ADVANCED DRAWING: March 2019

For this assignment I mainly drew from the work of Liz Peniazava for inspiration. Like we talked about in class Liz uses images of women from old playboy and pinup magazines and creates new context by contrasting their sexuality with bright femininity (such as flowers). She also defaces most of the women which makes their sexuality anonymous and seemingly uniform. Her use of bright colors and flowers exaggerates the eroticism of these women but also makes them inviting and pleasing to look at although some of them are somewhat crude.

I was especially interested in her idea of covering the face and mimicked that idea in my own pieces. The idea of female beauty and femininity is constantly being advertised and projected to the world. Young girls often compare themselves to these images of what a female is supposed to look like and how she should behave. Although many people look at models bodies and strive to achieve that same thin and long shape I think there is something intriguing about the face and the idea of the perfect or the more desirable face. When the face is taken away what really are we? The face is the most defining feature of a person, it is how we navigate our world. In fact, our brains are hardwired to recognize faces even in inanimate objects. So when the face is removed we become unrecognizable and seemingly just like everyone else. This also means that we would not be able to navigate a world without faces and thus be lost all together. In comparison what about the act of putting on faces that don’t belong to us? For example, the act of putting on make-up or putting on a happy face when inside you are crying. I played with this idea by putting faces on top of other faces and also by detaching faces from their original source to reveal something underneath.

http://www.lizpeniazeva.com/2018/2/25/welcome-home
http://www.curvemag.com/Culture/Cut-It-Out-Feminist-Collage-Artist-Liz-Peniazeva-Is-Reimagining-Queer-Contact-Relations-1901/

Ali Sykes

ART 318-Advanced Drawing

Collage Blog Post

This project was quite a bit intimidating to me at first, being someone with very little experience interacting with collage and even less creating collage pieces. Upon beginning my research for potential contemporary collage inspirations, I was initially drawn to GL Woods’ work, specifically the piece “Super/Model,” and Joe Moorman’s work, specifically the piece “Pink Champagne." I liked how both pieces were completely covered with material, value and images; I felt like there was always something new to look at and the pieces both felt very complete because they were in a sense “full.” In GL Woods’ “Super/Model,” I liked the idea of having a collaged background behind the aspects of the piece that are the main focus. In Joe Moorman’s “Pink Champagne,” I liked how the repeated use of related images, in this case pink things, created unity in the piece.

Then I came across Rocio Montoya’s and Raphael Vincenzi’s work. Both of these artists did not completely fill their pieces with collaged media like GL Woods and Joe Moorman, however, their pieces still felt very complete and balanced. Seeing their work showed me that not all collage pieces have to be completely “full” in order to be successful. Both artists construct their collages so that each piece is interacting with each other in a sense, which created unity through shape. Seeing Rocio Montoya’s work gave me my initial idea for my collage series of hands, because in the majority of Montoya’s collage work, hands are present. I have always had a fascination with hands and their elegance and expression, so I thought this would make a good starting point for my series. I further developed the statement I wanted to convey with hands in my work when I came across Raphael Vincenzi’s work, specifically his piece “Gala,” which depicts a seductive woman with her hand placed on her shoulder. I began thinking about why I thought hands were so elegant, and made a connection between women’s hands and the media, specifically fashion magazines that I and so many other girls grew up reading and internalizing information from.

As I began researching the portrayed of women in the media, and came across Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s documentary “Miss Representation,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011, which discusses the issues with the portrayal of women in the media and the negative effects it has on women, both young girls and grown adults. I also came across The Atlantic article “Women’s Magazines Objectify Women Just as Much as Men’s Magazine’s Do,” which, as stated in the article’s title, discussed how women are portrayed in the same sexual, seductive, and flawless way in both male-targeted and female-target magazines. As I began flipping through those same magazines that I once idolized as a young girl, like TeenVogue, Elle and Glamour, I saw this overwhelming reoccurring theme of woman in seductive poses, and each pose further accentuated by the placement of the woman’s hand, whether it be tucked into her shirt, in these elegant and unnatural positions, or positioned on her inner thigh. If so much sexuality can be conveyed just from a hand of a woman in a magazine, the body that hand is connected to is bound to leave an even stronger impact on the viewer.

When creating my series, I drew from all aspects of my research and incorporated things I found successful in other pieces into my own pieces. Some of my pieces are completely full of material and value, which some are not as full. Some aspects of my pieces interact with each other more than others. For the backgrounds in a few of my pieces, I chose to collage images of traditional, feminine looking fabrics and patterns in order to convey a strong sense of femininity and also to highlight the archaic and traditional views of womanhood. Overall, I think when my pieces are viewed together, they are stronger in conveying my intended meaning because they all use different methods to do so.

Images