Doodles on Lined Paper

Degas often painted dancers. This was said to be a young girl's route into prostitution, hinted at by Degas by the shadowy male figures lurking and watching them.

Cindy Sherman makes stills from films that never existed, stepping in as the model to these self set up shots. She makes a comment on old films, and the representation of women in films. Her work can be considered post modernist, as she is making work to make a comment on something, and her pieces borrow from already existing formats (in this case the 8-by-10 film stills that she replicates).

"Other artists had drawn upon popular culture, but Sherman's strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones—those 8-by-10-inch glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it is not real. " -http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1997/sherman/

MODERNISM                                    POSTMODERNISM

-marxism (economy)

-gender studies

-post-colonialism

-capitalism

-auto-ethnography

-semiotics

-psychoanalysis

- in the 20th century, artists were the avant garde. Now, illustrators and designers are the ones developing new visual languages.

- success comes from working with change, not resisting it.

Veronica Lawlor is a reportage illustrator based in the US. She Skyped us for a seminar! I really love her work, and she had a lot of interesting stories to tell about where her illustration has taken her. Lawlor shares a studio with 7 other illustrators, who all work in reportage. 

She loves drawing on location, and spent a week in Rome drawing the Vatican City, St. Peters and tried to cover Rome as a whole. She wanted to convey the scale and feeling that you're being watched, not to mentiont the sheer amount of people that travel there.

"When you do a reportage of a place, you become part of it", she said, telling us that she'd stayed with nuns, and got tickets to an audience with the Pope.

She suggests that if you're doing your own work, that you try to work as if you're being commissioned to do it, as if you've already got the job - this way you have a high standard of work towards your portfolio.

"If you do what you love, they will find you"

She has made reportage drawings in Grand Central Station, where she aimed to portray the activity there, and Times Square. She says it's good to draw iconic imagery as people can relate to it, and emphasises the importance of events, such as Le Tour de France.

"getting drawings confiscated  for being suspicious is all part and parcel of the job"

Lawlor aims to express what it feels like to be in a place, and that by sitting and drawing for hours, you get a completely different view and a deeper understanding of other cultures, in a very intimate way.

On drawing movement: "trust your instinct, and your memory gets better the more you do"

Lawlor changes the medium she works in to describe the mood (Paris VS Downtown NY), and says reportage is always about telling a story - whether it's about daily life, what it feels like to be in a moment and the events that happen day to day.

"you're making an investment in people and their lives when you draw them, and they respond and give you something back"

Simone Lia was another illustrator who presented her work to us during a lecture in uni. Her work is witty, whimsical and has a naive style to compliment the short narratives she uses.

She often uses anthromorphism, to explore her interest in what it is to be human. She deals with a lot of characters, such as Bunny, and Chip and Bean, and their personalities. She says it's very important to get to know the characters by working with the same ones more, and advises bringing the same characters into different things: keeping the same personalities  and having the same characters doing different jobs.

The immediacy of Lia's comics explains and communicates things well, and she says she likes to make comments, and be a bit satirical, in an innocent way - refer to the comic, Tate Super Modern. She likes to give a playful take on serious subjects, and feels compelled to give people a voice if they don't have one.

"instead of waiting for someone to ask you to do something, go ahead and do it yourself!" for example, her billboards for happiness in Brockley. She found that sometimes doing free things can get you the publicity - so it's a good idea to learn to balance what you get paid for and what you don't.

She also says it's really important to meet other people at least once a month to show, crit and talk about workl

"when you're promoting yourself, people aren't always interested, but if they discover things by themselves they pay more attention."

Her overall emphasis was: IF YOU'RE NOT GETTING ANY WORK, MAKE SOME HAPPEN!

(eg bilboards, community work, get people together for a gig and do interior design etc....)

Steven Smith was another guest lecturer that spoke to us. Although there are a lot of Steven Smiths online, I can't find any pictures that resemble his work at this moment.

He studied in Bristol, and has an MA in sequential design., claiming his tutors were his lifeblood. He has worked in print, publishing (4 books), editorial, type and image, brands (clothing), installations and gallery work, alongside his own art practice.

He works in a diverse way but drawing  is essential and runs through everything. "I am ALWAYS drawing". He uses a sketchbook to record drawings, and by redrawing things, they mutate into new things, like a graphic language.

He started off making cheap, photocopied zines, and later sent them to publishers. He says he sees publishing / book work as a movie - the illustrator is the director - "you control how people move through a narrative"

He sees editorial work as a chance to explore a scene, and 2 or 3 seconds within the scene, for example the pilot piece he showed us. He tries to do editorials for things he's passionate about, and advises bringing the things you love into your work.

He says it's a good idea to know what art directors are doing what.

Smith is inspired by grafiti art, the better side of street art, and the way the type is usually large.

He believes in DIY/club culture, in arranging projects yourself and making your own flyers and art. He has worked on interiors: in an artisan restaurant, (where he learnt it's hard to paint on stairs), and in a 5* hotel in France where he worked on large mirrored walls (apparently in France you can't have mirrors without something on them!), with one shot to paint on them. He said it drove him a bit barmy, because he ended up watching the reflection of the paintbrush rather than what he was actually doing, and worked on it for hours at a time.

Zara also produced a set of wall murals for an NHS hospital. She said she felt she had a responsibility to use good materials, and to make people happy! There was a very wide demographic, from "a 6 week old baby to a 100 year old!" She decided to try and bring outdoors in, and wanted her work to be like a "breath of fresh air".

She said this type of project makes you feel like you're making a difference.