First Term END

First term has come to an end, and though I am happy about being settled in LCC, second term is already haunting me. My first term at LCC has definitely been great, I've come to a new place and made new friends, and with that I have had new experiences. Though the beginning of the term seemed to be a lot at once, by the end of the term things seemed to slowdown. I think I have finally found my flow and in the second term will be able to make improvements that was unable to do before.

100

My 100 collage assignment though at the beginning seemed easy except the number that had to be done, became quite a challenge as the deadline dawned on me. As I realized that all 100 would be put up together, therefore viewed together, the thought hit me that they should have a sort of theme or subject that would hold the 100 pieces together, and with that thought in mind I put off doing the collages until I had a theme. Anyway no theme seemed to pop in mind and as a friend on my asked a second year student the recipe to make good collages, all he said was collect good material and then whatever you make out of that should be good. For the first time in my life I took his entire piece of advice (as I was completely stuck on how to start), and threw away all the rubbish I had collected, and started collecting (read buying), slightly expensive magazines. All I seemed to put my hand on were fashion magazines, as now I had the excuse for buying Vogue, and since all I had were fashion magazines, Glamour became a recurrent theme of my collages.

Being the person I am, I waited till the last moment to get started on my collages, and as I frantically  raced against time, I realized how little pieces paper stuck together made sense somehow, but most importantly I realized how I could enhance my work by adding different elements to it, something I had stop doing once I had started taking art lesson, somehow art  lesson had conveyed the message that when using one medium your supposed to stick to it, when actually that doesn't have to be the case, and hopefully in future work I'll be able to implement that.. For people interested in seeing my collages, I intent to put them up sometime soon.

Colours Of My Soul by Wajih ur Rehman

While chatting with one of my coolest cousins, he showed me his latest work. The pictures were really inspiring and I loved looking at them. The piece is called Colours of My Soul and its by Wajih-ur-Rehman.





Anger

Fire

Memories



Hope



Confusion



Harmony



Continuity



If you look at them in order you can see they form the colours of the rainbow. I personally got a kind of a retro feel from the pictures, and absolutely loved all the colours. My favourite however would have to be Confusion, I loved its colour and the way the light had come through.

More work from Wajih-ur-Rehman can be viewed on his flicker: flickr.com/theserialchiller

   

Typography (or lots of tracing)

So we had a typo session just after going out to view Lou Dorfman's typographic wall, which was great and got my mind working in that direction. We started off with a group activity in which our group had to eliminate the smallest element from a paragraph. So our group decided that a dot, be it a full stop, colon, or the dot on and i.

Then we had our own fun with letters. We traced over a letter of our choice and then reconstructed it in a number of ways. 

Here are the images of some of the work I liked.

The next part I loved, and kinda hated. Loved because the end result was nice to look at, and hated because all the tracing was getting on my nerves. It took some patience but I did finally get through.

I went a little experimental on the placing of the letters, I think it may have worked on my first name but not so much on my surname. Maybe just having the H and the dot of the i in a different colour would have been enough. I did like Ingmar's work though.

The T just came right under the g and the m which are kind of at the centre of his name first name, which creates an underline for his name. Also I could definitely see that on an office door.

Finally we finished with an exercise in which we used different approaches to express the meaning of the words chosen.



Old Street

For our out and about session with Paul we went around Old Street and I have to say I will definitely being going back. Our first stop was the Kemistry Gallery.

The exhibition was centered around the Gastrotypogapicalassemblage, a eleven metre handmade wooden typographic wall, made by Lou Dorfman art director for the CBS network.

Apart from  the different type faces used I loved that the wall contained food items and kitchen utensils, which really added to the feel of the wall.

Next we ere off to the white cube gallery. At the white cube, got to experience the work of Mark Bradford. Mark Bradford's work was amazing unfortunately we couldn't take pictures. What I loved about his work though were the layer he created and the elements of graphics used.

After the white cube we went to YCN. YCN is an amazing shop/library/studio.

At the YCN we got to look at some interesting books and some of their work.

Finally we wet to a little book shop with an amazing range of books related to our subject.

Kruger

I loved the recent VCT class. We had to take in contemporary examples of image and text together. I managed to completely forgot that we had to take something in only just realised an hour before class. So as I desperately googled, I remembered Barbara Kruger being mentioned in the previous class, so I went on to look at her work. Though I didn't agree with all she was expressing, I did love the way she did it. The contrast between her black and white images and a red background for the text was great. Unfortunately I couldn't find out much about the image itself, like when it was made and what was going on when it was made. 

Though I did take a relevant example, it was out of the time period we were studying. 

Make a complete Fool of Yourself

The image class started with us drawing. Though my drawing isn't bad, in class I managed to draw nothing that resembled the light bulb in front of me. Then Darren told us to draw the object without looking at the paper, and again all I came up with were squiggles. 

After observing every ones drawings (and my lines), we discussed what we had observed about all the drawing, coming to the conclusion that, the good drawing were the ones people had added their own touch to, not the ones tat tried to be too realistic, also it seemed people were vain about their work, which kind of held them back.

So Darren encouraged us to "Stop being scared" and "to make fools of ourselves" (like we don't do that enough). However at lunch I attempted the exercise again and managed to get a better result.

Anyway then we got on to mapping images.

Then for the last part of our class we looked at and made collages. The first set of collages were alittle congested, we were told to use the white space, instead of hiding it. You know the "less is more" thing.

  

We finally finished with making five collages, which because because the lack of time, I think I quite effectively ruined. Well at least I have hundred to attempt before the end of term.

Narrative

The narrative class really got me looking at images in a different light. How one image could be cropped to give a completely different meaning, or give more depth to the same meaning it depicted before, or just a different angle of looking at the same picture.

Apart from cropping images adding one image to another to form a narrative sequence, was also quite interesting.

Probably what I enjoyed the most was adding different text to images. Adding text completey changed what the image was illustrating previously.



 

Void

I didn't have a camera, so when I read the requirements of my first assignment, I was alittle worried  (actually I still am). I was required to take a photo and write a reflctive post about what I had done. However I am left with an empty space, and can therefore share only my thoughts of this void.

As I sit here and stare into a blank space I realize that, a blank can be filled with anything. It is not empty because it has been emptied, but is yet to be filled.  

My blank space however, has been brought by me to LCC, to be coloured and filled by the inspiration and teachings I find here, that will hopefully create a picture of true meaning.