One Week Response to Colours and Artist Research

I tried a new technique with this drawing, I went straight into the painting, I did not sketch it first, I went with my instincts and drew what came to mind, trying to improve my digital painting skills.

After drawing the above image I realised that choosing to design creatures similar to the Bobbit Worm would limit myself too much, plus I wanted a narrative to work from, so I decided to explore my other idea of Golems, Which lead me to the next few artists.

Lauren Gallaspy

Lauren Gallaspy is an American sculptor, most known for her incredible, one of a kind ceramic sculptures. These odd, dynamic and unstable pieces look as if they’d drip out of your hand if you were to pick it up. She uses a mixture of organic shapes and stiffer, more structural forms to create a form of unpredictability and chaos, even throwing in some small parts of human anatomy to make the viewer even more disturbed but intrigued. This particular sculpture resembles the colour and even consistency of wet clay, magically looking as if it were to slump over in a moist lump at any moment, leaving you to be in a state of unease, ready to lean forward and hold it up if it were to fall. Focusing on certain parts of the piece brings wildly differing opinions on what exactly it is, such as in the bottom right, we see a tongue-like shape protruding from the base, leading my mind to believe this is some sort of mystical creature wearing a fancy headdress or an incredibly lumpy pile of warts with a tongue.

Overall the sculpture brings out a feeling of disgust, making it hard to look at for too long as the more I look, the more I see a big pile of shit. However there is no denying the skill involved with creating a ceramic piece like this, and the deranged mind behind it.

Lina Hsaio

Lina Hsaio is a painter and sculptor who creates mystical faces out of flora, like moss and lichen. Her beautiful style of painting also shows through these magnificent pieces, piercing, very human eyes show through the organic matters that originally are unwanted and seen as a nuisance. This piece shows an otherworldly face with a strange and almost content look on its face. The way that Lina applied the moss and lichen makes the face look like a floating island of some sort, with trees and even steam floating up into the air, making the scene look swamp-like with its browns and yellowish greens. With its appearance of a landscape and also a face, it makes me think of an old god, looking at its creation, grown up and much different to what it used to be. To me this piece has a great deal of story and meaning behind it. However it could very much just be a face made of moss and lichen and nothing more.

This second piece is more illustrational than organic, the artist used paint to show a man’s face and adorned it with her trademark organic materials. This painting/sculpture was created on a panel of wood, which creates a strange symmetry of where the moss would grow in nature, on a tree, however this tree is long dead, but the moss still thrives, now with its own human face.

Nick Sheehys

Nick Sheehys is an Australian artist with a unique style comprised of dead animals and humans with a strange red string/vein which wraps itself around his illustrations. His black and white drawings are pierced with this bright red that instantly draws the viewer’s eyes, causing you to follow the trail of winding string all around the drawing. His amazing attention to detail is what makes his work stellar for me. The anatomical designs, mixed in with childish imagination and dark humour all add up to make brilliant pieces of art. Taking inspiration of street art and comic art he moved to London to rediscover his love for drawing after studying bronze sculptures “in the wilds of Tasmania”. The fact that the string is red could be a heavy indicator that it is in fact veins, but it could be something completely different. For example what I see when I look at the red string is a parasite, reminiscent of the Mermithidae, a parasitic worm that takes over the bodies of spiders and lays its eggs inside the carapace. When looking at Nicks other illustrations this theory becomes more and more plausible because a lot of the animals seem to be in distress by the creatures that have an abundance of red string. I very much enjoy his use of colour, I find something oddly striking about a black and white image with a burst of a single colour.