Context links
1.) Peter Blake – His influence on my painting technique
3.) Ryszard Zamorski – Wroclaw, Poland
5.) Camille Bombois – ‘Naive Artist’
Documentation links
1.) Third Year starting points – Clay models
2.) Spiderman Painting – Pop culture figures in art
5.) Discarded toys
Christmas is here! Which leads to Christmas crackers which leads to bad jokes and dodgy toys. You get some slightly classier Christmas crackers which give you things like bottle openers, puzzles and dice, but what i’m really after are the mysterious toys – the ones that make you question wether there is a factory somewhere dedicated to producing crap toys.
I found this plastic squid on the floor outside Sainsbury’s and felt inspired straight away.
As my work is about childhood memories and fears I feel that strange little toys like this symbolise everything I want to say in my work. As a child I would’ve felt an expectation to accept that this terrifying stuffed Marge Simpson was just as good and believable as any other non-terrifying toy. Even as a child this intrigued me; in my mind I would know that something wasn’t quite right with toys like this but couldn’t quite understand why such a thing woud be allowed… and who was making them?!
Knock off toys with bad paint jobs and flaws are really interesting to me and I feel like I can make so much work from them. One toy (such as the squid) can give me so many ideas, therefore I am willing to let my work change and grow as I go along throughout the year. Although my work is currently very personal to me, I can still create work that is slightly more fantastical and simply reminiscient of childhood memories rather than a literal illustration of them. If I don’t let these things inspire my work then I certainly won’t have a very interesting degree show.
My latest painting (work in progress) relates to a sign located in Portland, south Dorset, and very near the sea. I go there with my family every year as something of a tradition and this sign haunts me every time I see it. Below is my most recent photograph of it.
I find this sign so creepy because of how quiet the area is, also, there are no other signs around, just this one. It marks the beginning of a long downward walk into a small cove hidden in the rocks which attracts a small number of tourists.
With the way the salty wind has whipped away it’s paint over the years, it looks like it is too late to give warning; the children’s featureless balloon-faces make me think they have already been swept away by some sinister, anonymous figure, never to be seen again.
I chose to work on a dicarded canvas pre-made by someone from the studio (unknown), because I liked it’s anonymity and it’s warped shape and grubby markings. Also, the dark-salmon colour made for the perfect base coat, as it is a colour that is ironically soft and childlike for this particular painting. I chose to put greens and yellows over the top as they seem to make the salmon colour really pop in this strange, sickly and repulsive kind of way. I added stabs of red to the lettering to confirm the hidden warning and urgency of the piece.
Spiderman has been put in the ‘sign’ shape to re-affirm the warning sign idea. He looks somewhat like a neighborhood watch symbol, but one cannot tell if he is the good guy or the bad guy. My previous work would suggest he is the bad guy, but it is still ambiguous. Ambiguity is something I must be careful with over doing in order to avoid my work becoming – for lack of a better word – meaningless…?
So far I have decided to keep going with this language of symbols I am slowly creating in my work, as this will strengthen it and show a correlation.
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