Artist Research - Russell Mills, Nel ten Wolde and Ian Murphy

Russell Mills -

Russell Mills is a British artist who was born in Ripon, Yorkshire, UK in 1952. Mills has designed many book covers and album covers for bands such as Nine inch Nails.
Most of Mills' works are predominantly distorted portraits, with very jagged and defined lines surrounding the soft the (usually) black and white, toned faces. In the surrounding (jagged and distorted) area of the faces, Mills includes colour to add some life to his paintings and create the ever present distortions and abstract elements in his work. 
The piece on the left 'Live at Last' is of a female face, beautifully drawn in ink but her hair and clothes are painted very erratically and show how Mills uses colour to produce a very different composition than if he had used ink for all of the piece. The oil paint Mill uses is red which is painted over the thick black hair

Nel ten Wolde-
Wolde is a Melbourne based artist who uses collages, lines, subtle hues created by delicate watercolour, colour pencils and ink. Her collages are of real landscapes, cut out and the gaps filled in with the aforementioned mediums. The compositions create a confused but stunning showing of the beauties of the world. The composition on the left is a collage. The focal point being a photograph which is enveloped in small areas of line work to create the surrounding brickwork and other architecture.




Ian Murphy -

Ian Murphy was born in Wigan in 1963 and graduated in 1985 with 1st class honours from Sheffield University in a degree of Fine Art, Printmaking and Painting. The majority of Murphy's art is painting and drawing. In his paints and only his paints, Murphy uses hints of colour to suggest light hitting the object he is observing (which is usually architecture). 
He uses bold lines to outline parts of buildings and muddied paints to insinuate tone and light. 

This is my artist interpretation of Nel ten Wolde. I took a photo of something random in my house, ripped it up and stuck it down as the center piece. I used different materials and textures to create the rest of the piece around the picture for example I created a collage of newspaper and burnt the edges to add texture and tone. The whole piece is supposed to be ragged and torn to create an urban effect.