Genre Study

Originally for my Personal Investigation there were two key genres that I wanted to look at; Expressionism and Post-Impressionism. I had chose these because I preferred these styles of art to more realistic artwork for my chosen theme of ‘Figures’, I felt that you are freer to express yourself with the marks and colours that you choose to use which I enjoy doing. Also I was not used to doing figures so I wanted to give myself more room to experiment and not focus on perfect and very detailed people. My direction for my Personal Investigation changed when I decided to do an experiment with paper cutting and collage using one of my photographs I had been drawing from. I realised I really enjoyed this and I wanted to explore it further as it seemed different and more exciting than just doing paintings and drawings therefor now for my Personal Investigation I am going to focus on two key genres; Paper-cutting and Collage.

I am going to focus mainly on collage because I will be looking at how I cut things out and stick them back down. As I initially got the idea and inspiration to change my direction to collage and paper cutting from the initial piece using my photograph from the summer holiday I want to continue this theme and carry on using my summer holiday photographs for my collages making it more personal to me.

Paper-cutting is the art of cutting paper designs. Collage is a technique of an art production, primarily used in the visual arts, where the artwork is made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. A collage may sometimes include magazine and newspaper clippings, ribbons, paint, bits of coloured or handmade papers, portions of other artwork or texts, photographs and other found objects, glued to a piece of paper or canvas. The origins of collage can be traced back to hundreds of years, but this technique made a dramatic reappearance in the early 20^th century as an art form of novelty. The term collage was invented by both Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the beginning of the 20^th century when collage became a distinctive part of modern art.

The artists I am interested in looking at now for my Personal Investigation are David Hockney, Claire Pestaille and Annegret Soltau. They are all collage artists and relate to my theme of figures for my Personal Investigation as they all have people as the main subject of their work. I chose David Hockney because he has done quite a few pieces with water in them which link well to my holiday photos of the swimming pool. I was unable to see David Hockney’s work in a gallery because most of his work is privately owned or in galleries in other countries, however in February there is going to be a special David Hockney exhibition at the Tate Modern gallery in London so I will be going to that to see his work up close and personal. It will be interesting to see how he actually did his compositions in person rather than just looking at pictures on the internet.

My plan for my personal investigation is to do lots of experiments using the different collage techniques inspired by my artists and any ideas I come up with myself so I can figure out which ones work best and link well with my theme of figures. I can then develop the more successful pieces further until I come up with something that could be my final outcome for my Personal Investigation.