Ink Deep

Orla Kiely is am Irish designer, living and working in London.  Born in 1963, she attended the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, before going on to achieve a Masters at the Royal College of Art in London.  Since graduating, she has achieved commercial success and popularity, with many of her designs being mass produced and replicated, and sold to the masses at a reasonable price.  As a result, her designs crop up in day to day life rather often, and most of us will have someone we know who has some household item featuring one of her designs. Kiely's designs are wonderfully simple, featuring easily identifiable and natural shapes that have been simplified into an appealing and clean image.  Her colour choices are (in my opinion) quite bizarre.  I find them quite hard to describe.  They're not overly bright, but are quite saturated despite their darker tones.  The colours used are almost retro, and for me scream 'Seventies'.  I'...

Digital media covers a wide array of styles and techniques, which makes it both incredibly interesting and diverse, but also sometimes confusing to decipher or understand.  Most of the artists I have looked at so far are heavily focused on the commercial aspects of their work.  Work that has been requested or designed exclusively to fit a particular commercial purpose.  I have never enjoyed looking at art from a commercial perspective.  My approach has always been to try and create interesting art, and then look for ways to commercialise it.  This most likely comes from my background trying to make comics and such.  Ultimately, for me, the best and purest examples of digital art come from digital illustrations. As a result of this, it was important that I look in depth at (at least) one digital illustrator (which did not have an immediately evident commercial use).  Aaron Campbell is a Canadian artist who I have been aware of for some time....

Alice Rebecca Potter is a young British artist that we as a class have looked at.  Based in London, Potter works freelance, selling her illustrations to design companies.  She also makes some products herself which can be purchased through her own website, or through some third party websites who help her manufacture her items.  These products vary from greeting cards to mugs to clothing (most commonly children's clothing).  Her style is brightly coloured (often with a limited palette) and simplistic in it's form and composition.  Some of her designs can be repeated to create patterns and textures.  Potter has also experimented with typography in her work. Aside from looking at her commercial work, we also looked at how she creates her work.  Potter has talked about her process in depth, giving us a great insight to her creative process.  She explained how she starts by simply taking a walk and observing nature, or other elements of our surro...

Digital Media is a method of work that can really cover a great deal of work, styles and methods.  Digital work can mean that the piece of work is created entirely digitally, or even that digital methods were used in the works conception, realisation, distribution or display.  This can mean that understanding and narrowing down what digital media is exactly can be difficult.  To help assist in our understanding of this expansive medium, we were asked to look into and explore a number of artists. Matt Herring , an example of his work above, started as a London based commercial illustrator.  He is known most widely for creating magazine covers and illustrations, most of which have a striking (collage-type) style to them.  He mixes photography with computer generated elements and composites them in a colourful and pleasing manner.  Herring's work is a considerable commercial success. Harold Cohen (1928 - 2016) was a British artist who made waves in b...

Michael Craig-Martin is a British-Irish artist born in Dublin in 1941.  Despite being born in Dublin, Craig-Martin spent most of his childhood in Washington D.C. and would study art in the US, the UK and even in France.  In 1966 he would make the UK his permanent home.  His contemporary work pushed the boundaries and in 1973 he would produce an installation that would challenge how art, and in particular, contemporary art was perceived. By the 1980's, Craig-Martin was a teacher where he inspired and culminated the Young British Artists (including Damien Hirst).  In 2016 he was knighted. Craig-Martin's work has been incredibly varied over the years, working in both sculpture and painting, though his work is rarely 'traditional'.  Even his paintings tend to have some form of twist to them, such as using aluminium as a canvas.  His style has evolved and changed as he has progressed, with his recent work taking a cleaner style with clean black lines and flat ...

Jean Tinguely was a Swiss artist born on 22nd of May 1925.  Although he applied his hand to a wide array of mediums from painting to sculpture, he is most well known for his 'Kinetic art'.  In particular, Tinguely created a variety of machines with questionable purposes.  Some did nothing, some created moving paintings, some created their own drawings and a few even intentionally destroyed themselves.  He continued to work up to his death in 1991 due to a heart illness.  After his death, a gallery in his hometown of Basel was named after him and permanently houses a vast collection of his work. Initially Tinguely's work started out as part of Dada, creating Metamatic machines in the 1950s.  These machines created their own art, all be it in a very clumsy and mechanical way.  Attaching a pencil to a swirling hanging metal appendage and such.  He would continue to work with this concept, developing it into moving images.  Canvases where the s...

The Birth Of Cubism Two European Artists, Spanish Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) and French peer Georges Braque (1882 - 1963) are widely regarded as the creators of Cubism.  Following on from Post Impressionism and inspired by Primitivism, these two artists would take these ideas and study them, really focusing to develop their own interruption.  Both artists would spend years furthering Cubism.  Artists such as Paul Cezanne had been experimenting with fractured perspective, trying to show landscapes and scenery from various angles and times in the same image.  Initially his work was subtle, but soon fractured elements in his compositions would show through, resulting in geometric patterns and shapes.  Picasso would be the first to work with these shapes, exploiting them further. The Young Ladies of Avignon (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon) by Pablo Picasso is widely considered to be the first true Cubism painting.  Painted in 1907, it depicts five nude wome...