Use of sunlight
Aperture
Portraiture Research
A definition of portraiture in any medium its involved in is that it is a representation of the person by drawn, painted or photographed and self-portraiture is when the artist uses themselves as a subject for their work.
Portraiture is a very old art form that has been used through various mediums since its conecption being used since ancient Egypt and the way that a portrait was made was through a painted, sculpted, or drawn portrait was the only way to record the appearance of someone.
Portraits are more than just an aesthic representation of the person that the artist is painting, photographing or sculpting they are also made show the power, importance, virtue, beauty, wealth, taste, learning or other qualities of the sitter to define them above the rest if they are a higher class with more wealth than others. Portraits have almost always been used to make the subject flawless making sure that the beauty that is not on the outside of the subject is in the portrait and unfortunately for artists who refuse to use their art to lie about the subject through flattering their beauty and so forth with an example being William Hogarth who made what he saw and not what his subject wished to see which tended to have his work rejected. However, an exception was Francisco Goya in his apparently bluntly truthful portraits of the Spanish royal family which is surprising as you would think the royal family would rather have a majestically aesthetic portrait taken of them.
Below are some examples of Hogarth’s and Goya’s work.
Found Object Research
A Found Object is a man-made work piece usually found by the artist and sometimes altered in a way to convey meaning. That is one definition of Found Object another way I would explain Found Object is that it is Appropriation with objects found in the world around you and the works made with these objects may sometimes be used as inspiration for artists and their work. An example of inspiration due to Found Object would be the sculptor Henry Moore who collected bones and flints which he seems to have treated as natural sculptures as well as sources for his own work. Another variation of Found Object used by an artist with be Duchamp’s readymades which are works of art crafted from manufactured objects and the best way to describe what Duchamp was trying to accomplish would be with this quote: ‘…based on a reaction of visual indifference, with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste…’ as he quoted in The Art of Assemblage: A Symposium, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 19, 1961. This quote to me says that with his work he was trying to achieve work that made people think as they would be completely neutral in thinking about his work to cause debate which he seemed to have caused in the art world.
Below are examples of both Moore’s and Duchamp’s work
Appropriation Research
Appropriation is defined in art as a practice where artists utilize pre-existing objects or images but manipulate them so that they are different from the original object and image from the original artist giving their own personal style on the work. Appropriation has been used since the 1980s by various artists but artists such as Picasso and Georges Braque. Whose constructions were made starting from 1912 using real objects to create various versions of themselves through self-portraiture and experimentations with what would be coined as Appropriation and as time went on other artists started to pick up the trend that Picasso and Georges Braque started while surrealism soon followed making the works that originally seemed normal into abstract and in some cases absurd art and objects.
Below are three examples of appropriation-
Salvador Dalí
Lobster Telephone 1936
Jeff Koons
Three Ball Total Equilibrium 1985
Pablo Picasso Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper 1913
