Final Evaluation

The theme for my Personal Investigation was figures. Originally my plan was to look at figurative art and Expressionism which I described fully in my Draft Genre Study which is in my physical folder. I had looked at the artist Gustav Klimt because I loved the gold colours in his painting. The emotion felt very raw in his paintings and personally I think that you can almost feel the love that is shown in his work.

My intentions for Component 1 were to base my work on figures. My initial thoughts were that I had never really worked with figures before so I wanted to try something new and try and incorporate emotions into my work that were pure and raw at the the time of the event.

I didn't continue this because I did a collage and paper cutting experiment and found I quite like the technique and working with this style so I decided to change the direction of my Personal Investigation. I then investigated this by taking the photographs from my holiday of friends and family and creating interesting collages inspired by my three artists David Hockney, Claire Pestaille, and Annegret Soltau. I feel like I could have found some more collage and paper cutting artists to extend my ideas and to help have even more influence on my work so that I could do further experiments using different styles and the develop my work even further than it already is.

The picture I used from my Spain holiday for my final outcome.

My main inspiration for Component 1 and my them of figures was my summer holiday to Spain. All of my photographs are from my holiday, as I wanted my work to be very personal and based on my own experience and feelings from a very memorable and enjoyable time from last year. I also went to the London National Gallery to try and find inspiration, it was not as successful as I hoped. I think it was a combination of me not being in the greatest mood so it was hard to feel inspired by anything that I saw as well as there being a lack of artwork that I felt related to what I wanted to do for my Component 1. I also went on a gallery visit to the Birmingham Art Gallery. This was a very successful trip, there was lots of inspiration there and I really enjoyed it. I particularly enjoyed my experience in the exhibition 'Night in the Museum'. It really inspired me to continue with a theme of the colour blue as the artist who created the exhibition went into a lot of detail about why he used the colour blue and his idea of the colour blue being 'infinity' really struck a chord in me. I want my holiday experience and the memories to last forever so for me by using the colour blue I was backing up this idea that it means infinity and will last forever.

This was one of the first experiments that I did that led to my final outcome idea. It was inspired by David Hockney's Polaroid pieces of artwork. I did like this experiment however I felt it was way too simple and a bit boring so I wanted to develop it further to see if I could create something interesting. I think the composition worked because I tried to use images that looked like they were around the same level in the sea, with the top three photos being the top of the sea and the bottom three being the sea floor.

I moved on to do another experiment, this time on a smaller scale but using the same idea with the Polaroids. This time I just used one photograph, cutting it up into square and leaving gaps between them, making it quite symmetrical. I really liked this experiment, I think it looks more successful because the cut out squares are smaller so it looks more detailed and a bit more complex. I did however still think that I needed to develop this style further.

I decided to continue with the style of cut out squares, however this time I decided to concentrate on a small are of a photograph and to cut out really small squares to see what effect it would have with really small cubes. I did like this experiment, however I thought it was difficult to tell if it was very successful as you cannot see much detail with the re-arranged squares as they have been cut up so small. I knew I was definitely heading in the right direction with the cut out squares, it was just a case of experimenting further to find a method that worked.

I tried cutting up the whole image into squares again, however this time I did them smaller and I decided to remove all of the squares that didn't have any part of the figure in them. This was inspired by David Hockney's piece 'Robert Littman Floating in My Pool', I wanted to incorporate the 'blanc' space into my own work to see how it impacted the composition and if it made it more successful. I think that this experiment was definitely interesting however, when I did it I still felt that it was missing something.

I decided to go back to cutting up a whole photograph into squares. However this time I turned every other square upside down to see what it would look like. I really liked it, I felt that this made it much more interesting and it gave it more of a cubist element with the distortion. 

I then did another experiment using cut out squares, this time I made them smaller and I swapped every other square in the section with the figure in it. I loved the effect this had. The distortion was very subtle, and despite how simple the method was, I felt that it was very effective.

I tried it again on a larger scale as a draft final outcome. I did this one in black and white so that I could compare the two and come to a final decision on whether I was going to do it in colour or not. This time I varied the size of the squares, cutting the ones with the figure in into even smaller pieces than the other squares in the composition. After completing this one I knew that I was definitely going to do my final outcome in colour as the back and white didn't look as interesting or have the same meaning as the coloured version of the photograph. I had decided to do my final outcome on the next scale up which was A2 on photo paper. 

My Final Personal Investigation Piece was mainly influenced by Claire Pestaille and David Hockney. The piece has similarities to David Hockney with the use of a photograph containing a swimming pool and lots of the colour blue. I based my piece on Claire Pestaille's crystalline series, the layout I used was different as I restructured the squares differently to her, and I also had some different sized squares in my final piece to have more of a variety and to allow me to rearrange the squares more to make the photograph appear even more distorted. I used an A2 sized photograph printed on photo-paper for my final piece. I created line and shape by cutting the photograph into squares and placing them in a grid format. The final piece is very personal to me because it is a photograph that I took over the summer holiday in Spain of a family friend’s son Tom, we are very close to them and went away with them to Spain in the summer. 

I am pleased with my final outcome and I really like the finished product of my Final Piece, there were ups and downs during the process of making it however I think it looks really successful now that it is finished. It was a combination of my experiments which were inspired by both David Hockney and Claire Pestaille with the cut up squares and distortion. I think that my final outcome does have an element of cubism to it which I like. I like the subtle distortion of the photograph from the way I have composed and arranged the cut up squares, I think it is very successful. The only thing I would change is the size, I would like to make it even bigger and perhaps have even more smaller squares to take the distortion of the photograph further. I also think it would be better bigger as at the David Hockney exhibition I saw how huge his photographic collages were and I think it would have been easier and better to be able to include much more detail if I did it on a much larger scale. Other than that I was very happy with my Final Outcome for my them figures in Component 1. Perhaps I will develop this technique even further next year when I am doing my Art Foundation Diploma.

Personal Investigation Final Outcome

I had an A2 sized photograph printed onto photo paper. This was the image when I first started my final personal investigation piece.

I measured the amount I would need to take off of the top and right edges and then I measured and drew on all of the squares. I numbered the squares to try and make the process easier and in case I lost a square. I then measure up the smaller squares and numbered them one to four on each square as well. Once I cut off the excess that I didn’t need I carefully measured the size of the photograph onto the cardboard and then cut it out to the right size.

To start I cut out each column of squares. I did find this difficult, the ruler kept on moving which meant that even though I was trying to be very careful it was not perfectly straight leaving me with not so even columns. I also found that the paper was thicker so I had to cut it a few times which led to some stringy bits of photo paper which peeled off some of the edges of the photograph in the columns. I was started to feel very frustrated because it didn’t seem to be going how I wanted it to even though I was trying to be calm and extremely careful with my cutting.

Column by column I cut out each individual square and placed them gently on the cardboard to make sure that it was definitely cut to the right size. As the ruler kept moving it meant that the squares were not perfectly even so I knew when I started to re-arrange them there would be some white gaps which was really frustrating.

Here is a photograph of all of the cut out squares resting on the cardboard.

Once I had cut out all the squares to their biggest size I then rearranged them to where they were supposed to be and started to cut out the smaller squares. I found it easier to cut out the smaller squares as I was able to use a smaller ruler which gave me more control.

Here is a photograph of all of the squares cut to their correct size and re-arranged to where they were supposed to be.

I had decided to use spray mount to prevent the cardboard and the photo paper from wrinkling and curving. As I had never used it before I decide to stick the squares onto cartridge paper first and then if it went wrong I could easily cut the squares out again as the cartridge paper is thin.

I got a scrap piece of cardboard to place the individual squares on whilst spraying.

The piece seemed to be going quite well at this point as I was sticking down, the white gaps as it turned out were not that obvious or big in the first few columns so I started to feel hopeful.

Whilst sticking the smaller squares I had what I felt to be a disaster. As I was lifting a small square to place on the card to spray it fell out of my hand and landed face down on the sticky area of the cardboard. Spray mount is very sticky and when I tried to get it off I couldn’t and eventually it ripped. Feeling downhearted I carries on sticking, leaving the gap and not feeling very enthusiastic about my final piece anymore.

Here are some close up images of the areas that I decided to refine as I wasn’t happy with the white space.

Once it was all stuck down I decided to print of an enlarged cropped section of the photograph and to cut it out to the right size and stick it in the gap where the square was originally supposed to go. I also then used some alcohol ink pens to fill in the white gaps between the squares where I really wasn’t happy with it as the alcohol ink pens had a huge variety of colours and tones so I could pretty much match them to the colours in the photograph.

This is the photo of my final personal investigation piece whilst mounted up for exhibition. Despite some of the issues I had during the process of creating it I was really pleased with the outcome and it turned out just how I imagined it.