David Hockney on Lucian Freud



Really interesting to hear artists talk about one another who were close. For anyone still at uni (Falmouth) check out this DVD in the library - can't remember what it's called - but it's David Bailey meeting Andy Warhol (so type them in). Really interesting & quite funny (the bit in the car comes to mind)

This is why I love animation, Part 1

Gunna start a new little feature here on my blog, which is essentially a library of all the animation that I love. 2D animation especially has so much virtue in it, and to begin with, this, I think, is my favorite music video ever..

Rome - Two Against One by Anthony F. Schepperd


A quote from Anthony F. Schepperd (the animator behind it) - "Animation gives us the rare opportunity to spill our most coveted attribute, the imagination"

This is how I feel about animation too; This is why I love Virginia Woolf's writing so much. What she toiled to do in her writing is a shared attribute of animations; It's such a vivid & likely way to express the mind -- and feelings. It can do this very succinctly, e.g...

Sisyphus by Jankovics Marcell


Balance by Wolfgang & Christoph Lauenstein



Animation too you sometimes find can be a little too ambiguous for it to really mean anything to you at that precise moment. But often, because of the aesthetic beauty of it, those images are locked in your mind, and recalled as a metaphor at a later date.:
Rotary Signal Emitter by Reuben Sutherland



Even when animation is being more filmic, the ingrained, implicitly spontaneous attributes of the medium lend it to subjectivity.. - eg; how the characters move (the weight & exaggeration), the colours, the drawing style, weight of the line, the flow of the animation, the smoothness of it or choppyness etc etc etc (Film has similar abilities, but they are alot more confined and not as vividly implicit).  EG - 
Les Chiens Isolés by CRCR


Everything I can see From Here by Sam Taylor & Bjorn Aschim

Redressing the balance

It is important to remember that things like THIS tell us more truth about people, than the Daily Mail or Heat magazine.

--
Animation

Also, THIS is exactly what I love about animation. If you tried to do this with film, it just wouldn't mean anything.. (except to affix your own pre-concieved ideas about what a film should be like).

The difference between glamour & beauty // Glamour Schiele's

Hello hello. For a long while i've wanted to have a go at immitating Egon Schiele's style. Going to the Leopold museum recently spurred me on even more so.

I think what's most striking about his paintings is how they feel so contemporary. Showing a friend yesterday who is naive to art, he said he'd assumed he was a current artist, working today. I think its something in the subject matter, the (usual) grotesqueness of his painted figures, These sort of elongated inhumane figures that have been turned & twisted, that, for me atleast, speaks something of the superficial nature of todays English society..

I think that society, or that cloud of culture we're living under, is best epitomized by celebretized nonsense which is so ingrained; that which provokes us into shop door ways & to check hair in car window reflections. That which essentially makes you focus on your appearance so much more than what's inside of you; what you can learn, what's in your head. My biggest problem with it is the effect it has on women, I think one of the most distressing things is the frequency of plastic surgery today; to me, a woman having her flesh torn into and plumped up, to endear the fancy of a mans appetite, makes me really sad. Equally, older women who cannot grow old gracefully (which is true beauty) and stump around on stilts with a dog in handbag and a pulled-back face. I speak with cynicism but it really does sadden me more than anything.

Anyway, this comes back round to the question; What is the difference between being glamorous, and being beautiful? Have a think about it yourself.

I'm in no way going to try and encapsulate beauty, because beauty is beauty, we all know it when we feel it. From a giggling child to the grand canyon we all recognise it. Beauty is a natural thing, innocent too, I think we can all agree. Again, i'm not going to try and encapsulate beauty, we all recognize it.

Glamour on the other hand, comes from the point of view of the person being looked at. They are saying, look at me, look at me. It's all about envy, the reflection of envy they get bounding back at them resentfully off the faces passing them in the street. The uplifting feeling they garner from this. It is much the same as the difference between pride & humility. Both have a resounding confidence to them, however pride is to do with putting yourself above others - chest puffed out pacing down the road - whilst having humility is putting yourself shoulder to shoulder with others.

What summarized the two different attitudes to me was when I visited France last year. I found in France (Lyon) people look at one another in the street, girls especially will look at each other, what they're wearing, where their handbag is from, what type of shoes they chose to wear & how they dressed their hair. Then, they will share a smile with one another and pass by, as if to say 'aww you look pretty' with deepest sincerity. In England, my home town specifically i'm talking (Torquay) girls look each other up and down, too. But it's always in this facetious, jealous way, walking off muttering to themselves '..Bitch.' I dunno, to me this was the line between Beauty and Glamour, in France they recognize beauty, in England our eyes are most aware of glamour.


Anywho, a tangent, I know, but here's the pictures.




It's still not totally what i'm after, I wanted to make something that feels really grotesque. I think the first one could be mistaken as 'Toms drawing sexy naked girls.. lovely..', that's was not the intention, but I like the style of it anyway. The second I feel is halfway there, although she looked a lot more gangly and horrific in the line drawing. The third is a poster I did for me pals band in the summer, it is in a similar vein, although obviously not Egon Schiele.