Opinionated Art

Daniel Craig Airey

I wonder if Airey is inspired by Axel Scheffler in his visual design, as his work exhibits a similar overall style. Airey identifies himself as an artist that can use complimentary colours expertly to appeal to the viewer while not betraying the central personality of the character. The vibrant colour, excellent composition and unique characters combine to make a genuinely interesting book split into different stories. The colours combine well with a stylised and expressionate art style and use of an almost childlike font.

Scott Abbott – Graphic Designer

Ethan Lewis

A 3D modeller specialising in rigging, texturing and animating characters. Lewis’ characters are infused with personality and are the centre of the scene. Each model is intricately detailed and animated, with every element being carefully chosen and lit in order to sell the character. Even the camera movements and focal planes have been meticulously chosen to make it feel like the character could not only exist but that you could reach out and touch it.

Munashe Mutata – Ten Commandments

Phil Reilly – CAFS (Compressed Air Foam System)

Reilly is an industrial designer has devised a clever system to enable fire fighters to better combat fires. The designs and final work produced are professional quality and you get a sense that you could pick the CAFS up and just use it and it would work. Reilly has since been hired to work with Dyson purely off the back of this design, which is ergonomic, practical and simple; a staple of a designer that knows what they’re doing.

Megan McMullan

Mary Macken Allen

A fine art painting depicting a reclined figure with the head tiled back, wrapped in a shower curtain around the head. It evokes almost a claustrophobic or trapped feeling, leaving me to assume the figure is dead. The pale palette and whiter tones used give the piece and almost ethereal quality. The composition draws your eye in and leaves you there to ponder.

Patrick Doherty

Alex Clarke - Fluidity

An automotive sculpture called ‘Fluidity’; a futuristic, sleek design with shallow lines and a clear design goal well achieved. The ships displayed and concepted here evoke feminine curves and evoke images of falling liquid or DNA; the lines of the sculpture are similar to these. The 3D model itself is sanded soft wood glued together in sections, which help to sell the idea of a futuristic ship. One criticism, however, is the wooden pegs in the middle of the model which disrupt the flow of the model.

Ryan Freeman – Sculpture

Beth Hall – Clothing Designs

Hall has used bright colours, unique characters and sharp, clean lines. Little personalised slogans featured throughout like “I [heart] Dubstep” and so on really add substance to the work and personally makes me want a t-shirt like this myself. The colours used go well together and make the character stand out from the shirt. Hall has created eye-catching designs that I could imagine a lot of people would be happy to purchase from a shop. I’d love to see a continuation of this series and even stronger prints in future.

Jake Richardson – Event Posters for the Edinburgh Fringe

Rachel Mason

Mason has used Adobe Illustrator to create a vector-based series of crisp and charming images that are stylised and inviting. Mason has managed to maintain a minimalistic style whilst keeping the main parts of the image clearly identifiable, something I know from experience is incredibly hard to do. It’s very tempting to try to overly complicate a scene and stepping back early enough is something Mason has a good grasp on. Textures have been laid over the top of the image to create a greater depth to the scene and helping to reinforce the narrative, which is present throughout Mason’s work.

Shaun S. Minns

I would almost categorise Minns work as conceptual. These digitally-based images are full of expression and explore colour, mood and personality while managing to keep all of these elements serving the overall image as a whole. The work here might create a false sense of simplicity but is extremely hard to produce. Each piece by Minns here features a narrative as the foundation.

Harriet Rennison – Graphic Designer

Calum James Crawther

Photographer and set maker / designer, Crawther makes the viewer decipher the scene and the hidden war stories behind them. The composition draws you into the scene and cleverly placed props from the war force interaction between the scene and the viewer. Crawther deliberately uses an aged war-time palette to draw the eye in and sell the scene. It almost feels like you’re looking back in time.

Antonia Kinston

Alison Swinney

This is a very large piece painted on traditional paper with a brush. This series of 3 images all connect visually and Swinney has made sure to connect each element via narrative whilst breaking the frame and cleverly using perspective to link the elements. There has clearly been a lot of love and care poured into this piece with brilliant detail and story telling. Swinney has also left it to the viewer to piece the narrative together and follow the story through the frames sub-consciously.

Nicholas Barrett – Science Gone Mad

Mark Grace – ‘I’

This is a series of portraits that forces the viewer to interact with the work by inviting you to match a series of phrases with the portrait. It makes you conscious of the way you judge others, how they appear and the way we assume things.

I like the way that even if you don’t intend to, you end up almost being forced to interact with this series instantly. Compositionally, each portrait is positioned iconically to force you to focus on the face and form your opinions about them. The subject featured takes up a good 90% of the height of the frame and is the only aspect in the picture in focus.

Sophie Johnson – Cosmos

At Sheffield there was a range of things to see. First of all I went and had a look at some of the prototype production projects that were on offer. Here's what caught my eye;

PhysioFun

This project was all about children with Cerebral Palsy that have problems with balance, movement and coordination. They used motion systems like Microsoft's Kinect or Nintendo's WiiMotion in order to produce games that can help children with these issues. Pilot studies have been started with interesting results that home therapy can help to tailor physio exercises to a child and produce measurable and comparable outcomes. For the above, children would be given pre-set exercises and tasks to do in front of the motion system. For example, reaching objects like bubbles, puzzles and other more visually stimulated exercises.

In other areas, this type of technology could be applied to analysis of professional sports technique, virtually fitting clothes in a shop and any refinement of a physical motion, even within competitive environments.

Fingerprint powder dispenser

This next product was about forensic science and how existing methods in revealing fingerprints using brushing can also remove a fingerprint. Forensic scientists, software engineers and industrial designers with a Maldo MSI expert have worked together to make a device capable of reproducing fingerprints. 3 fingerprints were made, then an algorithm was made to analyse the particle distribution using the following method.

1. Spray coating over the area.

2. Laser analyse the fingerprint.

3. Software analyses the results, providing greater definition in fingerprint analysis, capable of making a big difference in the future.

The Widow of an Indian Chief watching the arms of her deceased husband - Joseph Wright (Oil on Canvas) 1795

I really like this painting if only because it perfectly captures how a master painter can use compositional techniques to first draw your eye to a painting and then how he keeps it there.

1. Wright uses the icon 'L' shape but backwards, as you can see with the land mass coming in from the left, meeting the person and then your eye follows the rest of the shape up to the top of the tree.

2. Golden Spiral - Wright uses a reverse golden spiral that your eye follows through from the left hand edge of the clouds around and spiralling into the widow's head. Ironically the golden spiral used here is literally a golden colour.

3. The rule of thirds. Wright has placed the key points of interest in the piece on the cross-section of the thirds of the painting. The primary focal point is the cross-section between the person and the tree, where the widow leans. The eye then instinctively follows through to the second focal point up to the branch that leans out of the tree - a focal point in its positioning and in its high-contrast nature.

4. Lastly, Wright uses visual weight as a technique here too. At the top of the painting the figure is darker than the background, creating contrast. Nearer to the bottom of the painting the figure is lighter than the ground itself again creating a contrast.

A Morpho Butterfly

After Nottingham I went to visit Derby's Art Gallery and a few other places I'll go on to detail.

One Pound Note - 1978-80

I found this £1 note interesting simply because of its design, depicting Sir Isaac Newton. It's a traditionally lined note design with Sir Isaac Newton as the watermark. The note is focused on Sir Isaac Newton and his astrological legacy and it is central to the design. The element of the design I like the most is the combination of crisp, clear lineart mixed with the colour change from left to right hand side of the note. Compositionally, you enter the note at the £1 bottom left, follow the design and the colour across through to the portrait of Newton itself, framed against the right hand watermark. I also appreciate the novelty of seeing a £1 note in such recent history, yet I had never before seen one in the flesh.

A Cottage on Fire, Joseph Wright (Oil on Canvas) 1795

The final gallery I visited in Nottingham was the Nottingham Contemporary Art Gallery. There were just a few artists' work exhibited here, but each artist had an entire series on display at one time. Below are the stand-out exhibits for me.

James Gillray (1756-1815) (Cariacature)

Gillray was the first artist to popularise cariacatures as if they were relevant pieces of art to the lay person. It became accepted that backgrounds were plain and the pieces were filled with flat colours with crosshatched shading on the characters only. This would have been to make sure that the pieces could have been finished quickly, as they were originally published in newspapers. Large scale A3 prints were outlines with dip pens and ink and later they were coloured in with watercolour paints. Each piece is highly political and satirical, poking fun at the politicians of the day. Larger than life figures were cariacatured and sarirised daily - it would have made people of the day not only chuckle but embrace the politics of the time. Each piece is fully detailed and painted by hand. Gillray influenced many subsequent artists and some would say started the birthing process of the cartoons enjoyed by many today.

Mika Rottenberg

Rottenberg tends to try to shock the viewer of his work into understanding the point he is trying to communicate; sometimes with the exhibits I saw I wonder if he tries too hard to be too clever trying to get the highly controversial message across that it distracts you from seriously considering it. Rottenberg tried to envelop you and your senses in the exhibit. For a piece of work called 'Tropical Breeze' you are watching a film literally standing in a life size container, supposed to be the back of the vehicle depicted in the video. Rottenberg comments on current or past events and tries to challenge the audience how factors like physical characteristics can be a means for self-determination and control. Personally I find it pretentious and a little pointless.

The Israelites led by the Pillar of Fire - William West (1845)

I think this piece is painted with Oil on Canvas although there is nothing around the picture to confirm that. West uses Composition very well here as all of the lines in the painting deliberately point the eye to the white high contrast region of light central to the painting. The white light echoes around 75% of the piece before the eye follows the lighting and the ground through to the secondary focal point - the valley of shadow directly juxtaposed with the purity of the while light central to the piece with jet black and crimson carnal red, a metaphor for sin. A captivating piece that really captured my gaze when walking past.

Lotus and Egnet (Embroidery)

The vivid use of colour and almost metal-like sheel of the silk really draws the eye into the piece immediately. You'd be forgiven for thinking it was a metal-painting, of sorts. Once you look closer you realise the countless hours of work and intricate detail that must have gone into the forms and the blending of colour. The flower and egnet don't hold my attention especially but rather the colours and light on the threads - the texture of the piece rather than the subject matter.

As with the University Degree show, I also visited Nottingham Castle art gallery and a few of the items on display there really stood out to me, so I'll comment in more detail about these items.

Samurai Sword - Kanya Goro Sabura

This sword was made from beaten iron in the 19th Century for the Japanese guard. The pattern on the sword is unique to each individual sword and can vary in basic design. The tsuba only regard the sword as being complete with this decoration. The guard itself is glazed and black and white dotted with a patterened leather handle. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into the design and the function; blending form and function perfectly.

2nd Volunteer Batallion Derbyshire Regiment Helmet - 1887-1901,/i>

This intricate helmet really stood out to me. The combination of colour and the materials used seemed to make a truly beautiful helmet. In particular I liked the quality and detail of the metal work on the helmet. Even the stitching remains in as-good-as-new quality today in the display cabinet. The blue and silver colour scheme combine to give any volunteer a regal helmet. The central badge is made of pressed metal combining silver with gold.

Emperor and Empress of Japan Figurine (1850-1860)

This is one half of a duo of figurines of the Emperor and Empress of Japan in their court costumes from between the 8th to the 12th Century B.C. These are truly unique and ornate figurines. The detail is mind-blowing when viewed up close especially considering their age and every material on the figure just echoes its regality. The patterns and colours on the gowns especially speak of the regal nature. The headresses are unlike anything seen today and help to keep the focal point on the white porcelain faces. The figures were kept in low light so as to protect the fabric from light damage.

Jessica Buckley (Acrylic on Canvas)

This piece is all about eating pomegranates. The large scale of this painting is what truly sets it apart coupled with a subject matter that grabs your attention. The painting is easily 6ft square if not more, and as an artist I appreciate the amount of effort that would go into a piece like this. The depiction of the subject makes the piece seem almost primal in nature. The addition of the hand clawing the cheek in the process amplifies this effect even more. The main tone of the piece is scarlet, with a lack of skin tone which, again, adds to this effect. It is the layers of mystery to this piece that make you want to stay and look at it to try to make sense of it that is the main draw.

Dean Mooney (Oil on Canvas)

These paintings are incredibly different to anything else seen in this exhibition, at least that I saw. Mooney has managed to produce a series of paintings that instead of showing a specific subject seem to be explorations of colour. Somehow the pieces both have an ethereal quality but the lack of sharp lines ensure they are anchored within themselves, grounded so as not to lose your interest. Both are loosely based on skies but seem to challenge your perception of the sky with colours that are too intense to be natural. They are the kind of painting you could imagine to be in a gallery or equally to take pride of place in a house.

Charlie Crookal-Nixon (Acrylic on Wall)

This is a large scale painting, taking up an entire wall. It is the scale of the image that really sells its effect and makes it mesmerising. It is a very vivid piece that almost seems to punch you in the face when you see it. The sharp black and white contrast are rooted in optical illusion. The piece is a good 8ft square, which makes you feel like this is some portal you could jump into. Grey replaces white in the centre, giving a sense of depth and helping to maintain contrast. A mind-bending piece.