Three collages I presented as my final work materials used – needles, soil, photographs of the eye, euphrasia seeds.  The work is about the idea of a cure for visual impairments and looking at complete blindness and surgical procedures.  I found that I wanted to look at the idea of a cure in a positive response and found that certain flowers were thought to help improve vision and although they were not necessarily a complete cure they were natural unlike surgery.

Andrea Pisano

Worked around the time of the medieval art movement

Italian sculptor and architect

used bronze and marble in an amazingly skilled way

Detail was everything at this time of ornate sculpture

He also produced reeifs the subjects were: the Four Great Prophets, the Seven Virtues, the Seven Sacraments, the Seven Works of Mercy and the Seven Planets.

Detail of Andrea Pisano’s panel for the Florence Baptistery.

Auguste Rodin

Many of Rodin’s most notable sculptures were roundly criticized during his lifetime.

They clashed with the predominant figure sculpture tradition

Rodin’s most original work departed from traditional themes of mythology and allegory, modeled the human body with realism, and celebrated individual character and physicality.

 Rodin was sensitive to the controversy about his work, but did not change his style, and successive works brought increasing favor from the government and the artistic community.

The Burghers of Calais by Auguste Rodin, in Victoria Tower Gardens, London, England.
Under French law no more than twelve casts of this piece were permitted after Rodin’s death.

Frederic Remington

American painter, illustrator, sculptor and writer.

worked in bronze using traditional methods of sculpture

In 1895 Remington began to make sculptures, producing 22 different subjects. He worked in clay. His clay models were cast in bronze at art foundries. His first four subjects were cast using the sand casting method.

In 1898 he began working exclusively with Roman Bronze Works using the lost-wax bronze casting method.

Raymond Duchamp-Villon
Brother of Marcel Duchamp and Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon began his education as a medical student at the University of Paris. After a becoming ill in 1898, he was forced to switch career paths and took up sculpture. Self-taught, he worked in a variety of styles before adopting Cubism in 1910.
Below is one of his most famous pieces of work ‘the horse’.

These are examples of site-specific work by an artist called James Jaxxa which I found when researching neo-dada work. I like the idea of creating something so small which goes unoticed at first blending into the environment itself.

The following is a statement he made about the work I have shown:

The concept of an orderly, systemized world constantly ruptures to reveal elements that I find seductive, brutal, contradictory and absurd. It is from this prodigious and fantastic reality that I choose the objects and symbols for my art.

From the baroque profusion of modern life, I mix familiar materials with those that are bright, glittery and sensuous to expose latent possibilities in the commonplace. Through combining these materials, I challenge preconceived ideas of what an object is and what role it should play in our lives by setting up provocative dialogues.

Like the playground of a high-energy dance club where glitz and joyful wildness meet desperation and loneliness, I meld fantasy and reality. I evoke the wonderment, vitality and playful abandon of youth. I explore the relationship between dichotomies such as nature and the artificial, the everyday and the extraordinary, feminine and masculine. Excited by the opportunities for subversion and change, I enjoy creating the unexpected.

 Red Pear Tree, 2004
Site-specific work
Chelsea Waterside Park, New York

Sexy, 2003
Site-specific work
11th Avenue between 27th and 28th, New York

Water Pillows, 2005
Site-specific work
Fort Tryon Park, New York

Fantastic Green Gemstones, 2005
Site-specific work
Topanga Beach, Los Angeles

Lime and Orange Drinks, 2005
Site-specific work
Fort Tryon Park, New York

Pirate’s Treasure, 2003
Site-specific work
East River Esplanade, New York

The perils of fame 

Relacing celebritys with stars using ideas such as the red carpet, drugs.  Obsession with celebritys.  My concept was about the struggle to become famous and I took the idea of cloning to be like a celebrity when I cast the pills showing their imperfections and also showing the imperfections in the way I drew the stars.  The gold paint and red material were there as a reminder of the glamous and wanting to be a part of that.  I sort of imagined it as poor people dressing up in fancy clothese as if they were creating their own version of the celebrity lifestyle and sort of mocking it at the same time.

Zadok Ben-David, Horse power

This sculptor was interested in textured surfaces which absorb light and metaphysics.  He often tried to convey his feelings about the beast within man and often used animals or the silhouette of an animal in his work.  I admired the way he used shaddows and cared about the nature of these animals in a scientific way.  This piece takes ideas from times when a strong horse was like a racing car of today – they were valued more and showed others how wealthy you were.

For my sculptural piece I decided to used materials which reflected the idea.  I used soap and coal to creat a tunnel shape similar to a rabbits burrow.  The idea was about cleaning obsesively to protect yourself – soap, and heat as a form of protection – coal.  I combined the materials by melting the soap down using a little water because as it cools it goes back into the same dry form holding the piece together.  It works really well and as some people suggested it is not slippery like soap or oily it goes completely dry again.  I liked the look of the black against white and felt that this helped to reinfoce the contast of clean, dirty.  Basically I was combining opposites and I felt that it worked well and would have made a nice piece if I had enough time to reinforce the height with plaster from the inside.  However I got some really nice photos of it when it was lit from the inside.  I broke it in the end because it was fragile and would have been hard to take back home but theres no point when you have photos which is something I really hate about sculpture because I like the real form of the artwork being there in front of you to see and touch.  Ye Im not good at sculpture at all really dont like doing anything 3D most of the time but im glad that I learn more from doing it.

Just realised that I hadn’t written much about the process of my work for protection from last assesment.  Basically I thought about fear and how this relates to things that sort of scare me and started looking at animals because one of the things I came up with was albino animals.  They really scare me sometimes I dont know why its just the lack of colour – pigment and just the way that some of them look as though they dont have eyes.  I had a pet which was albino like it was all white with red eyes and thats what made me think of the rabbit when you hold them they get scared and their heart will beat faster so I focused on this form of fear more on the feeling of the heartbeat than the actual animal.

Observing fear in the rabbit.  The rabbit became my subject and metaphor for this type of fear.   We protect a pet by caring for it like its a natural instinct of ours to care for something providing the necessary – the purpose of all of this caring is so that the animal will not die which is strange because everything has to die eventually but I found it interesting.

In my research I collected images of the anatomy of animals and of rabbits.  I then began experimenting with drawing, making colour associations and painting for various surface textures.  I used accetate and wood in my final drawings and felt that the accetate worked best as I didn’t think of using it at first.  I also experimented by drawing more detailed images of rabbits and cutting out where the heart should be and also attacting diagrams of the heart.  The accetate piece seemed to work well as my aim was to start off with just a small amount of red paint to represent the heart and have the colour grow as the rabbit moved accross and it sort of worked out like an animation.  If I had more time I would have made some more drawings and paintings going into more detail and maybe a larger scale piece.

Bruce Nauman is an artist completely uninterested in adding to a collection of things that are art.  He is investigating the possibilities of what art may be.  He was interested in the role of the artist in society.  As early as 1964 he tried to give up painting – “My concept of being an artist was making pictures, landscapes but I knew that this was not enough”.  At first it seems as though he was very unsure how to break away from painting which is like Manzoni’s earlier work.  He started to adapt painting to suit some of his ideas and his next step was to weld steel parts into organic shapes and bolt them onto his canvases.  “I loved moving the paint around and the manipulation of materials.  It was very serious, but it also got in the way.  I still dont trust any kind of lush solution, which painting was, and so I decided that I was not going to be a painter.  I can imagine that this would be a difficult decision to make as an artist.  Nauman often made list of things that he could do for example to a straight bar such as bend it, twist it etc.  He applied the same method to his performances in relation to the shape of his body.  This was to emphasise the process of making art rather than the result.  “In a way I was using my body as a piece of material and manipulating it”

One of his most famous pieces of work is his self portrait as a fountain.  I find his work in neon signs really different and fun.  He experimented so thoroughly for everything he does.  The writing involved in the neon signs is really ineresting as he spells the words backwords creating new meanings and highlighting certain letters within the words.

Above – Double face

I really like the way Nauman works and thinks about things.  I feel that he has a sense of style even though he says he likes the way certain artists dont seem to have a style and his work is pretty varied he approaches the waork in a similar way.  I especially like his work in neon as the way he used it to describe sex and sort of swear words and stuff I think worked really well illuminating it rather than trying to hide it.

This artwork was made by an artist who had the idea that he could make a new artwork by erasing another artist’s drawing—with the artist’s permission.  Does giving your permission for something like this to happen to a piece of your artwork make you a part of the process – like a collaborative piece? I dont think of it as a collaboration but more a work of art by Willem de Kooning which is what it was before it was handed to Robert Rauschenburg.  I think of it in the exact same way with de Kooning being the artist who created this piece of work.  I think that by allowing the erasing to occur de Kooning plays a more superior part in the artwork however I also think of Robert Rauschenburg as an artist who had a great idea and wanted to be more involved in other artists work.

Maybe I need to be more appreciative of the concept involved but to me everything is still there that was before erased.  The marks left which could not be erased, the pressure of the materials all tell the story of what was there so the painting is still there its just that you can see it slightly differently – not that the apperance of it has changed but thinking of it  differently.