I also have to write a small artists statement that will be put on a plaque that will go next to my work in the gallery, this I am definitely stuck on, simply because I still don't know what I'm even using in the exhibition haha. I'm sure that all artists have this late panic just before they're about to show something but Holy Shite....
I have also decided that I will be entering a painting into The Williamson Art Gallery Spring/Summer Fine Art and Photography Competition.... Hopefully my work will be good enough because I'm forking out £90.00 for a frame to put it in.
My current work however, is based on Beauty, and what is conventional beauty? why is it the norm?
as you all know I am greatly inspired by surrealism and expressionism, so I have been trying to find a good balance between the two.... I have primarily been creating collages from magazine imagery and turning these autonomous figures into distorted demons. They still hold a fashionable and femenine element to them- which I love.
My teachers are trying to convince me to just submit the collages to the exhibition, however, I like the process of creating work from imagery, not using imagery.
Here are a couple of peices that I have been working on:
(Apologies for the poor photography.)
This peice is yet to be completed.
I was inspired by a wallpaper that I saw which was basically a print of a dandelion; when the seeds are leaving the centre.
As I am collaging fashion imagery I thought it would be suitable to create an image using all the lips that I could find from one Vogue magazine.
I used lips for the obvious reason that you blow the seeds away with your mouth.
I actually love the image that I have created, simply because it was totally autonomously created, yet has created a beautiful image.
This peice is also unfinished, however I find that I progress more if I work on more than one peice at a time. my Plan for this painting is to distort Barbie.... as I am challenging conventional beauty I thought Barbie would be the perfect model.
It disappoints me that children are brought up to believe that barbie is the 'norm'. she's just a plastic doll. maybe they should make a doll with cellulite, maybe a jaw with a slight overbite, or a larger bridge to her nose. would people still see her as a role model??
More and more women these days are getting surgery to look like barbie- Heidi Montag, Lady Gaga....no offence to them, I think they're beautiful, and I don't disagree with surgery at all, I'm just saying, what's so wrong with being yourself?
Barbie is seen as the 'perfect woman' but if you look at the doll, she is alien like, she has a symmetrical face, iluminous yellow/white hair. infact she is completely imperfect. I don't want this painting to look completely clean and graphic like. I want her to look ugly and over worked. Almost as if She'd had surgery.
These are the kind of collages that I am creating.... as you can see here, the peices of the figure have been taken from some of the most beautiful women from normal fashion magazines that we obsess over every day.
My point is, is that if you take a nose you like, lips you like, breasts you like, eyes and brows that you like, legs you like from different people and compile them together the result is not as beautiful as you thought it would be....