Mixed Media Project

Niki Ravari

ART 318

This assignment introduced me to new mediums as well as new artists who inspired the way I used materials. The first artist I wanted to talk about is Kara Walker. Kara Walker is a painter and collage artist whose works generally shed light on important topics, primarily about race and gender. Something that stood out to me about her collaging work is the way she uses historic pages as the base for the works and uses them as key factors in the piece. This inspired the base for my pieces which are pages from a book titled The Capitol. This book reported on music and entertainment news from 1948 and while I knew it would be unrelated to the rest of the subject matter, I chose to use it because I liked the idea of incorporating images that would not normally make sense together. The images I’ve included in my collection of works are generally relating to the popular beauty standards of women overtime, such as images from well-known magazine covers and vintage beauty ads, which I then altered to remove them from their intended surroundings which creates a new image that seems arbitrary.

Kara Walker:

The next artist is John Brendan Guinan, who is known for his paintings using mixed media which contain an abundance of textures and vivid colors. Each of his paintings are layered and complex, making me wonder what steps he took to create his works. I particularly like the pieces which incorporate what look like doodles from a sketchbook, with raw edges of the paper attached to the base. This added to the theme I wanted to explore of using shapes and images that don’t necessarily make sense. Guinan’s use of color inspired me to think about strategic ways to incorporate colors in a way that would be visually pleasing. Creating relatively random shapes and piecing them together in the most strategic way became the most enjoyable part of this project for me.

John Brendan Guinan:

Pieces from my project: