Random little sketch from my sketchbook
Author: bdonnet
Heisenberg
Just felt like making a poster, hope you like it
Sketching
Just got back from a few days visiting Copenhagen. It’s a lovely place (pretty cold though!) and if you go there, you should definitely rent a bike to get around: it’s a lot easier to go from one place to another and it’s a lot more fun too!
This is a sketch I did when I visited the National Gallery of Denmark. (It’s of a detail of Erik Werenskiold’s Portrait of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson)
Fairy Tales Aren’t Perfect
Wanting to create a little advertising campaign, I decided I would set myself the brief of promoting Google Play’s services. Google Play, as well as being the biggest app store out there (over 1,400,000 apps in 2014), also offers music, movies, and books. Even without the more “classical” entertainment forms, the apps alone cover multiple types of services ranging from utility and communication, to games and educational apps.
My approach was to play on this huge diversity and to suggest that no matter who you are and how unusual or specific your situation is, you could benefit from its services.
A Deadly Irony
I’ve been reading quite a lot about the shooting at the Umpqua Community College in Oregon and the discussions resulting from that terrible event.
It beggars belief that some people can see in such a tragedy proof that what schools in the US need are MORE guns! It seems that the twisted idea that more guns means more security is so engrained in their minds that they can’t see the irony of the situation
Illustrating Pinterest girls episode 2
I said in my last post I’d probably do more… Well, it wasn’t too long a wait! I happy with the way the colour turned out for this one.
Now the question is, will there be more than two?
Late night Photoshop experimenting
I’ve been playing around a bit on Photoshop tonight. Trying out a different style. I think I might do more like it, thank goodness Pinterest is full of many more reference pictures!
Context
It’s funny the number of people who still judge works of art by the supposed technical skills required to produce them. “I could do that” is for those people the worst condemnation, in a world where the genius of a work of art is measured by its ability to depict things “realistically” (and therefore the difficulty one might have to reproduce it). At some point it might very well have been so, but the advent of photography rendered the sole ability to render a scene objectively relatively futile (impressionists were quick to realise this) as it is much more effective at faithfully reproducing its subject than painting.
Ironically, I doubt many people who reason like this would pay to come visit it if I were to put on a show exhibiting perfect reproductions I had painted of the Mona Lisa and Starry Night, for example. I don’t blame them. In his book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1937), Walter Benjamin says: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be…”. My Mona Lisa would have no relevance other than to show my ability to reproduce a painting.
Context is a lot of what makes art art. In an older post, I’d briefly mentioned Roy Lichtenstein. I’ve seen comments being made about his paintings being a rip-off of the comic-book artists’ work they are drawn from. Although the fact painted reproductions of individual panels are now literally worth tens of millions seems obscene (especially as they were taken from a comic probably only sold for a few dollars), I disagree.
I like the definition of poetry given by Wikipedia very much: “poetry is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning”. I think that last part about adding or transforming the pre-existing meaning of something can be extrapolated to all other art forms. What’s important in Roy Lichtenstein’s work, for example, is not necessarily the image itself; it’s the idea behind it of transforming an otherwise mass-produced panel into a unique piece of art with a “unique presence in time and space” and what that says about consumerism.
Anything, (any object, drawing, action, footage, etc.) can be considered art depending on the context. The context is a lens through which something is viewed, and if that something evokes more through that lens than it would without it, it is art.
This doesn’t mean that all art is good, but next time you find yourself thinking that you “could do that”, think about what the piece’s context is and what it’s trying to say. Think also about if you actually did do it yourself: would it have any more meaning than the original?
No Peace And Quiet
The Royal Society for Public Health suggests having bar staff (as well as hairdressers, cleaners, etc.) provide people with advice and “promote healthier lifestyles including smoking cessation or physical activity”.
El Chapo
The drug lord’s tunnel escape from the prison puts the Mexican government in an embarrassing position.
brendan donnet 