Recently i've been writing my dissertation for my final year at uni, and i've decided to write about street art, and the positives and negatives in how Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat have influenced the aesthetics of it. I am also planning to question why graffiti is a crime, and discuss the differences between creating art in the street, and creating something exactly the same on a brick wall inside a building or gallery. I thought i'd give you a snippet of my intro as it has a little about my past and present art influences and ideas, plus i added a few art works, old and new:
The past year has taken my art through a dramatic
transformation. I found what art I was influenced by and what style truly suits
me. Ever since my A Levels, 4 years ago, I have been interested in the
aesthetics of street art. I used to paint photos of graffiti that I had seen first-hand
– complicated and simple, all painted by my friends. I would mix different
scenes with different graffiti in an almost perfectly neat style.
Untitled - Acrylic on foam board, A3, 2010
From then on,
I changed my style to a more rough-and-ready, Rauschenberg like style –
dabbing leftover paint in random places, using and materials I found. My
subject matter changed from portraits, to textured landscaped, to fashion
magazines and collages, all the while keeping my painting style influenced by
the crumbling bricks of those spray painted back alleys. My current art work
consists of bleached film photographs that I collage images from magazines
onto, with themes of popular culture.
From a collection called 'Impulse' - Collage on photo paper, 4x6 inch, 2013
I also have been making similar paintings
for the past year with a mix of collage and paint as a base, with wild brush
strokes and spreading of paint with a ruler, to create an uneven crumbling
effect with acrylic paint. I would usually create a main focal point taking the
rule of thirds into consideration, and either collaging bold text with an
unrelated phrase, or a graffiti-esque stencil made from a silk screen print and a powerful portrait of a woman. Mainly when I use text in my
work, like in my mixed media paintings, I pick them out of a magazine or
newspaper purely for convenience and for the aesthetics – font, text or colour.
When people see my work, their eyes take them straight to the text and they
read. My aim, by choosing mismatched sentences is to bring the focus more to
the pure technique of paint and aesthetics of collage mixed with paint, pen or
ink. Another idea of mine is to let the audience’s mind wander. Maybe they will
find an interesting story about my work which only they will see. Maybe the
unrelated word relates to them personally and sparks up an old memory or makes
them see an image in my blurred paint. A like-minded artist from the 1980s art
word, Keith Haring once stated his ideas behind his work:
“I am interested in making art to be
experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many
different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning
attached. The viewer created the reality, the meaning, the conception of the
piece. I am merely a middleman trying to bring ideas together.”
Keith Haring Painting
Before reading Haring’s book recently, I was quick to judge
his cartoon like simple stick figures and unusual imagery, but now I understand
his work, I am fascinated in Haring’s life, style and ideas, and plan to share
his ideas in my future art work for my final year. My other main influences are
Jacob Kolding, Robert Rauschenberg and Kurt Schwitters.
Love this post, I remember doing a pop art related work for my a levels x
ReplyDeleteJoannaloves
Thank you! Ooh I love pop art x
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