Barber Art Institute

Barber Art Institute - visit

These photos are from my trip to the Barber Art Institute of fine arts in Birmingham. In my opinion it was like no other gallery I've been to. It was packed full of outstanding artwork as it was such a small gallery. This is an advantage, however, as it gave the museum more of an atmosphere which was very uplifting and inspiring. I found all of the paintings there very realistic, all with a great message to pass on. The artworks were inspiring and amazingly well painted, some, melodramatic almost and they offered a glimpse into the past of art and how it was like to paint hundreds of years ago. Altogether I found the gallery to be a great experience and I would explore it in more detail, if I were to go again, which I probably will.

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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 t he 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,...

Artist Research

Artist Research Arinze Stanley and Kelvin Okafor Kelvin Okafor The two main artists that have had the most impact on my work and techniques are Arinze Stanley and Kelvin Okafor. I look at Okafor for the techniques and processes he uses, how he handles his tools etc. I find his compositions differ too much from the reference photo to look at the final outcome of his drawings. This photo taken from his instagram depicts perfectly what I mean. The final outcome looks too airbrushed and unlike the reference photo. To be more specific and critical; the iris is the wrong shape, certain parts of the lower and upper lids are too dark, the eyebrows are deformed and the detailing of the iris is all wrong. Despite all this, the processes Okafor uses throughout his compositions are extremely helpful. A perfect example of this is pictured above. Okafor uses a paint brush to spread graphite across the composition, creating an extremely soft and realistic base tone for the skin tha...

Distortion

This was a project I started at the very beginning of Foundation. The visual quality doesn't match that of my current work, but it was a fairly long project, so I'm giving it a chance to shine. These are a series of photos taken throughout the development of this piece to show the progression and development of it. The photo is of my friend that I took. There is nothing special about the photo, it is a portrait photo, the angle isn't heavily distorted and the lighting is fairly standard. I wanted to get as much light on the face as I could all to add to the beauty and life to contrast the acrylic I would put over it, softness vs rigidity. When drawing a portrait, I always start on the eyes, finding the right shape and size and with this I can create a rough outline of where the other facial features should be. I start working on one eye to get the right tones and depth of the rest of the face and put in a rough nose and mouth (it's still just construction lines at this ...

Foundation

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