Final project: FREEDOM

Our final project is based on freedom, something that all people have, freedom to me is that we are free to say what we want, do what we want and go where we want and the big one is that we are free to express ourselves in which ever way we want wether it be through music or art or writing ect. 

The first thing we did was draw a mind map of what freedom was and what linked in with it like racial equality and martin L king with his speach or through art where banksey does his work outside of the rules, making his art where and when he wants with his freedom of expression.

Vintage project evaluation

I chose to research the 1960s which is also the rock n roll era because it was the begining for my favourite type of music and i loved doing the research on where rock came from and how it evolved and how it has made rock music the way it is today. From the 1960s i chose to research the music as my chosen focus and i also looked at fashion, transport, the vietnam war and the comic book heroes of this time. The main cultural influences of the 1960s were mainly the music where rock n roll started to become popular with bands such as the Kinks and the Beatles which were from the UK as well as the comic book movement that started to become massively popular especially with in the US and the minimalistic life style, influenced by an architect known as "Mies Van De Rohe" he believed that less was better, having a space that wasn't over filled and had just the essencials. Through the 1960s there were many artists and designers, i researched into the architect called mies van de rohe who ive named above, then there was the graphic designer Stanley Mouse who designed film posters and some of the work from the sphycadelic art movement. Then there was roy lichenstiene who was a big part of the pop art movement. Then there was the minimalism movement with in the art world where i researched donald judd and tony smith who were sculptures from the 60s. In my opinion the art and design in my chosen era was pretty wide in verity with sculptures made from metal and wood in simple shapes to comic book like pop art with bright block colour and paterns that caught your eye. In my sketchbook I've kept to my usual media such as acrylic and water colour paint and pencil both shading and coloured with some use of oil pastels because I didn't like the thought of ruining my sketchbook with experiments with art that would go wrong so i kept to what i was comfortable with. With my chosen media i think it was effective as I mostly used paint for block colour or background with easy to do detail then i used pencil to add fine detail and some block colour. To be honest my annotations aren't that creative as I've just written on my pages in black ink as I don't think annotations need to be fancy. Like with all my projects i think i could have managed my time better with doing more at home than just one or two pages so if i were to do this again i would do at least 3 to 4 pages for each day of homework and try to do maybe 4 to 5 pages in class. I am satisfied with my sketchbook over all i think ive tested myself with some painting like the mighty chrysler painting and the lizard drawing from the spiderman comics was something I'd not tried before but i do think i could have put in more acrylic paint work andd maybe some scraffito work in one or 2 places like the fashion pages and the music pages.

Christian Boltanski

French sculptor, photographer, painter and filmmaker. Self-taught, he began painting in 1958 but first came to public attention in the late 1960s with short avant-garde films and with the publication of notebooks in which he came to terms with his childhood. The combination in these works of real and fictional evidence of his and other people's existence remained central to his later art.

In class we were looking at a particular piece by Christian boltanski known as theatre d'ombre which translates to theatre of shadows, created between 1985-1990. This piece is a haunting yet playful piece created with scraps of every day materials such as cardboard and wire to become a piece of contemporary art that portrays the memories and dreams as well as the nightmare of jewish children from the Holocaust. 

Samantha Groom print making artist

Samantha groom is a Sheffield based printmaker specialising in wood and lino-cut printing onto paper, cardboard and fabric although she does enjoy all forms of printmaking. she likes to perform work with out technical equipment if she can get away with out using it. she recently became a full-time printmaker after over twelve years teaching art and textiles in secondary school. she works from her home studio, using her ‘Rollaco’ press.

she has always taken her ideas from the everyday things around and these days she finds her inspiration in the fun she has with her six year old; from the songs and books they share. from her blog I have found that she likes to create simple, brightly coloured and playful prints that also remind her of imagery from her childhood in the 1970’s.

here is some of her prints :

Jonathon Borofsky

Borofsky was born in Boston,Massachusetts. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in 1964, after which he continued his studies at France's Ecole de Fontainebleau and received his Master of Fine Arts from Yale Universityin 1966. Borofsky specialises in sculptures, his most famous pieces are the hammer men which slot together to create a tower. Each structural piece is near 30 feet tall and have been constructed all over the world with the largest structure bieng in Korea and the second largest in Germany.  His work is in many parts of the US and one piece was placed over a drug store in the US looking like a clown.

Cardboard city town centre trip

This week we had a walk with the whole group where we would go round taking photos of the town buildings and the skyline, as well as visiting the matisse exhibition at the civic. Then we came back and were told that we would be in pairs and would have to make a scene with the boxes by cutting them and painting them to create a one of a kind city box. This would then be our chamber where our wire figures would then hang and create shadows on our city scene.

Zoatrope workshop

For this workshop we had to make a sort of film strip of anything we wanted. To make it we had to fold the paper into 12 squares and then draw 6 different images of a sequence. Then we would draw the 6 images in the backwards order on the other 6 squares. Then once we drew them with pencil we would go over them in fine liner to make the images stand out, then we used colour to finish them off. 

The Zoatrope was created by ding haun in 100 bc and was later improved by a British mathematician called William George hornor in 1843 where he created the drum like structure. 

Card board city

In this session on our cardboard city project we were introduced to a photographer called James Brunt who introduced us to his way of art. The aim of the session was to build a cardboad city but we decided to create a castle/turret where we added guns and a cannon. After this we were told we had to build a pyramid but had to work together as a class, this showed us who were the leaders and who was confident.after this we had to build a sort of chamber where we would put our wire figures we made in the last session, then we turned off the lights and turned on the lamp in the middle of the chamber where it showed us shadows.