Contextual Influences: Photomontages

Laszlo Maholy-Nagy

This is a piece by Laszlo Maholy-Nagy an Hungarian photographer. He does a lot of photomontages as well as his photography. After looking through some of his work this one stood out. I really like how this piece looks. I like they way that the grey beams overlay and create darker sections. I love how simple this piece is. As a graphic design student i really like this piece, Laszlo Maholy-Nagy has utilised his space really well, as the white space draws your eyes to the centre.

Jan Tschichold

This is a photomontage by Jan Tschichold this is another really nice pice of work, I really like how she has used the white space and I also really like the red lines used which ads a bit of depth to the image. The way the images are put together looks really professional. I think this artist is really talented and is one of my favourites that I have found.

Man Ray

Man Ray is a very famous and high rated designer and artist. He does a lot of wacky and strange work that stands out well and looks very good. This is a piece found and I decided I would use as an example. I really like this piece as its quite strange and can be hard to make out, i like the facet that he has only used 2 colours ,black and white, but the main thing i like is that you can look at it for a a long time just trying to work out what it is you are looking at.

Contextual Influences Photo montage

Dave McKean

Dreaming – Comic cover

-Dave McKean has used very modern techniques to create this image.

- Surrealism art is often referred to as a nightmarish dream land. With the title being ‘Dreaming’ it suggests this is something that would be featured in a dream, so to me it fits the Surrealist category perfectly.

- I really like how this image looks. I like the way how you can clearly see a face but if you look at the shadows you can make out shapes, like the crow and a hand, which to me gives away what this picture is about, like an insight to the book.

Hannah Hoch

-Bauerliches Brautpaar (Peasant Wedding Couple) 1931 

- This kind of art tends to be referred to as Dada and surreal.

- Dada art is art made from pieces of found scrap images. They use these images to create a brand new piece of art.

- Some of Hannah Hoch’s work is much like the work of Salvador Dali because of the fact they both do very surreal work.

-In this image the first thing you see are the two figures stood at the front. With this piece of art being called ‘Peasant Wedding Couple‘ I would assume they are the couple to be wed.

-The woman in the image has been given a Gorrilas face which suggests that Hannah may think, being a peasant and doing this kind of work is only for the animals.

-There is also a black man stood next to her. This may also suggest that work like this is also for black people, this may seem racist but at the time it wouldnt have been seen that way. 
John Heartfield

Jesus

-John Heartfield was considered the pioneer of photomontage as he would use his art work as a weapon and to help create anti Nazi movements.

-I think this picture is trying to say that the Nazi’s were not just killing of people but there beliefs as well.

-The way John Heartfield has done this picture I think is really good. At first glance I would have thought this image could have been on Photoshop because of how well it is done. E.g. colours fit well, its hard to se a definite edge between each separate image.

Kurt Schwitters

-     The Merz

-Here Kurt Schwitters has made a piece of art that was really unique at the time.

-This picture is made during the Dada movement but Kurt Schwitters went about making it different to any body else during that era.

-I really like this picture for one main reason, and it is that it has no hidden political meaning.

-Most people who did Dada art (like Hannah Hoch) would try to put a hidden political message in it, but Kurt Schwitters hasn’t. He made this picture because not everything has to be political. Sometimes art can just be a pretty picture.

Print Making

                             

Print Making

6th November 2012

Above are 3 very different prints. I have used various mono printing techniques to create my images.

We started off with a thin layer of an oil based ink on a flat surface. We then drew out some images on A4 sized news print paper. We then placed our image; face up, on the thin layer off ink. When the face up image was traced it left an impression on the news print.

My favourite thing about using this technique is that you can get a nice even colour. So it makes certain types of images really easy to draw. You can also create a lot of copies of the same image really easily at the same quality which is one of the reasons this technique is used so much.

The first print we did (top right) is a print we made were we were only able to use one colour so I decided to draw a skyline in the style of Jean Michel Basquiat. I deliberately made this image look scrappy and rushed because that is his style.

The second image (middle) is by far my favourite. It is a character created by Jean Michel Basquiat. I used all the same techniques that I had for the previous image but this time had added a bit of colour to make it stand out a bit more.

The far left is my least favourite as, but what i did was I used tissue to create a background. I made it in the weave style because Jean Michel Basquiat draws a lot of these random weaves in his work. The print quality of this image was a little poor because the ink wouldn’t transfer much due to the thicker paper.

Print Making