Cildo Meireles (1948 to date) is a “Brazilian conceptual artist, installation artist and sculptor”.  A lot of his work is in response to the political oppression in Brazil. Meireles’s use of many different individual art pieces has inspired me to subtly incorporate smaller pieces into my main picture. 

Jane Alexander (born 1959 to date) is a South African artist and sculptor.  Most of her work is influenced by the social and political issues in South Africa. Her most popular work is ‘The Butcher Boys’, which is said to reflect the state of the country in the 1980s. I started to get ideas for how to make some of my fantasy characters more realistic by taking ideas from Jane Alexander’s display.

Carrie Mae Weems (1953 to date) is an American artist.  She works with fabric, text, digital images, installation videos and photography and covers issues facing African-Americans.   I attended her exhibition, called ‘From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried', at the Tate Modern in London.  It was a display of a selection of pictures covering slavery in the 1850s to the Civil Rights era in the 1950s. The display started and ended with the picture of the wife of a Congolese chief that was taken in the 1820s.  The display gives the impression of the chief’s wife being a spectator through the timeline of events that were shown.  I was particularly affected by the use of poetry and prose to enhance the effect of the display.  It gave me ideas for how to use prose or even seemingly random words to add emotive dimensions to my work.

Warhol (1928 – 1987) was an American artist, entrepreneur, sculptor, producer and author.  His work covered a wide range of media including photography and painting.  Andy Warhol helped me to see art in a different way.  For example, instead of starting everything out as light and gradually incorporating shadows, I can also start my drawings as shadows and gradually add highlights.  

Ely Leach (aged 15). Ely has a completely different style to mine and has given me a totally different view on how to create backgrounds for my drawings. She enjoys digital illustration and combines her patterning skills with her mathematical knowledge to geometric mandalas.  I have been inspired by her to use Zentangle design and to add geometric structures into some of my backgrounds.

As a child, Bruce Wayne was tormented by the death of his parents so he became Batman in order to stop the kind of people that murdered his parents.  The drawing is mainly in pencil and the eyes will have 'anime-ish' proportions. The cowl will be quite animalistic as a result of the influence I have gained from viewing from Jane Alexander's work and exhibition. The lightning in the drawing will be done in masking fluid and bright Copic Marker colours reminiscent of Andy Warhol's use of bright colours.  A newspaper, flying about in the wind, will reflect Carrie Mae Weems's style of incorporating literature into her artwork. Finally, I will add highlights in watercolour corresponding with the colours that I used for the lightning.  Again, look out for hidden images of the Joker and his characteristics, as influenced by Ely Leach and Zentangles.  

Enjoy and please tell me what you think!

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The Story of My Work:

I looked through my previous work for inspiration.  I was looking for a piece that I could recreate to include all the artists I have studied and all the new things I have learnt.  I decided to use a picture of Batman that I drew in 2015

I used this drawing because when I created it I had been just been reading the Injustice comics and thinking about the circumstances that made Batman who he was and how I would show them in my depiction of him.  The drawing reminded me of the work of Carrie Mae Weems and how she use used poetry to show that art can be an expression of real life, is not always beautiful, and can be used to tell a story.  I also like how Weems uses prose to intensify the emotive effects of her photographs.

                                                    

I traced the outline of the work that I had done previously, as I liked it because it had taken me a lot of thought and time to get the image to reflect the darkness of Batman’s character, caused by the pain of his experiences.        

 I could also see how I would be able to incorporate what I have learnt from Andy Warhol’s use of shadows to depict emotion in my new piece.

                                                   

I used a rubber to create a Zentangle pattern as the base of the smiley face to represent the Joker, Batman’s nemesis.                      

 I used the same medium to add laughter in the background to accompany the Joker’s face.