Francoise Nielly

Francoise Nielly is an artist my sister came across doing support studies for her Junior Cert project and I instantly fell in love with her work. Her use of colour is intense and eye catching. The colour she uses is influenced by the classical, florescence imagery of South France. The use of knives to create the paintings leave clean thick brush strokes. She was taught as a child that there is no room for mistakes, and with an influence of architecture, you can see the construction in the faces are an extreme strong point.

 http://www.francoise-nielly.com/

                    

   

Day in the woods

Images taken from a housemate day out to Curraghcase 

Sheila Pree Bright

While writing my dissertation about the media and celebrity influences on body image I did research on artists that were involved in this topic. One of these artists is Sheila Pree Bright.

I instantly fell in love with her work.  

The first project of hers that i found was Plastic Bodies. Here is an artist statement:

"Bright create images that critique society’s fascination with the unreal and morph human skin onto a toy figure, showing the fine line that is often drawn between reality and fabrication in American culture. French social theorist Jean Baudrillard describes this concept as “The Precession of Simulacra.” He states,

The concept of simulation suggests the fabrication of what is real through conceptual or “mythological” models has no connection or origin in reality. Instead of the reality, the model becomes the determinant of our perception of reality. Therefore ideal models presented through the media, such as homes, relationships, fashion art and music all become dictated by the given ideal. This creates a world of hyper-reality where the distinctions between real and dream like

are blurred.

Plastic Bodies series show the impact that media and advertising play in defining beauty for girls and women and how Barbie is used in Western culture to encourage one standard of beauty."


Whist reseaching her i found this project Young Americans

"Recently, Bright took the Young Americans portraits to the streets of Art Basel Miami   2012, wheat pasting eleven images in the Coconut Grove neighbourhood on building and abandon homes that are often unnoticed in the urban landscape.  Bright revisits the series which exhibited as a solo show at the High Museum  of Atlanta in 2008, curated by Julian Cox, Founding Curator of Photography and Chief Curator  of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The work examines attitudes and values of Generation Y as American citizens. The series shows diverse young Americans, who are new to the voting system, and exploring ideas of what it means to be American. The sitters expressed their perspectives in a statement and posed in their chosen stance with the American flag. "



And then this one called Suburbia 


"Bright received national attention after winning the Santa Fe Prize from the Santa Fe Center for photography in 2006 for a series of work entitled Suburbia . The series takes aim at the American media's projection of the "typical" African American community and depicts a more realistic and common ideology of African American life. The series also explore the variations and similarities of an existence that subverts lifestyle and culture, particularly as it relates to Americanism."

Trip to Fota Island

This blog is not only college work but contains some of my own photography images as well. This entry is just about a trip to Fota island I took with friends however, after looking at the images I have found more to it then that. More to follow on that topic :) 

Flora Borsi

IREEL is a series of painted images don't by the artist Flora Borsi.  The hyper realistic painter aims at trying to achieve a result that looks like a real photographic image. She applies some colour and toning affects to the photographs and adjusted the contrast and shin retouching.



"A pictorialist photographer's desired result is visually equivalent to a painting."

Nickolay Lamm

Nickolay Lamm is a 26 year old artist who's mothers kitchen table is his studio. I came across his work while I was researching work for my dissertation and realised it was an influence in to recent studio work of mine - My Barbie image series.  I enjoy his work and efforts in trying to achieve his goal of getting the ideal body image of females available to them true a representation of an average teenage girl. It is a positive body image for young females to be introduced to.
What i find more interesting behind the project then the work itself is the reviews and feedback he has on the product. Many women and men around the world have ordered and received the barbie doll for themselves, their daughters and even their sons. His doll has made so many people more happy then the average barbie doll ever had.

This is a statement of his work i found on his website: "He scored a big hit last summer with his “regular Barbie” doll which — gasp! — actually possessed the body proportions of the average 19-year-old female. That was a digital mirage, but Mr. Lamm has spent much of the past year developing a real doll for sale called Lammily — complete with reusable stickers that mimic freckles, acne, cellulite, grass stains, moles and stretchmarks — and she’s been selling like hotcakes."

This is the software barbie doll he has produced too sell to families. Not only is the doll of average proportion but her clothing is also of ideal standard rather then the skimpy, non-appropriate style the barbie doll is sold with.


This is is the comparisons of the barbie doll that Lamm produced before he started creating his own doll. He uses the Mattel Barbie doll to show how out of proportion the doll is to the one he made.

Scanned self images

Taking images of yourself is a hard thing to do, especially when working on something like the topic of body image. These images iv uploaded before, but these have a twist to them. I painted over printed images, to try and create something new. I painted over the body figure, as if to hid them from people seeing them, like we do with make up, Photoshop, and Internet on a daily basis. I then scanned these images back onto my laptop and cropped them down. I thought there was something personal going on in the images, for me there is, but when i showed them to others, i got responses that they felt like they were spying on someone, like they shouldn't be looking at them. 

 These two images, are more abstract then the rest. This was purposely done because I was trying to achieve an image that looked like there was a figure within the page.