Girls with pearl earrings, an online drawing.

I explored the process of creating an online drawing by interacting with people i knew over the internet.
this involved facebook, blogging and email.

i decided to ask people to produce a drawing of 'Girl with the Pearl Earring' by Vermeer. 
This included people who studied art, people who knew the painting, people who'd seen the film or read the book and people who knew nothing at all of the painting. The piece has different interpretations throughout it's media and it's history, the girl eventually becomes a vague image surrounded by reality and myth. by layering lots of people's interpretations of the image i created a drawing that paralleled this.

 

by taking many peoples interpretations it had the effect of looking more similar to the painting than any of the drawings did when stood alone.

three colours: blue.

"I’m like any other woman. I sweat. I cough. I have cavities. You won’t miss me. You understand that now…Shut the door when you leave."

Rauschenberg portrait work

Cut Up

"All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read, heard, overheard. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of rearranged cut-ups. Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound to kinesthetic." william burroughs

From A to B

We are all so complicated, and then we die. We are a subject one day, with our vanities, our loves, our worries, and then one day, abruptly, we become nothing but an object, an absolutely disgusting pile of shit. We pass very quickly from one stage to the next. It's very bizarre. It will happen to all of us, and fairly soon too. We become an object you can handle like a stone, but a stone that was someone.

—Christian Boltanski

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

barbed hula-Sigalit Landau

i saw this film art, in centre de pompidou in paris last year.

mesmerised i wondered who was watching in awe and who in a sick curiosity.
that kind of curiosity which provokes people to slow down as they pass a wreckage, or stare at people in an a&e waiting room. human nature is to be attracted to that which we would never want to see.

you may feel you're above others.

i do miss making art with you mily lellor.

painting in miniture

sometimes i like to paint very small.

it's probably about the size it's about on your screen, and has it's own mini easel.

sometimes it's nice to be so concentrated in on such a small space, you lose yourself in every tiny mark made.

every brush stoke counts

in equality

to the next.

welcome to our world..

-http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/tattoo/

we are the wasted youth; and we are the future too.

skön Sverige

I loved Sweden. Especially Steninge where Chris' grandparents have their summer house, it is beautiful.

i've fallen in love with rocky beaches, just wish the weather had been nicer for longer!

poetic cosmos of the breath

I first read about Tomas Saraceno in a French Vogue that i picked up in Paris in april.
The piece here was actually about ArtBrussels exhibition which i would love to visit one day, but it was the articles picture that captured my attention.

This is Tomas Saraceno's 'Poetic Cosmos of Breath', an installation piece that was created to interact the iridescent material with the rising sun. Upon inflation the dome reflects cascading ripples of neon. When i initially saw the pictures it made me think of blowing bubbles, when the sun catches the liquid in the bubble and swirls the same colous.



This video shows it's setting up as well as it's finished effect.



I think for me this is the start of something good and irresponsible.

sit back, relapse

i've been quite irritated with myself at my lack of blogging.

i need to get back into being creative. i need to explore ideas, not just emotionally but phsically.

working could be to blame or it could just be an excuse. hopefully my trip to sweden will break me out of this and push me in a good direction again. it will be great to be in a country that's different but bears similarities to england.

crash.

After the commonplaces of everyday life, with their muffled dramas, all my organic expertise for dealing with physical injury had long been blunted or forgotten. The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years.
-J.G.Ballard, Crash.

"I came to Party Crashing because accidents happen. People you love will die. Nothing you treasure will last forever. And I need to accept and embrace that fact."
-Chuck Palahniuk, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey.

for once i want to be the car crash
not always just the traffic jam
-Snow Patrol, headlight on dark roads.

The cruel truth:

people have an amazing ability to make me constantly doubt my own.

working hard and with a passion for what you do,

                                                             gets you nowhere...

"I am still a girl trying to understand myself"

 

R.I.P Louise Bourgeois

 

"The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn't get mad. She weaves and repairs it."

i know a place we can go where you'll fall in love so hard that you'll wish you were dead.

One of those fucking awful black days when nothing is pleasing and everything that happens is an excuse for anger. An outlet for emotions stockpiled, an arsenal, an armour. These are the days when I hate the world, hate the rich, hate the happy, hate the complacent, the TV watchers, beer drinkers, the satisfied ones. Because I know I can be all of those little hateful things and then I hate myself for realising that. There's no preventative, directive or safe approach for living. We each know our own fate. We know from our youth how to be treated, how we'll be received, how we shall end. These things don't change. You can change your clothes, change your hairstyle, your friends, cities, continents but sooner or later your own self will always catch up. Always it waits in the wings. Ideas swirl but don't stick. They appear but then run off like rain on the windshield. One of those rainy day car rides my head implodes, the atmosphere in this car a mirror of my skull. Wet, damp, windows dripping and misted with cold. Walls of grey. Nothing good on the radio. Not a thought in my head.
 -Be Safe by The Cribs

I liked to listen to this song on really loud when driving. It's really quite good.

i am young; and i am lost

every sentence has it's cost.

it was amazing to see annette messager's work in paris, an artist who i have studied intensely in touching distance. just wish my digi cam hadn't of been playing up!

fmp one week in counting! i'll be sure to post some pics of the finished piece.

blinded by the sun and the sea

line drawings from my dreams, these have been drawn onto the mattress and will be embellishes with embroidered text. 10 days left of college!

                                                                           

 Sarah Richards via English Muse

ink indulgence

liking the idea of an arm tattoo. on display forever? when i'm wrinkly i won't care.

everytime i see fmp i think..

fuck
my
project

                                                         take me back to paris?

                                      please

insomnia is a symptom.

recently i have had great trouble sleeping. ironic considering my fmp is about that action of which i can not fulfill.
certainly dream documentation is causing me problems sleeping, as dreams and reality mesh. It is probably very unhealthy to be so aware of what i've dreamt. dreaming being a process through which our brains realises desires and anxieties of the day that have been pushed into the depths of our unconscious mind. i'm reliving these thoughts everyday in my work.

                                           plaster cast pillow (3rd attempt)

even when i'm sleeping, it's not a satisfying sleep. and fatigue follows. to the point where i'm disrupting my work. leading to anxiety. vicious circle.


zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

We must never, ever be boring.

This was just a quick break from my final major project, i think it messes with your head a bit when your so inside a project.
If you have read Invisible Monsters this will make perfect sense. If not go and read it, it this is probably one of the most influential things i have ever read. I did the same drawing from the same image last year, and i loved drawing it so much that i decided i would draw it again, i wonder if this one is any better?

I'm currently struggling with deciding between Loughborough and Leeds University, both of which i now have offers for.  I have weighed the pro's and con's and i'm still struggling. help!

a little side-tracked.

so i was looking for more artist who work with sleep, and thought that searching blogs might be the way to discover some.
I didn't find any...but i did find this blog, which i found absolutely hilarious, so i thought i'd share it.
I love how he has a whole sleeping persona, and how dry he is. 

his poor wife! I used to sleep talk (and walk) a lot, and my dad would frequently tell me i'd shouted something in the middle of the night. I'm not sure whether a change of environment has stopped me from sleep talking, or whether Chris is simply too heavy a sleeper to notice.

eventually i did find an artist that documents people sleeping.
David Ichioka's Sleep PixSeries, is 9 sets of people photographed sleeping every 30 mins. They are so honest and personal, and really show "the third of our lives when we're not aware our body is up to". Yet again references Chiharu Shiota's work, we are never further away from knowing what is going on in the minds of the sleepers.

we're all mad here.

Following my work with Dreams and Subconscious i have decided to create a series of surreal imagery, using discordant themes and subjects, to create scenarios that would appear in dreams.
I wanted the photos to involve me as my dream journal is so personal to me, i think i needed to have that connection with the scenes. I wanted to create an un-real composition placing everyday objects outside of their surroundings. I really tried hard to steer the piece away from an Alice in Wonderland theme, attempting to make it more threatening and less fairytale.

The majority of the photos, i blurred the backgrounds out of focus making them appear even more dreamlike, the contrast between the harsh focus and an undefinable forest background.

Freeing the Line

Just found these two pictures that show Monika Grzymala's work Transition, which was part of the Freeing the Line exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery. I think they are actually great, so foreboding and oppressive, like a bit black mass permeating the white space, it reminds me of Chiharu Shiota's work about sleep and dreamers. Black can be extremely powerful and psychologically invading, yet also has a sense of beauty.

                                                       Monkia Gryzmala, Transition

                                                         Chiharu Shiota, Unconscious Anxiety 

Parisian Skies

Can you tell i'm excited about our trip to Paris?

just two photoshop postcards which i quickly strung together using images i sourced off the internet, and then manipulated. i only have Photoshop Elements, so i can be a little bit limited sometimes- but i really like these.

the left contains Friendly Fires' lyrics and the right is Maximo Park. i don't think i could possibly romanticise this trip much more if i tried!

First Edition Flush

I was amazed to discover today that Polaroid were due to finally release their new film for both the old SX-70 and One series cameras, on the 25th March...today! Being the owner of a one series and having only 4 Polaroids left to my name, for a good 5 minutes i was very excited about finally getting my hands on some new film. Until i found out the release of film for Polaroid One has been delayed. Boo.

In an attempt to reinvent myself, i had all my long blonde hair chopped off. I miss it terribly, i think sometimes i hope that if i change my appearance i may change my perspective, offering fresh ideas, and artistic inspiration.
we'll see.

My work centered around dreams has led me to Gregory Crewdson.

The images depict a surreal american suburbia in which the ordinary twists, and forms images you would fail to imagine.

I particularly like the last photographs which is very Ophelia (Hamlet), the drowned living room -so still the water appears mirror like. I really like the colours used, to emphasise the familiarity yet the darkness which is evident.

Currently feeling a little depressive about my lack of hair, this is severe vanity maybe it's a good thing its gone!