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Artists for Art200

poppymiddlemas
Feb 7, 2016
2 min read

Since the start of the new module I have been looking at some more controversial artists to inspire me to take a different path and push myself in the way that I make portraits. As I am currently making four 5x4 foot canvases I want to make sure my ideas are solid and I can flow through the painting without giving myself too much pressure and ruining the work.

Ivan Alifan's portraits and skill with oil paints is something I can only dream of being able to create. His work is fabulous and he is able to paint from memory. His work always shows a sexual undertone whether it is thrust right at your face with the small hand studies he paints or the fact that he smothers his figures with white ambiguous liquid. The wetness makes you want to touch the painting to see if it is actually wet. In some of his other works he has actually used paint as icing to add another dimention and another texture that draws the viewer into the work. His conceptual landscapes are something else completely, still with the white liquid but making the figures giant completely shifting the meaning of the work.

Colin Christian's most recent work was Miley Cyrus' extremely controversial "Bondage Unicorn" for her Dead Petz Tour. However, his silicone portraits of giant manikin heads from his current show Trypophobia are so disgusting that they make you wish you had created them. The colour of the mouth in this piece "Teeth" is mirrored in the gory holes around the right eye of the girl. The watery eye with smudged mascara adds to the beauty of the piece because of his attention to detail.

Elly Smallwood's paintings are beautiful; remeniscent of Jenny Saville but without the bruises and black eyes. Her oil paintings are very emotive and very sad. Yet her watercolours and sketches are much more sexual and have the suggestion of pain linking the figure to some form of sexual act. Again, they are very emotive yet the sexual connotations make the viewer feels somewhat uncomfortable. I love her use of colour and how she doesn't always use skin colour to paint a face.

All three of these artists use colours like red and pink to represent something that isn't necessarily shown in the actual painting, it is just a suggestion of pain or blood or some hidden sexual undertone.

I will be trying to immitate these artist's way of painting and taking myself away from just the simple paint and paintbrush technique. Hopefully this will help me to get better marks and push me in a different way than in previous modules.