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

An (A)lte(R)na(T)ive investment

Investing in any market or scheme is undoubtedly unpredictable and comes with a great number of risks. Stocks and shares are volatile, and with this to consider some investors are now focusing their assets on alternative forms of investment, perhaps most interestingly in works of art.

Pros in the field of art investment, or the ‘investment of passion’ as it is often referred to, have a few rules when it comes to buying and selling art. Firstly, as with all types of investments, you shouldn’t expect a fast return on your buy. Art insiders would recommend holding on to the artwork for at least 5, if not 10 years, to allow for the artist to develop in the industry. This brings us to the second rule; ensure you purchase an artwork which you enjoy. When at art fairs or auctions buy what catches your eye, not what you think will impress others. The work is going to be with you for up to (if not longer) than a decade, so you want an artwork that you can look at on your wall and take pleasure in. 

An excellent example of how art investment works is the case of Peter Doig’s The Architect’s Home in the Ravine. The huge oil painting was bought for a mere £280,000 in 2002 by Charles Saatchi, who then resold the artwork in 2007, after the artists reputation soared, for £2.7 million. The buyer from 2007 put the painting in Christie’s February auction this year and it sold for just under £7 million. That’s an unbelievable 2300% rise in value in just over a decade.

Peter Doig’s The Architect’s Home in the Ravine

However with the positives you also get the negatives, as with all investment there are substantial risks involved. Taste in art changes over time, so what is popular one year may not be the other. As well as this, if the artist’s reputation is badly damaged, the price of the artwork will subsequently tumble. Take for example well-known Australian artist Rolf Harris who has a large contract with Whitewall galleries.  In spring when sexual allegations against him were first released, people started selling his work on eBay for low prices because they feared if he was charged the art would be worthless. Now Harris has been charged, it is still unclear what Whitewall are going to do in reaction, but price slashing will almost certainly be the first step, if not removing his art from galleries nationally altogether.

One of Harris' paintings

 To wrap up, art investment can absolutely reap the benefits, but it requires a lot of research, as well as the equity to invest in the first place. But with the correct amount of planning and in a decade or 2, perhaps you could be the next Saatchi?

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

Meghan Howland

Meghan is a young artist, born in 1985, living and working in Portland, Maine. She studied painting at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and studied in Italy for a year also. Meghan's close detail of figures clothes and hair is outstanding, but most interestingly she focuses many of her paintings around the obstruction of the face, most commonly birds with outstretched wings.

Meghan kindly sent me her statement:

"Meghan Howland is an emerging artist living and working in Portland, Maine. Her work offers a unique range of styles and observations, while often personal in their meaning, ventures to examine larger cultural and emotional issues.  Through a haze of oil paint, and sometimes animals, we are confronted by situations that are at once disarmingly beautiful, yet are infused with an implied sense of yearning, loss, or disaster. In recent work, subjects are bathed in nature in a subtly unnatural way. Naive to or unaffected by what is happening around them, figures are often used to explore issues of fragility, identity, and our individual understandings of nature within our own personal, somewhat obscure relationship to it." 

www.meghanhowland.com

Huang Zheng

Huang Zheng, a Chinese artist, paints hyper realistic portraits up close of women's faces.

Art Slant

Picasso's Blue Period

In the spring of 1901, Picasso learnt about the suicide of friend and fellow painter Carlos Casagemas, and fell into deep depression. These blue paintings are a representation of Picasso's melancholy and sombre mood throughout the years 1901-4, his mood dominating his paintings. Picasso's Blue Period was followed in 1904 by his Rose Period, when his mood improved and this reflected in the pink, red tones of his paintings.

La Vie (1903)

Casagemas in his Coffin (1901)

Portrait of Jamie Sabartes (1901)

The Old Guitarist (1903)

The Rose Period (The Actor - 1901)

Beth Galton

Beth Galton has made a series of, in her words, 'Conceptual' artworks in which she has examined the way we look at food amongst other things. 

Cut Food: Here Beth has taken apart the food we rarely see inside of, such as the favourite pot noodle or ice cream cone

Beth kindly sent me a statement about Cut Food: 


This series was inspired by an assignment in which we were asked to cut a burrito in half for a client.  Normally for a job, we photograph the surface of food occasionally taking a bite or a piece out but rarely the cross section of a finished dish.  Charlotte Omnès, the food stylist and I thought it would be interesting to explore the interiors of various foods particularly items commonplace to our everyday life.  By cutting these items in half we move past the simple appetite appeal we normally try to achieve and explore the interior worlds of these products. I chose to light them with a harder light, and to place them against black.  Daniel Hurlburt composited elements in retouching to achieve the final image. Both Charlotte and I felt that this approach helped highlight our exploration of the world within.

Landscapes: In this series of photographs, Beth zooms into food and captures the different textures we experience with sight instead of touch and taste, creating images which look like abstract landscapes.

Idioms: The last set of images I'm showing is perhaps the most interesting, called idioms. An idiom is a set of words in which the meaning isn't deductible if they are not put together, for example 'raining cats and dogs'. Beth has used this definition to place together  in photographs, things which we put together instantly in our minds, (much like my post on David Schwen a month ago).

Beth has posted loads more of her projects on her website so take a look!

What is meaning?

How do we decode the things we see? For one of my university essays, I have been reading up on Erwin Panofsky's theory of iconography, the semiotics of images, and how we decode the images we see almost instantaneously, without even thinking about what we are doing. 

In Panofsky's theory, he relates iconography to gesture, in particular the tip of a hat when walking past someone you know as a greeting. The person to whom the hat is tipped recognises this as a greeting, a polite gesture, and in order for them to understand the meaning they would've had to exist in the same cultural and social context. Yet we don't even think about how we interpret the things we see. Another example, as in the book 'Practices of Looking' by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, is road signs. If we think about road signs, we interpret them quickly and easily, and pretty fast we understand them and don't think twice when we see them. The same relates to images, for example, if I were to show you the image below, you would instantly connect that to the Olympics. Both the symbol of the rings and the word 'Olympics' represent the event, that's semiotics for you.

Although Panofsky's theory is meant for artworks from the Renaissance, lets interpret the Olympic rings using it. 

Breaking down interpretation or meaning:

1) Primary or Natural

- I recognise the shapes and colours

2) Secondary or Conventional

- I recognise the symbol as representation of the Olympics, I recognise the cultural context

- I recognise that the rings mean the 5 competitive continents and the colours (including white) represent the colours of the flags of all competing countries

3) Intrinsic meaning

- The symbol tells us the about the cultural context it was created in

- An age of sport and competition 

- The symbol was created only 100 years ago, so the symbol was created in a fairly contemporary age

Thanks!

Wow I've reached Hong Kong! Thank you to everyone who's taken the time to look at my posts, makes it feel worthwhile!