Life Drawing: In a gallery

We had various materials to choose from. Our model was clothed infront of the gallery window. The difference in environment creates a new challenge and new opportunies.

On The Side: Giraffe and Fish paintings.

As well as foundation work, I also do work for people who request it. For a birthday I created two paintings, one which consisted of giraffes and the other of fresh water fish. I simply used watercolour and fine liner as that is my style of work that people like. I also window-mounted them myself, I have window-mounted a lot of my past work so I have built up the skill however there is still room to improve.

Life Drawing: Ink and Water/ Fine liner

The Gallery: Continued

The background drawing is going to link to where the framed drawings are placed, like a map of where I've been and what has been there. I am using fine liner to draw on the wall.

Sean Dower Lecture

Sean Dower's lecture consisted of a visual timeline of his life as an artist; both his achievements and mistakes. It showed us the transitions people go through to get to where they are. As an artist, everything is unpredictable. Sean didn't hide from the fact that he had dropped out of things and failed to do things, it is a learning process. I was hoping to chat to him about where I want to be in the near future and whether I am going about it all the right way however I had work commitments so unfortunately I missed out. 

The Gallery

We have been given an empty shop in Blackburn to exhibit our work in. I am ecstatic about this opportunity and I am looking forward to working in the space I am given. I chose the window space as it has a ledge that I can use as a table to continue working on. First however I need to complete the space around me.
I will be revolving my work around the trip to Africa by putting my framed drawings up all over the wall. I plan for the drawings to be placed above a big drawing that I will have done straight onto the wall which will serve as a background. I also want to put some text on the window. I want the text to be a quote from Africa however I'm not sure which quote would be most effective as I collected a few. It will be between "In Africa we always say 'I'll see to that', it's a less diplomatic way of saying no" and "They were shooting inside and outside."
The opportunity to work in a different space and environment will help process different thoughts and ideas. I will be continuously working on things in the shop during the day so I can speak to any members of the public that wish to speak about my work, my experiences in Africa or that simply want to watch how I work.

UCAS Fair

Today I visited the UCAS fair dedicated to Art and Design subjects. As opposed to last year, I actually understood the day a lot more and knew what to get from it. Alongside my tutor, I visited the Edinburgh stand as Edinburgh is my first choice. I needed to know what they like to see when seeing online portfolios and what my chances are of becoming successful. I am really worried when concerning my A-Level grades. Although I have A's in Fine Art for both GCSE and A-Level along with a B in GCSE graphics and an A in A-Level photography, I acquired a grade C in English Literature A-Level and they require grade B minimum. I am hoping that my two grade A's in English Language and English Literature at GCSE prove that I am skilled in the subject and I simply had a bit of a knock-back in the final A2 English Literature exam. When I explained this to them, they explained to me that as long as my online portfolio meets their standards, the admissions team will look beyond my grade. They advised me to keep my online portfolio simple and not to try and cram a lot of images into one file. I will bare this in mind when the time comes to submit my portfolio.

Fine liner drawing

Rather than doing more watercolour, I created a piece of work using just my fine liner pen. This style of work is my favourite. The reason I haven't been doing it often is because it is quite time consuming. When drawing up ideas or doing quick observational work, watercolour is the best medium as the outcome is fast and effective. In this drawing I cut out the photograph of the girl and then worked around her. This reflects that she can never be altered however her surroundings could be anything if she had the power to change it.

This style of work relates to the my favourite influential illustrators Chris Riddell, Brett Helquist and David Day.

David Day

Brett Helquist

Chris Riddell

Is Facebook the new Life magazine?

'Life' was defined by its bravery. It was the first magazine of its time to tell its stories through photographs. It captured the most iconic images to date and everyone was on it during the photojournalism phase. We as a society today can understand everything that happened from the early 1900's - 1960's, just like people in many years to come can look on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram other social media sites to see what was going on.

Ron Mueck

Watching a documentary about 3D sculptor Ron Mueck taught me that everything is relevant regardless of what categories of art things fall in. Mueck is a contemporary artist who is creating his interpretation of realism. His influences were sculptures like 'The Little Dancer' by Edgar Degas and the mother and child painting by Dürer. What influenced him was the way that the subjects never look completely real. Although my preferred way of working isn't like Muecks, the ideas and the passion is still relevant in every artist's work. I found it interesting watching how he works and how he progresses through each stage. Although I am not a huge fan of his work, I have a lot of respect and understanding for the reasons why he does it and the time it takes for him to accomplish a finished piece.

Durer 

Mueck

Life Drawing: Sight Size Measuring

2B pencil

Life Drawing: Ink and Dry Brush

"Don't touch me go away"

I began to create some work with the photos I took from Africa. Now I am back at college, I have the time to fully process my thoughts and ideas. I also have the materials and the space to create more developed work compared to the observational sketches I did in Africa.

Sally's Lectures: Beat Generation

The Beatnik attitude: Improving themselves intellectually and spiritually.
The things they did were unconventional and radical for their era. They sat in coffee shops, wrote and read poems and discussed what was going on in the world. This civilised image is contrasted to the other half of their nature in which they openly take drugs and are sexually explicit. Ginsberg wrote a poem called 'Howl' that resulted in him getting arrested due to the content:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving

  hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry

  fix,

aded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the 
  star

angelh

ery dynamo in the machinery of night,

d and high sat up smoking in the
  supernatural darkness of cold-water

who poverty and tatters and hollow-ey

e flats floating across the tops of
cities contemplating jazz,

angels
  staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through u
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan
 niversities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan-
  sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

d in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in
  wastebaskets 
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes
  on the windows of the skull,
who cower
eand listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt 
  of marijuana for New York,

h waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and 
  endless balls,
incomparable blin
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or
  purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, wi
td streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind
  leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
  tionless world of Time between,

affic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring
  winter dusks
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunk-
  enness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
  blinking t
r of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of
  mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy
  Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought 

ale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the
  cra
  them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain
  all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat
  through the s
tck of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, 
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue
  to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire

n total recall for seven days and nights with
  brilliant 
  escapes off windowsills of Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and
  anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged 
ieyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous
  picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of

 racketing through snow toward
  lonesome farms in grandfather 
  China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wonder-
  ing where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcar
snight,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah
  because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels
  who were visionary indian angels,

z or sex or
  soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse ab
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural 
  ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse 
  of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking ja
zout America
  and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but
  the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in
  fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts

 down, and
  wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed
  with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incompre-
  hensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze 
  of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and 
  undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed the
m,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before 
  the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for 
  committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and 
  intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof
  waving genitals and manuscripts,

ed endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind
  a part
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and
  screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of
  Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of
  public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whom-
  ever come who may,
who hiccu
pition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to 
  pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew
  of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the
  womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass
  and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom.


  were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of
  t
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a
  package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued
  along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with
  a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of con-
  sciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, an
dhe sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C.,
  secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to
  the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner
  backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or
  with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings

door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-
  heat and opium
  & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys
  too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a 
  sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-
  over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams
  & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks
  waiting for a
 ,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hud-
  son under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall 
  be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy 
  bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions
  and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to

ew their watches off the roof to cas
  build harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the
  tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in
  the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming
  of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who th
rt their ballot for Eternity outside 
  of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next 
  decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and
  were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were 
  growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue
  amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regi-
  ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis-

ashed phonograph
  records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finish
  ing & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down
  by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked 
  away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown
  soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window,
  jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the 
  street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot s
med the whis-
  key and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears
  and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to the each other's
  hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you
  had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver
  & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in

Pacific to the black locomotive or 
  Harvard to Narcissus to Woo
  Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver
  is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salva-
  tion and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a 
  second, 
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals 
  with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang
  sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha
  or Tangiers to boys or Southern
 dlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with
  their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently
  presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with
  shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instanta-
  neous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity
  hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & am-
  nesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table,

ed at the wall in reply and the
  resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and 
  fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns 
  of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the
  echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
  dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to 
  stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the 
  tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 a.m. and the last 
  telephone slam
m last furnished room 
  emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper
  rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary,
  nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the
  total animal soup of time--
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash 
  of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the
  vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images
  juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual

of America's naked mind for love
  into an eli eli lamma lamma sabac
  images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of
  consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens
  Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before
  you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet 
  confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his
  naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here
  what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow
  of the band and blew the suffering
 thani saxophone cry that shivered
  the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies 


  good to eat a thousand years.

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up

  their brains and imagination?

s! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Chil-
  dren screaming under the stai

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugline

srways! Boys sobbing in armies!  Old
men weeping in the parks!

Mo-
  loch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensi
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental
 ble prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jail-
  house and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judg-

ch whose blood is running
  money! Moloch whose fingers are ten 
  ment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned govern-
  ments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Mol
oarmies! Moloch whose breast 
  is a cannibal dynamo!  Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrap-

es!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul i
  ers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose
  factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and
  antennae crown the cit
is electricity
  and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
  whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the
  Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in

! Wake up in Moloch! Light stream-
  ing out of the sky!
Moloch
  Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness
  without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ec-
  stasy! Moloch whom I abando
n! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries!
  blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad houses
  granite cocks! monstrous bombs! 
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios,

akthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood!
  H
  tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! 
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American
  river! 
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive
  bullshit! 
Br
eighs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
  Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells!
  They bade farewell! They jumped off the roofl to solitude! waving! carrying


  flowers! Down to the river! into the street!"

Other literature that influenced the Beat generation were Jack Karouac's 'On The Road' and William Burrough's 'Naked Lunch'. 
It was in Karouac's film that the term 'Beatniks' and 'The Beats' came into use.

I found this all extremely interesting, these groups of people just wanted to understand the world and have a good time whilst trying to do so. Their anti-materialistic views shows how they weren't out for money or for stardom, they just wanted to live a life worth living. 

"Because in the end you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing the lawn. Climb that god-damn mountain" - Jack Karouac. 

"

Day 7: The Conference and Coach Tour

This morning I was chosen to attend a conference to meet ...
 The coach tour consisted of visiting numerous areas.