Being Human

Being Human

Project Brief

Being Human (Mock F.M.P.) 
This project offers you the opportunity to consolidate your existing skills, and extend your visual research through life drawing, alongside your investigation into relevant historical and contextual understanding. 
You should consider extending the way in which you interpret the above, in terms of conceptual thought, structural elements relating to life drawing and the relationship of the figure to your subject area. As a starting point you should work towards the following: 
You have been asked to participate in an arts festival. The festival theme is “Being Human” and will celebrate the diverse creativity within the local area. The guidelines given for the festival are very broad, and essentially ask that each artist or designer remain true to their own vocational context, in order to ease the planning and mapping of the experience for visitors. 
Therefore, you must produce a body of work that demonstrates your knowledge, understanding and ability to work within your chosen career path. In order to do this, you must submit a proposed rational, brief and time-plan for the festival organisers. 

Life drawing work

Prior to the mock FMP we had around 12 sessions of life drawings that we used to expand our skills and ideas for drawing the human form, I found this very helpful as I learnt a lot of new skills that I never knew I had prior this project.

I also discovered a love for oil pastel and quick geometric sketches of the human form, this lead me to the point of where I decided the theme I would undertake for my mock FMP.

Primitivism

"Primitivism is a Western art movement that borrows visual forms from non-Western or prehistoric peoples, such as Paul Gauguin's inclusion of Tahitian motifs in paintings and ceramics. Borrowings from primitive art has been important to the development of modern art.

The term "primitivism" is often applied to other professional painters working in the style of native or folk art like Henri Rousseau, Mikhail Larionov, Paul Klee and others."

For my work with Primitivism I want to lean many of the techniques that were used by different tribes and cultures when making their artwork. For my artwork I want to create a series of pieces that mirror how artwork was used to record events and moments in life in a primitive style but of events from the present.

I researched into a method of paint making that was used for many of the worlds cave paintings, these primal paints were made from a base of animal fat, spit and colouring (charcoal for black/ sand for reds/ soil for browns and so on) when doing my sketches I used tools that were used for painting by these primal groups such as hair and sharpened sticks. I found these tools added to the paint mix to be a vey long winded and difficult task and had to tone down my original idea of working exactly how early man did and begin using drawing inks for my artwork ( after all I only have so much spit )

Doll Making

I wanted to create a few 3D pieces to go along side my 2D paintings. A main theme in 3D pieces I found was dolls, each form of doll had a different use or purpose as well as style depending on the culture. I began looking at forms like the european dolls often made from wood or hair like the blair witch one below. then I looked into african fertility dolls that were made to bring pregnancy and good health these often depicted men with large members and women with large breasts. The last doll I made was the voodoo doll, a doll found in witchcraft all over the world, I worked in the caribian style where I started with black dyed clay, decorated with seeds and stone and completed with a fiber body.

Coming of age

The stone below was my attempt at the hand prints left on the cave walls of many north american caves, it is not entirely known what the represented but the lack of child hand prints made many believe that it was a symbol of becoming an adult. To be created the stone would be dampened and then paint would be spat or flung to capture the mark of who ever was being printed. 

Now and then

For my 2D piece I wanted to capture a primitive style moment from today in the style of primal artists. My main interest to primitivism was the want to create by man so many years ago that lasts to this day for all to see how they lived. I decided to work from a subject I knew, that being gig life. How a group of people can perform to like up and entertain others back into being in a primal state. For the piece below I still worked with primitive tools but had to use drawing ink as the amount I would have to make would be damn near impossible.