H.R.Giger

H.R.Giger is one of the most famous artists, in the realm of fantasy art. He was born to a chemist’s family in 1940, in Switzerland, he moved to Zurich in 1962 and studied architecture and industrial design at the school of applied arts.

By 1964 he was producing his own artwork, which was mainly ink drawings but his real work started when he discovered the airbrush. This instrument combined with his own unique style lead him to fame for his surrealistic biomechanical dreamscapes. Giger’s most famous book, Necronomicon, was published in 1977, as it was the inspiration behind Ridley Scott’s film Alien. For this he won an Oscar in 1980 for best achievement in visual effects, for the designs of the alien and its life cycle and the environments that surrounded it.

Sculpture was also a big part of Giger’s work, extending the work he did on paper into the third dimension. In 1988 he was given the chance to design his own first total environment, a Giger bar in Tokyo Japan. By 1998 he had opened a museum in the chateau St. Germain,, in the old city of Gruyeres, Switzerland. This is a permanent home for many of the artist’s more prominent paintings, sculpture and furniture’s.

Appropriation (art)

Appropriation can be understood as the use of borrowing of elements of another persons work to produce a new piece of work. In the visual arts, appropriating means to borrow, recycle, adopt or sample aspects of another’s work. By doing so we re-invent, what once was, in to something new by variation, interpretation, parody and many other methods.

I decided for my appropriation project to work on a picture by H.R.Giger called future kill. Not being the first artist to appropriate work from someone else, I will be looking at other artists who have done the same. One of Banksy famous pieces of appropriation art is Show Me the Monet.

This was a close copy of Claude Monet, Bridge over a pool of water lilies 1899, except it shows a traffic cone and trolleys dumped in the urban paradise. Another artist, Douglas Gordon used the film psycho and just slowed it down and called it 24 hour psycho. He said that it was not a simply work of appropriation but more of an act of affiliation. He felt that his different take on the familiar classic, allowed people recognition and repetition, time and memory, complicity and duplicity, darkness and light, which in its normal context would be over looked.

Mind

Mind is a leading mental health charity, which covers the regions of England and Wales. The idea behind mind is to create a society that promotes and protects good mental health for all. It tries to build a society that treats people with an experience of mental distress, fairly, positively and with respect, It looks to make sure that those who experience mental distress are listened too, that their voices are heard by those that can influence change. It focuses on demanding higher standards of mental health care and to challenge discrimination wherever it occurs.

The services for mind include supported housing, crisis help lines, drop-in centers, employment and training schemes, counseling and befriending. Although mind is one charity, each local mind is an independent charity run by local people, for local people. This gives mind the ability to respond to issues within the community, like the planning of mental health services, local campaigns to on metal health issues, and raising awareness so that attitudes towards mental health may change.

Mind is totally independent, this gives it the integrity and the independence and freedom to stand up and speak out on the real issues that affect people’s daily lives.

Types of Masks II

Art Masks

Masks can be just for decorative purposes, used to create atmosphere to enliven a room. They are usually have elaborate designs, which are of great beauty, creativity, diversity, and the richness of human imagination. It represents our desire to show where we have been, our present, our future, heroes, demons, dreams, fears, fantasies, and nightmares.

Mardi Gras Masks


Mardi gras is the season of carnival, in is the celebration prior to the fasting season of lent. It is traditional to wear a mask on Mardi gras day; it allows us to truly be free or anonymous. Masks can express your inner secretive personality or your alter ego.

Masquerade Masks

These were historically made for a masquerade ball, a party that involved costume, dance and most importantly masks. The ideas behind these occasion was in the realms of pure play, itself an avid pastime in the 17th and 18th centaury, is found the Art of Masquerade. Masquerade Masks are things of play; they enable us to enter the realms of fantasy and dreams, things that we all inhabit within our own imagination. Just like we drink to allow us to socialize more freely, so we aid ourselves with masks to do the same.

Types of masks I

Halloween Masks

Halloween is short for All Hallows’ Eve, which is know as day of the dead, and is the day before all saints day. Halloween is a holiday that celebrates the well being of departed souls, allowing us to pray for them. We are reminded of our own mortality, and that the doorway between life and death is guarded by many devils, ghosts, goblins, and fear itself. Wearing masks on this day is a tradition, and is favorite celebration for many because of this reason.

Ritual Masks

A ritual is a form of sacred theatre used to commune with the dead. Masks are used quite a lot by certain cultures as ritual devices, being a vehicle to leap into other dimensions. This is accomplished by merging with the spirit of the mask, thinking of what they want to conjure, thereby transforming into it. It has many different ritual uses from healing, telling the future, teaching and sacred theatre.
These masks are also called Guardian masks; they can be angelic or demonic
And are used to connect us to unseen forces, using the power to protect inner or outer treasures. Guardian masks can sometimes be placed above ones bed or a doorway entrance.

Somerset House – Pick me up exhibition

Somerset house presented Pick Me Up, the first contemporary graphic art fair in the UK. The fair brought together the most exciting graphic artists working today.

The show comprised of 24 up and coming graphic artists nominated from an international pool of talent selected by the pick me up panel.

Some of my favourites at the exhibition were, Andy Rementer, Annelle Carlstrom, and Mcbess.

Andy Rementer grew up in the USA, and received his bachelors at the university of arts in Philadelphia. From 2005-2007 he worked at Fabrica in northern Italy. He’s the author of a comic strip tiled ‘techno Tuesday’, and currently resides in Philadelphia. His work is very cartoon like with an amazing simplicity that shines through.

Annelie Carlstrom is an artist who likes to produce what could be called extremely detailed caricatures. They are beautifully drawn and have a unique style to them.

Mcbess was my favourite artists at the exhibition; her work was exceptional with her old 1900s cartoon style. The work was made up of only black and white and she uses cross-hatching to give the pictures a shade. The work is cleverly put together and had a whitey overtone.

David Hockney

David Hockney was born on the 9th of July 1937; he is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire, although also maintaining a base in London. The pop art movement in 1960s mainly knows him for his contributions; he is considered to be one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century.

David Hockney has worked with photography, or to be more precise, photo collage. Using varying numbers of small Polaroid snaps or photo lab-prints of a single subject. Hockney would arrange a patchwork to make a composite image. Because these photographs are taken from different perspectives and at slightly different times, the resulting image has an affinity with cubism, this one of Hockney’s aims discussing the way human vision work. Other work was landscapes such as the Pearblossom Highway and also portraits like kasmin.

Hockney created these photomontage works mostly between 1970 and 1986. He referred to them as “joiners”. He began a style of art by taking Polaroid photographs of one subject and arranging them into a grid layout. The subject would actually move while being photographed so the movement would be shown from the photographer’s perspective. In later works Hockney changed his technique and moved the camera around the subject instead.

Hieronymus Bosch

Hieronymus Bosch was born in Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aken on august the 9th 1450 and died in 1516; he was an early Netherlandish painter. His work is renowned for its use of fantastic imagery to illustrate the moral and religious concepts and narratives.

Not much is know about Bosch’s life or training. He did not leave any diaries or letters, and what has been taken from brief references to him in the municipal records of s-Hertogenbosch, and in the account books of the local order of the Brotherhood of Our Lady. To this day, nothing is know about his personality or his thoughts on the meaning of his art.

Bosch was born and lived all his life in and near s-Hertogenbosch, a city in the Duchy of Brabant. Bosch’s grandfather, Jan Van Aken was also a painter, it is know that Jan had four sons who were also painters. Bosch’s father, Anthonius van Aken, acted as an artistic advisor to the Brotherhood of Our Lady. It is supposed that either one of his uncles or father, taught him how to paint, but none of their works survive. In his lifetime, Bosch became a well-liked artist and received many commissions from abroad. In 1488 he joined the highly respected brotherhood of Our Lady, a conservative religious group of some 40 influential citizens of s-Hertogenbosch.

The Tower of Babel

The Tower of Babel is according to the book of genesis, was an enormous tower built in the plain of Shinar.

From biblical account, the great flood left a united generation of humanity, all speaking a single language and migrating from the east, came to the land of Shinar. They decided upon building a city with a tower, which would reach the heavens. God came down to see what the people had built and said “they are one people and have one language, and nothing will be withholden from them which they purpose to do.” So God said, “come, let us go down and confound their speech.” So God scattered them upon the face of the Earth, and confused their languages, and they left the off building the city, which was called Babel “because God there confounded the language of all the Earth.”

The Tower of Babel has often been associated with know structures, like the Etemenanki, a ziggurat which was dedicated to Marduk by Nabopolassar in 610 BC. The base of the great ziggurat was square, and measured 300ft in height, although it was demolished by Alexander the Great before his death in an attempt to rebuild it.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

The Garden of Earthly Delights was painted by the early Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch (1450 – 1516). The painting has been held in the Museo del Prado in Madrid since 1939. The age when the painting was painted is between 1490 and 1510, when Bosch was around 40 to 50 years of age. This is Bosch’s best know and most ambitious work, a masterpiece that reveals the artist at the height of his powers; in no other painting does he achieve such a complexity of meaning or such vivid imagery.

The triptych is painted in oil and has a square middle panel flanked by two rectangular wings that can close over the centre like shutters. The outer wings, when shut, display a painting of the earth during the creation. The three scenes inside the triptych are intended to be chronological from left to right. The left depicts God presenting Adam and Eve, while the central panel is a panorama of sexually engaged nude figures, animals, fruit and stone formations. The right panel is a hellscape and portrays the torments of damnation.

Art critics have interpreted this painting as a warning on the perils of life’s temptations. It has also been seen as a moral warning or a panorama of paradise lost.

The tree of knowledge (of good and evil)

In the book of genesis, the tree of knowledge sat in the middle of the Garden of Eden. God told Adam and Eve that they were not to eat the fruit of this tree. One day, a serpent came and tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, telling them that it would bestow them with wisdom. Eve then Adam ate the forbidden fruit, and they become aware of their nakedness, using leaves they covered themselves. After discovering their betrayal, God banished them from the Garden of Eden, making sure that they did not get to the tree of life, which would have made them immortal. God cursed both the snake and the ground, forcing Adam to survive through agriculture, meaning that he would have to work hard. He told Eve that her pains in childbirth would be greatly increased and that man would rule over her. God also placed guards at the east side of the Garden, making sure that the tree of life was protected from Adam and Eve, and their descendants. This left Adam and Eve who had been protected and loved in the Garden, to the harsh reality of the world and all its misgivings.

Lucid Dreams

Aurora Parrabellum was the name that would be whispered all the way through history. Half human, half angel, a product of a war between heaven and hell. A tormented creature that was forced into a life she did not choose, tainting herself to avoid the word of God. A word, which caused her unbelievable pain, acts of evil were the only relief for Aurora, being rewarded is the serenity of quite after committing them.

Aurora was sent to purgatory for her crimes but she finds away of escape. Using the dreams of artists she was able to escape, getting the artist to paint her, allowing her into our world. Returning to the world she decides to cause all sorts of trouble, blaming God for her own crimes and the prison he had given her. She decides that it is her destiny to overthrow Gods reign and destroy the balance between heaven and hell.

In Gage she had found a way to escape forever and to finally shift the balance to her side. He was the link in the chain that would sever her from God’s sight forever. This was the moment she had been waiting for and where my story begins.

The Tree of life

The whole concept of the tree of life is that the many branches illustrate the idea that all life on earth is connected. This has been used in many areas, from science, religion, philosophy and mythology. History has seen many religions and societies use the tree of life in their culture.

The ancient Egyptians called their tree of life Saosis , that they used to explain a tree in which life and death were enclosed. They also held the Sycamore as a holy tree, which stood at the threshold of life and death, connecting the two worlds.

Assyrians tree of life was represented by a series of nodes and criss-crossing lines. It was seen as an important religious symbol.

Baha’I Faith refers to the manifestation of God, a great teacher who appears to humanity from age to age. The concept has God as the roots and trunk of the tree and his followers as the branches and leaves.

In Chinese mythology the tree of life depicts a phoenix and a dragon; the dragon often represents immortality. A taiost story tells of a tree that produces a peach every three thousand years. The one who eats the peach will become immortal.

The Turner Prize 2010

The Turner Prize is awarded annually for an outstanding exhibition. Four artists are shortlisted and they present their work in a three-month exhibition at Tate Britain.

Dexter Dalwood has been nominated for his solo exhibition at Tate St Ives, which revealed the rich depth and range of his approach to making painting that draws upon historical tradition as well as contemporary cultural and political events. He is known for making paintings of famous places he’s never seen, making plausible suggestions of those iconic haunts, Dexter Dalwood pictures his own documentation of history.

Angela de la Cruz has been nominated for her solo exhibition, After at Camden Arts Centre, London. De la Cruz uses the language of painting and sculpture to create striking works that may represent the death of conventional paintings. Her paintings are more like a piece of sculpture escaping the realms of the canvas while braking down its boundaries.

Susan Philipsz has been nominated for the presentations of her work Lowlands at the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and Long Gone in the group exhibition Mirrors at the Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Vigo, Spain. Philipsz uses her own voice to create uniquely evocative sound installations that play upon and extend the poetics of specific, often out-of-the-way spaces.

The Otolith Group have been nominated for their project A Long Time Between Suns, which took the form of exhibitions at Gasworks and The Showroom, London with accompanying publication. The Otolith Group questions the nature of documentary history across time by using material found in its many varieties, in particular the moving image.

The fourth plinth

This year’s exhibition, held in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-fields church in Trafalgar Square has attracted a lot of attention, as the winner will grace the plinth during the 2012 Olympic games in London.

It’s a coveted privilege but it comes at a price. There are demands placed upon the sculpture: two essential criteria for the art is that it is attractive and interesting to look at and that it must convey a universal message which is relevant to contemporary society.

Proposals were shortlisted by judges for the 2012 commission are the best of the best, although almost all of them fulfil only one of the two requirements.

Katharina Frisch’s Hahn/Cock is a sculpture of a cockerel rendered in stunning ultramarine blue. This sculpture would bring vibrancy to the square with its otherwise drab colour scheme. The message for this piece is somewhat vague. It uses the cockerel as a symbol for regeneration, awakening and strength.

To contrast this, Brian Griffiths’ Battenberg is a huge cumbersome brick in the shape of this quintessentially British cake.

The only proposal that seems to fulfil all the criteria for the project is Allora and Calzadila’s untitled a.t.m organ. It’s a replica of an old fashioned pipe organ. If installed on the fourth plinth the organ will be linked to an a.t.m at the ground level, which when used by the general public, will trigger sounds of varying pitch and volume with each press of the a.t.m’s buttons.