Artist Analysis: Banksy

Banksy

Artist Analysis: Banksy

Banksy in an anonymous British graffiti artist and political activist. Due to his hidden identity his birth and real name are unknown but it is to be believed that he would have to have been born in Bristol, England, around 1974.

He began his artistic career around 1990 in a graffiti gang called the DryBreadZ Crew, this work was mostly freehand but he occasionally used stencils, this then developed into using exclusively stencils. This is when his black and white characters style developed.

Although he used other materials such as paint, Banksy mostly uses spray paint through home made stencils.

All of Banksy's work has political meanings behind it as he is a political activist, His work often engages political themes like war, capitalism, hypocrisy and greed.

The piece shown here shows a man with a paint bucket in his hands, and the words follow your dreams next to him, it also has the word cancelled over the top of the follow your dreams.

The colors used are extremely simply, but this is Banksy's style, most of the people he illustrates are in black and white.

The way Banksy illustrated is to try and make his paintings look although they are real at a glance, most of the people depicted are life size, giving a surreal truth feel.

I think Banksy is trying to get the message of oppression across saying that you cannot follow your dreams and the government don't allow it. but is the man in the painting the one painting the "follow your dreams" or the "cancelled"?

I believe that this inspires me with my work as it is rejecting the saying, saying you cannot follow your dreams, but in the same way saying the opposite in an ironic way.

Artist Analysis: Sam Bevington

Don't Knock It Till You've Tried It - Sam Bevington

Artist Analysis: Sam Bevington

Born in 1987, Sam graduated from UWE in Bristol in First Class Honours in 2009. His work is heavily influenced by urban surroundings and environment and graphic illustrations of the 1930s-1940s.

Most of Bevingtons work is made using graphic design programmes featuring typography and the 1930s looking illustrations, his illustrations also can sometimes be controversial and touch upon taboo subjects. 

As his artistic career has only just started, Bevington has already designed posters and other advertisements for company's like 3 Mobile and The NHS.

This piece here is called Don't Knock it Till You've Tried it. The piece looks like a poster for something but is drawn on top of book pages as it is a poster it makes you read it from top to bottom, the look at the image. The piece is all worn and faded but features a character that looks like a medicinal pill but done in a 1930s style, so maybe the piece is made to look worn to make it seem like it id from that time. The poster also has the words Don't Knock It Till You've Tried it written on it, this saying implies that this pill may be for recreational use and shows the controversy that Bevington sometimes features. In the piece there are colourful and childlike drawing done in what looks like crayons. The colours used in the piece are mostly primary colour (Blue, red and yellow) this again may suggest childlike qualities.

I believe that this piece is created to show how old fashioned saying, with good intent can be used for more controversial issues and more sinister situations, for example the drug use that is suggested in the piece.

This piece influences me as I like the way he has made a child friendly looking poster into something that children should not be taught. I also appreciate the way that he has turned the traditional saying of "don't knock it till you've tried it." into almost an advert for people to try drugs.

Sketch Book Week 1

 

This is my first observational study of an old violin, I drew this because I thought it would be a good starting point for tradition as it is a traditional instrument. I drew the first one (the lower one) in pencil but i stopped before i finished it to do another one in Biro, but this time I did a 30 second timed drawing to contrast with the first one.

This is another observational drawing i did but this time of an old film camera, again the first one was drawn normally but this time in Biro, i then did 4 more studies of the camera but from different angels but i did these in Conte Crayon and they were all timed drawing as i felt this worked well in the last drawing.

I did more studies of cameras in the same style.

This was my first study of my chosen artists work. My chosen artist is Sam Bevington, he uses old saying and makes posters with little illustrations to go with them. In this study i use this card that you could scratch away to reveal different colour to re-create Bevingtons piece 'Make It Happen'. I believe this worked well as you could get the worn away look that Bevinton uses particularly easy as you just scratch it.

AS Exam

For the AS Art exam, I have chosen the question, tradition,custom, and ritual. I have chosen this question as it gives me a chance to look at traditional saying and proverbs. This also allows me to study artists that use typography and then I can use these studies to create my own style and eventually create a final piece.

Artist Analysis

Cy Twombly

Proteus, 1984

Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly, Jr. was born on April 25, 1928 and died July 5, 2011. He was an American artist well known freely scribbled, graffiti paintings.
Twombly used the nickname "Cy", after his dad, also nicknamed Cy, was a Major League Baseball player.
After his return in 1953, Twombly served in the U.S. army. From 1955 to 1959, he worked in New York, where he became friends with many other artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
He became interested in tribal art. Twombly soon developed a technique of gestural drawing that was characterized by thin white lines on a dark canvas that appear to be scratched onto the surface. Twombly also did sculptures assembled from discarded objects, similarly cast their gaze back to Europe and North Africa. He stopped making sculptures in 1959. In the 1970s, Twombly began to use similar colours in his paintings favouring brown, green and light blue. In 1978 he worked on the Fifty Days at Iliam, a ten-part cycle inspired by Homer's Iliad, since then Twombly continued to draw on literature and myth.
This painting (although looking simply like a lot of  expressive stokes) is actually an abstract painting of a flower and shows themes of romance and passion. The red in this represents the petals of a rose or similar red flower and the singular green stroke is the stem. The eye is almost instantly drawn towards the center where there is an explosion of red and other similar colours.
 I don't think that this relates to my current work but i do really like the abstract themes and how Cy Twombly paintings could be whatever the viewer wants them to be and in future i will apply methods and themes similar to this in my work.

Antoni Tapies

 

Antoni Tapies - 500 Anys Libre Catala (1974) 

The son of Josep Tàpies i Mestre and Maria Puig i Guerra, Antoni Tàpies Puig was born in Barcelona on December 13, 1923 and dies in February 2012. His father was a lawyer who served briefly with the Republican government. Tàpies suffered a near-fatal heart attack at only 17 caused by tuberculosis.
Tàpies studied in Barcelona. In 1943 he ended up devoting himself to art. He lived mainly in Barcelona and was represented by the Galerie Lelong in Paris and the Pace Gallery in New York.
Tàpies was perhaps the best-known Catalan artist to emerge in the period since the Second World War. While he was still at school, he taught himself to draw and paint. After came into contact with contemporary art through the magazine D’Ací i D’Allà,
In 1948, Tàpies helped co-found the first Post-War Movement in Spain known as Dau al Set which was connected to the Surrealist and Dadaist Movements.
Tàpies' international reputation was well established by the end of the 1950s. From the late 1950s to early 1960s, Tàpies worked with Enrique Tábara, Antonio Saura, Manolo Millares and many other Spanish Informalist artists.
The paintings colour scheme is interesting and different to most of his other works, it pops out and is hard to miss. The viewer is forced to look at the thing as a whole instead of one part of the paiting. I am unsure of the themes in this, to me it suggests struggle because of the finger prints. i feel my work is similar to this as there are expressive strokes and leyers that almost make it look like a collage.

Robert Rauschenberg Analysis

 Posters for a Better World

January 11 – February 9, 2008

 

            “Robert Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the pop art movement.” -  Wikipedia

Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas in October 1925, he attended the University Of TexasUniversity of Texas to study pharmacology to study pharmacology, but then left to join the US Navy and fight in WWII, this is where he decided to study art.      was born in Port Arthur, Texas on October 22, 1925was born in Port Arthur, Texas on October 22, 1925Robert Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas on October 22, 1925.Robert Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas on October 22, 1925.was born in Port Arthur, Texas on October 22, 1925During Rauschenberg’s career, he was quoted as saying that he wanted to work "in the gap between art and life" this then lead to him questioning the distinction between art objects and everyday objects. Rauschenberg’s first solo exhibition was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1951.

In this image you can see a collage of lots of different key figures and events from the 1940’s onwards, you can see JFK, Martin Luther King’s death, an astronaut from the moon landing, pictures from the Vietnam war and other events that were big news in America.Rauschenberg’s first solo exhibition was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1951.Rauschenberg’s first solo exhibition was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1951.Rauschenberg’s first solo exhibition was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1951.

It seems that Rauschenberg has glued images to paper, cut up and stuck down over other images to give a layered effect, even the colours don’t match on all the pictures and they look like they don’t have anything to do with each other, the image forces you to only concentrate on one thing at a time. The only images that I can see that link together is maybe the black man in the corner seems to be resting something on Martin Luther King’s corpse, this may suggest something about black civil rights. Rauschenberg has maybe made this so confusing to show how much has gone on in such a short time, reflecting back on past events that effected most of the United States.