fine-art-practice

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Contemporary artists making a statement about social media

'Hansel and Gretel' by Ai Weiwei, Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron

'Hansel and Gretel' by Ai Weiwei, Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron created an installation that tackles the issue of surveillance and privacy in social media. ‘Hansel and Gretel’ prompts participants to think about their right to privacy. On a larger scale this means surveillance cameras and drones monitoring our movements, but on a smaller scale it also includes the fact that every man and their dog now has a camera phone that can be used to invade someone else’s privacy.

The Artist is Kinda Present’ by An Xiao

‘The Artist is Kinda Present’ by An Xiao created a performance piece which ran alongside Marina Abramovic's 'The Artist is Present' at the MoMA, 2010. Within this piece viewers are invited to sit in front of Xiao and engage with their phones by sending messages, tweets etc. and Xiao responded until they got bored. What I found interesting about this piece is that is clearly is supposed to show that technology speaks volumes about the way technology mediates our social ability to how people connect and the contrast between online and offline communication.

‘Tinder Diaries’ by Audrey Jones

Aubrey Jones' 2017 work, 'Tinder Diaries' dissects romance, intimacy, and the modern day courtship facilitated by dating apps. In a series of comics, Audrey illustrates the brash, vulgar, and downright disgusting messages that are often sent and received on Tinder. By putting a face or body to each message, Jones highlights the aspect of digital communication that allows us to hide behind a screen and say things we might not otherwise say in person.

I agree that Tinder and other social media sites allow you to hide behind a persona because no body knows what's at the other side of their phone screen, which makes especially the younger generation vulnerable to a variety of dangers including cyber bullying, catfishing, grooming and also self confidence issues due to social media being a key source of the 'idealised look' idealising what a woman or a man 'should' look like.

Due to new technology people can easily hide their true appearance. This generation is living purely in the 'selfie era', giving everyone the opportunity to change their photos with filters, Photoshop and other image altering settings because people want to hide their imperfections for the attention and praise they're looking for.

*However, this is not always the case, altering ones photos, can also give a confidence boost due to feeling beautiful and wanting to present yourself, even though this still conforms to the idea of creating a persona to 'fit in' with the rest of society.

Selfie-Esteem: The Relationship Between Body Dissatisfaction and Social Media in Adolescent and Young Women

Social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook have become ingrained in the lives of countless individuals. With adolescents and young adults, particularly young women, being the primary users of such platforms, it is an important question whether social media use has an impact on self-concept, self-esteem, body image, and body dissatisfaction.

“Social media is not real life,” stated Essena O’Neill, a 19-year-old Australian Internet star who quit social media in November of 2015 to prove the point that social media is just a means of fake self-promotion. As soon as she went silent, her fans and friends created an uproar. They called the Australian teen out and accused her of intentionally closing her social media accounts in an attempt to attract more fame and attention. Her fans, friends, and followers began posting blogs and videos in reaction to Essena quitting social media, with some going so far as sending death threats

'Selfies'

In the 17th century, only a handful of people on the planet had the skills, materials, and tools needed to create public self-portraits. In contemporary socity, sophisticated smartphones help us indulge the obsession to tell the world about ourselves, showing them what we find interesting about our faces, privileged about our vacations and interesting about our boredom.

Saatchi Gallery did an exhibition, “From Selfie to Self-Expression,” the world’s first exhibition exploring the history of the selfie, it captures self-portraiture in all its forms and its power to reboot how audiences understand art. The exhibit begins with acknowledged self-portraits of renowned painters digitally displayed on enormous flat screens, which look like oversize iPhones, displaying Diego Velazquez’s “Las Meninas” (1656), Rembrandt van Rijn’s “Self-portrait with Two Circles” (c. 1665–1669), Edvard Munch’s “Self-Portrait” (1882), Vincent Van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait with Pipe” (1886), and others. The viewers experience these classic paintings as if they’re selfies on your smartphone, moving past each like a swipe. You are even given the option to touch the screen and “like” each one. The painting with the most likes is Frida Kahlo’s “Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird” (1940), which has 42,055 likes to the 24,262 likes of Van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear” (1887–88). Perhaps viewers like Kahlo’s self-portrait more because it conforms to our polished expectations of the selfie. By contrast, Van Gogh’s appears rather brutal. Painted just after he cut off his ear, it doesn’t present himself as something more or different than he is; its brutal honesty isn’t trying to broker a kind of social-media currency.

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Series for AC3 exhibition. simple pencil drawings recapturing someones true outline, using crosshatch shading.

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John Tenniel as illustrator

Sir John Tenniel (1820 – 1914), an English illustrator and political cartoonist for the magazine ‘Punch’, made the illustrations for both Alice in Wonderland books

After the 1850s, Tenniel's style modernized to incorporate more detail in backgrounds and in figures. The inclusion of background details corrected the previously weak Germanic staging of his illustrations. Tenniel's more precisely-designed illustrations depicted specific moments of time, locale, and individual character instead of just generalized scenes.In addition to a change in specificity of background, Tenniel developed a new interest in human types, expressions, and individualized representation, something that would carry over into Tenniel's illustrations of Wonderland. Referred to by many as theatricalism, this hallmark of Tenniel's style probably stemmed from his earlier interest in caricature. In Tenniel's first years on Punch he developed this caricaturist's interest in the uniqueness of persons and things, almost giving a human like personality to the objects in the environment. For example, in a comparison to one of John Everett Millais's illustration of a girl in a chair with Tenniel's illustration of Alice in a chair, one can see how where Millais's chair is just a prop, Tenniel's chair possesses a menacing and towering presence.

Another change in style was his shaded lines. These transformed from mechanical horizontal lines to vigorously hand-drawn hatching that greatly intensified darker areas..

I would like to use the cross hatch technique within my work creating an illustration. I like this technique because it’s bold but simple, it looks really effective but not as time consuming

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This is Igor Lukyanovs, views on cross hatching and artists who have inspired him

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i have wanted to find a looser drawing style and i have found this artist, Igor Lukyanov whose style of drawing is more illustration based with the use cross hatch technique to shade. i have really started to experiment with cross hatching and i am really enjoying the effect it. The talented Ukrainian artist/illustrator Igor Lukyanov is a featured emerging artist. His portfolio shows a wide range of work including product design. “Before starting my career as an independent artist I had been working for a web and graphic design company for around a year.”

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Why do you take selfies?

I have started using my friends as m inspiration within my work as it came to me that everyone has got their own reasons to why they do and don’t take selfies?

here are my friends answers:

L - I take selfies because everyone else does, you have to in this generation  to keep relevant J - I do it to feel better in myself, to keep an online presence and hold my appearance, i’m not very social able so i post selfies to let people know i still exist

T - i take selfies for reassurance when people like or comment, but i hard ly post them because i feel like i’m being judged.

K - If i’m feeling fit, i’ll take a selfie

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This is an example of how I have incorporated their answers to the question “Why do you take selfies?” I have wrote this in fine pen and created a selfie in a Polaroid. I’m going to experiment with different techniques and composition.

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I have found a looser drawing style that I’ve practiced and really enjoy doing it and it doesn’t take me as long as a detailed pencil portrait. I have started using friends as my muse as I wanted to find out why they took selfies and somehow incorporate that into my work. Yet to practise incorporating these together

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Selfie

REMBRANDT

Rembrandt's lessons for the selfie era: why we must learn to look again. Self-portraits have always reflected self-esteem, this was true in the Renaissance. It was true for Rembrandt, whose late works, which include many self-portraits, go on display in the National Gallery, and it is true for us now.

Selfies reflects a surge in self-confidence that is both admirable and dangerous.

Rembrandt leaves behind 80 renderings of his own image, between paintings, drawings and etchings. His preoccupation with self-portraiture was not a passing fancy of youth, nor was it an old man’s obsession: it spans his entire career.

The sheer number of surviving self-portraits attests to a marked self-confidence on his part, and a desire to be immortalised. Rembrandt wanted us to remember him, because he mattered. 

When we take a selfie, we are making the same statement. We are saying: Look at me. I matter. Facing bankruptcy, having endured the deaths of many of those most dear to him, Rembrandt stood before the mirror and painted himself. His self-portraits show him, not as he wished he might have been, but as he was: ageing, thickening, alone in the gathering gloom.He wanted us to remember him – as an artist, certainly, but also as a man: bereaved, lonely perhaps, but undeniably proud. We try to erase our most personal imperfections. Being photogenic is more important than looking like ourselves.Rather than being driven by an internal, proto-Romantic compulsion to explore his own soul via his self-image, maybe he was meeting a demand for “portraits of the artist, by the artist”.

One thing is clear, though: his images required care, thought, skill. They took time. They were the product of a long and careful look, and another, and another; they did not issue from one throwaway glance.

Self-confidence is indispensable. It is the cornerstone of the human rights movement: it is the necessary precursor to that raising of long-silent voices that is the pride of our modern age.

We are tempted to have experiences for the purpose of photographing them, and apply a filter to them, because the last thing we want is for our lives to look ordinary. But when we stand before a Rembrandt self-portrait, we realise that being ordinary – being human – is where the real interest lies.

The selfie threatens to distract us from what we should be doing, and what Rembrandt did: looking at ourselves closely, honestly, but compassionately. Rembrandt teaches us to take care. He teaches us to create self-portraits, rather than taking selfies. He teaches us to look again.

Source:

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/16/rembrandt-selfie-era-self-portrait

I think this is a really great take on how we should treat selfies but also how they define and take over us without us realising, The idea of making an effort to buffer images wit filters to be judged by strangers. 

“Selfies are not self-portraits. Self-confidence is not a problem. And self-portraits aren’t a problem. It’s when the self-portrait becomes a selfie – trivial, banal, and ultimately disposable – that we should tread carefully.” I really like this statement due to the idea of portraits and selfies being two different things but people try to make them something they aren’t. self portraiture is time and patience, no just clicking a button to snap a picture of a face.

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Some more doodles just experimenting with life drawing and drawings what’s in front of me.

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These are a few experiments I created using Biro. Trying to experiment with quicker ways to draw and I liked the idea of having some drawings half finished , therefore experimenting with colour, mark making and medium

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A group member had postcards created for us all, this is mine just with a statement on what my work meant. We suggested donations when taking one and made £26 on postcards alone.

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This is our finished poster for everyone to view and get a true feel of our exhibition and as us as a group.

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It was my job to be in charge of advertisement and create posters to place around Sheffield. This was my rough first draft but thought trial and error we experimented to find a better look to represent our exhibition

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For our second exhibition we picked a venue that truly reflected all of us as a group, it was quaint and rustic, it was held at The Holt cafe In Sheffield.

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These are some other experiments of different things to try and sprout interest, and to experiment using different materials and mediums.