might miss on first glance but they help create both a calm relaxing atmosphere for his pieces but also a mysterious type of ambiance like anything could be hidden in that fog. I’ve just noticed he goes with the three main colours way of kind of selecting a colour palette, for example in one piece he will use faint blues, yellows and reds are his three main colours which has been a common reoccurring element in his pieces. Some of the objects he paints will sometimes not follow the laws of gravity and just float, this really helps further the dream motive of his pieces, almost like these objects are floating off into the white abyss above almost like a passing memory. Another thing that also helps with the motive of these objects trying to reach the great above are the objects that are the objects that seem to have a ton of blob like webs that almost look like they’re climbing up the structures and assembling into their own version of that object.

 Another surrealism artist that I like is Belgian born artist rene Magritte. Rene was a surrealist artist who was mostly known for his lighter more humorous pieces but also his more down to earth pieces which helped people think on issues and often depicted regular objects in strange areas. Rene has had a harsh life, when he was 14 his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the river, this wasn’t the first time she attempted suicide. His early paintings which where around 1915 where in an impressionistic style, a style which was characterised by thin, small yet visible brushstrokes which often showed off a normal subject matter which is of course a huge polar opposite for what surrealism is and is what surrealism is agents. He moved from movement to movement a lot, going for more abstract movements with each change like, impressionism to futurism to cubism to then finally settling on surrealism which was the most abstract of them all. He starts surrealism painting when in 1922 he saw the reproduction of the painting “the song of love 1914) which brought rene to tears, he stated this was “one of the most moving moments of my life: my eyes saw for the first time”.

 He paints a lot of surrealistic stuff, he’s mostly well known for the portraits he would do with the objects covering a person’s face; however, he also created a lot of lesser-known abstract landscapes which often depict a lot of nature. He uses a lot of blue greens and browns to create a very earth like piece, he uses a lot of earth like imagery in his work which creates a much more intense dream like feel with his use of the vivid blue sky and soft fluffy clouds. He tends to focus on one main subject when he’s painting his surrealistic pieces, for example his most famous piece a man’s face being covered with an apple or a Boquete of flowers that’s ends are actually a bunch of old-fashioned pipes. With his pieces of people with they’re faces covered it might be referring to the fact that the brain cannot make up peoples faces when dreaming, we always have to see someone even for a second to see them in a dream so these pieces could maybe represent the unconscious brain trying to make up a face on its own. He uses a lot of clouds in his pieces to further the dream motive, they help his pieces also look a lot calmer despite all of the abstract pieces in his paintings.

 He tends not to add a lot of visible brushstrokes to his pieces, he opts to make pieces with thick well blended paint to go for a more realistic feel to contrast the abstract with the more realistic style of painting he goes for. The brushstrokes that he makes visible is to add texture to objects like rougher brushstrokes for bricks and lighter drier brushstrokes to help empathise the fluffy clouds he’s going for and even drier brushstrokes to help empathise the dry dirt and sand he paints. He’s very hyper detailed with how he paints, even for most realism artists he really pushes himself, for example he adds the tiniest of bumps and cracks in order to make a huge rock painting and the tiniest pieces of disturbed sand in one of his landscape pieces to add just that little more life to his work.

Comparing both yve’s and Rene’s work, Rene is the more realistic painter of them both, Rene opts for more minor details like details in the sand he paints where yve goes for a smoother look to his piece which makes his shapes more abstract but sacrifice detail. Rene also has a more verity to what he paints as he doesn’t just paint one thing like yve does, however, yve doesn’t really need much verity to his work as his unique trait really is that he paints mostly the same subject over and over again. There’s a lot more visible brushstrokes in yve’s work, he uses it a lot in the sand to add contrasting colours in it and he also uses it in his more fabric-based shapes to add a fabric like texture to them. Rene’s use of brushstrokes is a lot looser in application to Yves, but he makes them count, only adding them to the objects that could use the extra layer of detail like his use of sand and fabric. They both go for I believe the representation of the subconscious mind, yve’s with the thoughts in our mind and the passing emotions and Rene with representations of dreams and showing how bizarre they really can be.

 In conclusion, I very much prefer yve’s more simplistic surrealism, I just find it a bit more unusual where I feel like Rene’s just makes a bit too much sense for my liking, I prefer work when its at its weirdest and yve hits that spot. I also very much prefer the palette Yve uses as it’s much more muted palette which despite being very muted makes the strange objects he paint all blend into one giant mess of abstractness that just makes my eyes happy to look at.

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w.i.p essay thing

I realised that I'm an idiot and forgot to start this project. so i started it today and I'm already half way done, I'm still going to work on it a bit more tonight with the secondary artist for this essay but for how here's a little taster for what I'm writing. right now I've finished yves work and I've got a total of 780 words out of a minimum for 1500 words.

The artist I have chosen that really does inspire my work is the French born artist Yves Tanguy who was a surrealist painter who was and is well known for his abstract landscape pieces that just make me happy looking at? He has a very unique style of painting which was unusual for the time and was completely different from other surrealist art at the time. Yves didn’t start off wanting to do art, like most of us he kind of floated around in life not knowing what to do, he joined the navy in 1918 and afterword’s into he took up jobs until he came by a painting by the artist Giorgio de Chirico and was deeply inspired by It and was inspired to become an artist due to it. He got right away to painting, fully being absorbed right into it like it was his calling he was waiting for. He would only work on one piece at a time which could probably be due to how small of a studio he had at a time which would only have enough room to work on one piece. He was introduced to the surrealism style by his friend prevert showing him the work of many surrealism artists who revolved around André Breton.

 His style is very unique and distinct, a far departure for what other surrealist artists were doing at the time, his pieces show off mostly empty vast landscapes that are mostly occupied by nonsensical objects that maybe act as a metaphor for the brain. The brain is normally shown to be a calm desert so maybe these objects represent thoughts? He uses a very limited colour palette in his pieces, mostly consisting of normal colours for the sky and sand but more unnatural colours are used for the abstract objects so they stand out way more than the desert its self. Due to these colours, they stand out way more which is good as the abstract shapes tend to be either small in the background or super close in your face with the angels he paints. He either paints his objects as very loose, fabric like making them look like draped cloth and in contrast he paints a lot of objects also that are ridged with very strong looking structures that make them appear almost like concrete or clay. What he does with these shapes is very unusual, with his cloth like shapes he tends to make them either bend in the non-wind almost like they’re stretching to the heavens and with the ridged shapes he tends to leave them as is most of the time which helps contrast form between the both of them.

 The colour in his pieces is also placed oddly too, most of the time there’s one colour almost bleeding into another, for example: in the piece Through Birds, Through Fire, But Not Through Glass 1943 he tends to make the orange red in the highest top object slowly shift into a bright yellow which is just subtle enough that you don’t notice on first glance but really start picking it up when you look closely. He tends to go for very heavy shadows, not adding much in the ways of transitioning into the darker parts of the shadows, he literally just tends to block in a thick layer of black to empathise his shadows which allows them to appear almost like a second object in itself. He paints a lot of sky’s in his backgrounds, I’ve noticed he really tends to like painting in fluffy light clouds or either a very slight fog which you also might miss on first glance but they help create both a calm relaxing atmosphere for his pieces but also a mysterious type of ambiance like anything could be hidden in that fog. I’ve just noticed he goes with the three main colours way of kind of selecting a colour palette, for example in one piece he will use faint blues, yellows and reds are his three main colours which has been a common reoccurring element in his pieces. Some of the objects he paints will sometimes not follow the laws of gravity and just float, this really helps further the dream motive of his pieces, almost like these objects are floating off into the white abyss above almost like a passing memory. Another thing that also helps with the motive of these objects trying to reach the great above are the objects that are the objects that seem to have a ton of blob like webs that almost look like they’re climbing up the structures and assembling into they’re own version of that object.

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hey

i have no idea how to link my timeline thing

help

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heres a wip of my modernsism thing

not nearly done but heres some progress

modernism (wip) - Copy.pdf

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Ai Weiwei and Antony Gromley compare and contrast

Ai Weiwei is a political Chinese born artist who uses the medium of sculpture to show the corrupt nature of the Chinese government where Antony Gromley is a British born artist who works on both small scale and large-scale sculptures which he is mostly makes to be landmarks for touristy areas. Ai has ore of a meaning to his works like the Chinese government and its corruption where Antony doesn’t seem to have much of a message to his work, they’re all just made to be pretty things to look at which isn’t a bad thing. Both artists have both made more humanoid sculptures, Antony with most of his works and Ai has also made a ton of human like figures in his series S.A.C.R.E.D, Antony’s humans are more abstract they don’t have a lot of features, just solely rely on the vague human figure where Ai has very detailed humans for his project, they look creepily human, a little uncanny valley but I genuinely thought at first look that these where full on photography pieces with the artist and people in costumes not sculptures.

 Both artists have a lot of experience with making exhibits with a ton of mass repetition of one thing, Antony with his “Asian field” which consisted 180,000 clay pots made of red clay which was made by Chinese villagers and Ai made a whole large-scale exhibit which the floor was filled with tiny pieces of clay sunflower seeds which him and a group of others hand painted and laid on the floor for people to walk on. Unlike Ai, Antony has faced some controversy on his large-scale exhibit as it could be seen as potentially exploitive as Antony himself never actually made any of the pots, he shelfed all the work onto these villagers and then slapped his name on it which now that I think about it could be literally be what Ai is saying about the exploitation in china. Surprisingly though, both artists have had pieces from these exhibits stolen, pots have reportedly been stolen from Antony’s exhibit and Ai has definitely had sunflower seeds stolen from his as the proofs literally on eBay right now.

 Overall, I believe these artists surprisingly can be compared very well, they share a lot in common with they’re work. Personally, I prefer Ai’s work as it feels more impactful and personal to him, I can really tell he’s experienced a lot of what he puts into his works and is very passionate about what he makes. Also, now this is just me personally but yeah, I kind of agree with some of Antony’s critics on “Asian field” technically really isn’t his work to label, sure he organised it but I feel like its pretty scummy to get all these people to make these little pots and then for him to go “yeah this is my art”. Now, I know he has said explicitly that it was the villagers that made all these pots but I don’t know, it really does rub me the wrong way that he’s kind of claiming all the glory for a collaboration project.

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Artist research!

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Notes