CREATING OUR OWN TOOLS

MYTHICAL CREATURE

EXPERIMENTING WITH PORTRAITS AND MATERIALS

We were asked to get into pairs and then turn to themand create them with as many materials as possible. Here is my attempt at my classmate Shannon Goody.

Some of my fellow students work that I really liked:

JEWELLERY

KEYRING

UNDERWEAR COMPANY

CHAIR BUILDING

In our aligned groups we were asked by our tutor to close our eyes and draw and redraw the comfiest chair we have ever sat on. I took inspiration from my old house and the old corner chair in the living room and started scribbling. Its long narrow back and extremely comfy plush cushions always left me in awe as I was growing up, and when I sat on it, I was the Queen herself. You might think this is blasphemy, but I really was.


Certainly the peculiar shape was a little difficult to grasp with my eyes closed as it wasn't a basic standard block chair, but it left for a giggle when I opened my eyes. The end result I actually quite liked, as it gave me an insight to experimenting with the lines and "breaking the rules" a little in my eyes, as I'd never created anything like this before.


Next we were asked to make a 3D product design of the chair using materials we could find around the room, I found this a little difficult but struggled on and was left with a cute little chair made of card and glue with a little pink cushion resting on it, I even managed to make it stand! A quite enjoyable task, once I got into it and let my creativity live a little.

DAVID HOCKNEY

I Draw, I Do.

A new exhibition by artist David Hockney is now open at the MAC. It is the first significant presentation of David Hockney’s work in Ireland.

David Hockney (b. 1937) is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer. An important contributor to the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century. I draw, I do is the first significant presentation of Hockney’s work in Ireland. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s formative years at Bradford Regional College of Art in the 1950s and how the training and experimentation pursued there stayed with him and was further drawn on throughout his career.

Works on display include rarely seen anatomical and observational drawings, early graphite portraits as well as the print series Rakes Progress (1961-63): a semi-autobiographical story about Hockney, the ‘rake’, and the down and outs he met in New York in the early 1960s. The format, story and numbering system in this series is based on William Hogarth’s 1735 suite of prints of the same title. In addition to these early pieces, also on display are significant later works which demonstrate Hockney’s continued interest in pushing the boundaries of drawing practice using new technologies.

The title of the exhibition is taken from an interview with the artists and designer Paul Smith. Smith asked, “Do you still draw in the more traditional way; in the way you first did when you left the Royal College?”
And Hockney replied:


“Yeah, I draw, I do.... From the age of 16 to the age of 20, all I did was really draw, because I was at the art school in Bradford and in Bradford you could be in the school from nine in the morning to nine at night, because as a full-time student, you could go in the evenings and you’d have a life class then.


So I drew for four years.


I don’t know what art schools are like now, but I’m told they don’t do drawing. That seems a bit mad to me that.


Drawing is going to be needed in the future.”




Some of my own pictures that I took from the exhibition: