The truth about beauty ads

Anna Hill, 24, is an art student studying at East Carolina University. For a project she undertook in class, Anna investigated how women are being fooled by advertising corporations into buying their products by stimulating desire for what we haven't got (and what is impossible to obtain), and simultaneously creating anxieties about the features we were born with and we live with. 

Using photoshop, Anna has created a selection of 'mockvertisements' - that is, a bunch of adverts created as a parody to the ones we see everyday in so called 'glossies', a term coined by feminist theorist Imelda Whelehan to describe magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Glamour that promise an attractive and shiny lifestyle within their pages. Anna picks up on the fact that advertisers use Photoshop way too much and the women displayed to promote the products are not real and buying the product will not make you look like that. 

Anna describes her unexpected reaction to the images:

"One thing I noticed when I was doing these that when I suddenly went back to the unedited [image], it looked so wrong and kinda gross," Hill said. "It made me extra aware of how skewed my perception was after looking at the edited ones for a while."

So there we go, despite Anna knowing that the images she created were completely fake, she still felt increased anxieties after looking back to the natural shots, replicating what women all over the modern world feel at looking at what is advertised as the desirable woman, when really she doesn't exist at all.

Read more on the Huffington Post

Mica Angela Hendricks - Collaborating with a 4 year old

Hello everyone! Sorry I haven't been on here for a while. Summer has been very busy, I went away with my parents to Greece, and then shortly after went with a couple of friends to Thailand for 3 weeks, then almost as soon as I came back started an internship at a Financial PR company called Abchurch which has been going really well.

But I just had to blog about this latest craze which is sweeping the likes of Reddit, Tumblr and the general social media sphere. Mica Angela Hendrick, a graphic artist (check out her blog here), on the 27th August updated her blog with her latest collection of artworks to share with her followers. These were slightly different to previous works of hers because they are not entirely her own, she collaborated with her 4 year old daughter. 

Hendricks explains the collaboration delightfully, describing how she received a brand new, squeaky clean sketchbook in the post and she started sketching an old movie still (she claims are her favourite photos to draw). Her daughter came up to her and insisted on finishing the drawing. Hendricks thought to herself that she'd just let this drawing go, but by the time her daughter had finished she'd fallen in love with the finished piece. 

Hendricks draws the head from 20s, classical Hollywood movie stills, and then her daughter completes the drawing by adding the body and the background. The finished figure could be anything from a dinosaur to a stick insect. Hendricks and her daughter also both jointly add colour, her daughter being a little more free with her markers, and Hendricks a bit more tidy with acrylic paint. 

The pictures are quite lovely! Combining old traditional style with the young, free imagination!

www.busymockingbird.com

Tom Fruin - Watertower on Brooklyn skyline

Artist Tom Fruin is going to build another stain glass water tower in New York after his first one last summer, this one is due to start installation on the 10th May.

Here are some pictures of Watertower I, a beautiful addition to the Brooklyn skyline. Built out of over 1000 pieces of plexiglass and steel, it sits on top of a water station.

I will update you in about a week of the new installation!
www.tomfruin.com

College for Creative Studies

The clever marketing team at the College for Creative Studies have put together this set of humourous advertisements

Dirty Car Art

Apologies for the lack of posts the past couple of days! Have been campaigning to become President of my society (which I got!) and starting back at uni for the last term of second year. Today's post is something a little different, I'm sure a couple of my readers would've written on a dirty car window 'Clean me' or drawn a face or something of the like, artist Scott Wade, who lives near a dirt track, does something a little more...

dirtycarart.com

Anthony Cudahy

Anthony Cudahy is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York City. He mostly paints portraits of individuals with a bold sense of colour and light, using thick strokes of the paint brush. For me, his work echoes features of Francis Bacon's paintings, not just with technique but also the eerie and unfamiliar subjects and emotion emitting from the painting, and also Lucian Freud, because of the fleshy feel of the paint. 

Francis Bacon - Self Portrait (1970)

Lucian Freud - Reflection (1985)

www.anthonycudahy.com

Confessions - Candy Chang

Candy Chang, a well established designer who has worked previously with the likes of the New York Times, began a project last year titled 'Confessions' on the Las Vegas Strip. Chang opened her project with the line 'What happenes in Vegas stays in Vegas, but what if we could share with full discretion?'. Inspired by Catholicism, the book 'Post Secret' and Shinto shrine prayer walls, Chang's project allows the public to confess their deepest secrets without having to reveal their identity and relate to others around them in a big and busy city, where you may often feel very alone. 

Visitors to the exhibition are invited to join the project, they can step in a booth commanding them to 'WRITE A CONFESSION', and once written, drop the confession in a letter box ready for display. Chang explains:

'Every passerby is another person full of longing, anxiety, fear, confusion, and wonder. We struggle with a lot of the same issues and there is great comfort in knowing you are not alone.'

The confessions range from 'I eat too much cheese', 'I still love her, 5 years and 2 girlfriends later' to 'I'm afraid I'm going to die alone'. Take a look at the pictures from the project.

The Project