Seán Ferry

Wall presentation

Display of work

Damien Hirst is a British artist who makes sculptures, paintings and installations worldwide. I'm interested in his series of large scale sculptures of pipe cleaner animals. Almost everyone is familiar with pipe cleaners and making things out of them as children. Hirst creates these impressive sculptures based off of pipe cleaner figures made by his staff and friends' children which contributes to the sense of childhood and innocence. They are not perfect as children are not professional artists. The googly eyes just make the pieces fun and not too thought provoking.

Jeff Koons is an American artist known for his work with pop culture and his sculptures. He has a collection of work in which he recreates inflatable pool toys however he creates them out of stainless steel even though they look elastic. This series features lobster toys, dogs, dolphins and monkeys. It is almost like an optical illusion seeing these sculptures as they look fragile and inflatable when they are actually solid metal manipulated.

Grayson Perry is a British artist who has many works inspired from his childhood teddy- Alan Measles, named after when he had measles as a child. Perry has stated that Mr. Measles is one of the most important things in his life and so, he uses him in his artworks.

I like his idea of integrating his teddy bear into various works with different mediums such as paint, ceramics and sculpture. Alan Measles was an important part of his childhood and helped him through bad times, Perry uses the teddy in his art as a way of repaying the bear for his service.

Here are images of a couple of drawings and paintings I did of toys that I remember when I was younger

Richard Patterson is an English painter. Some of hos paintings feature toys or his image of toys. He abstracts the figure of the toy with colour and brushstrokes to a point where it doesn't really look like a toy anymore.

My work relates to his as I am also looking at toys. I think I will take inspiration from his work and look at how I can manipulate and transform the image of a children's toy.

On Monday I did some life drawing with the live model. For this session we could use any medium we wanted. I used charcoal, chalk pastel and black ink. Some drawings have more shading whereas others are more black line as I ran out of time to start shading.

I found the palette knife very challenging to use as I've never used it to paint before. It was only tones painted, no colours but I found it hard to do the face and had to scrape off the paint and start again 2 or 3 times.

On Monday I started the painting discipline with life painting with Sylvia. The exercise we did painting the life model was similar to the life painting workshop I did earlier in the year. I had to mix three tones- dark, medium and light.

Craig Williams is an Australian artist who focuses on bird and other wildlife. He began creating scientific illustrations for educational purposes of different animals and creatures. What I enjoy about his work is his paintings of birds on vintage educational pages of information regarding the bird in the painting he also includes maps of the area or country the bird is native or found in. I think it's a unique way of creating art rather than just drawing birds on a blank canvas.

This artist relates to my project as I created a couple of paintings of birds, however I would like to incorporate something to my paintings like how this artist adds the book pages to his paintings.