Little Love Owls

Zara Wood at The Yorkshire Sculpture Park

                                                 The Lady of the Seas

 Whilst the clan at college went galavanting round the sights of London, on their educational week away I took myself round the local sights, to see what our yorkshire museums and galleries had to offer. I started at The Yorkshire Sculpture Park, because I had read that artist Zara Wood was exhibiting her work there and it was the last couple of weeks for the exhibition.  I knew who Zara Wood was as I had come across her work whilst researching for my visual investigation project and I had liked the work I had already seen, so it was a great opportunity to see her work first hand.
Her distinctive work is defined by the cute little characters she has created, which in most of her work stand completely alone, with no background, which is what makes them so attractive as a piece of art. As well as making pictures she also makes beautiful pieces of jewellery, cameo's, pendants and broaches, some of which are one off's with no copies made. I loved every bit of her exhibition and I am trully inspired by her work. I think it's her style of illustration, which is very femanine and delicate that attracts me and the materials she uses for her pictures really works. She actually has a shop in Brighton, I wish it was in Leeds and I did find out she is planning to bring a book out soon. She is definitely an artist I will be using as a reference in my influence file for future works.

                                              

This is my self portrait, which took me sometime to do due to my inexperience in the print room. I would have liked to have printed the colour behind straight onto the perspex, but I ended up doing the coloured images seperate and then sticking them behind the black images, certainly not the professional approach Andy Warhol would have used, but never mind I did get the effect I wanted in the end.

Andy Warhol

                                                   Art by Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987)

No other artist is as much identified with Pop Art as Andy Warhol. The media called him the Prince of Pop. Warhol made his way from a Pittsburgh working class family to an American legend.
Andy Warhol's Pop Art is both interesting and inspiring.  Although alot of his work was silk screen printmaking as opposed to painting, I do like his style.  The images resemble the posterised look, which is why I was probably drawn to them.  I like his creative style of repetition which he seemed to become obsessed with in his work and his clever use of colour to enhance his images.

We spent a short time in the print workshop at the beginning of our course exploring ideas of our own, although I found it quite daunting to begin with I soon became quite enthusiastic about what could be achieved.  I used Andy Warhol's work as my inspiation and did my own version of his self portrait 1978.

Choosing the right pictures for my paintings wasn't easy, I spent practically a whole day in Rounday Park with the kids last year, acting like David Bailey with my proper zoom-in digital SLR.  The kids were as accommodating as they could be I suppose, considering they were hating every minute of being together and were having to pose as if they genuinely liked each other.  In fact inbetween the tears, the fights and the shouting I was quite lucky to get such a  large collection together.
The picture of Lou and Freya was perfect for a portrait and the composition of the the two of them together was definitely worth painting.  The other two with Freya looking almost angelic and Lou looking very composed also seemed to be the ideal choice.
The baby is my nephew Haydn, which I painted for his christening last year.  Ideally, I would like to continue with this type of portraiture, I have tried to research other artists who may do something similar but I haven't found many.  Most create the image they want on photoshop and print it off, very few actually paint the image they have created.  I have used acrylic paints, but it would be interesting to pick up other painting techniques or ideas from artists who paint in a similar style.

This is my self portrait, painted in the same style, which I did for our visual Investigation project.

This is a picture of my two children Louis and Freya taken in 2010. I wanted to paint a portrait of them both, but not in a traditional style. I was experimenting on photoshop and came up with a posterized effect which I then changed into Black and White. I thought it would make an excellent portrait painting, so it was kind of an experiment, but I enjoyed it so much that when I had finished, I decided to paint them individually as well.