birthday gifts

To celebrate my parents both turning 50 this year, I made a series of sketches, paintings and prints of the family to gift to them. 

a mono print of my brother and sister. I used oil-based ink on copper and used cotton buds, pencils and kitchen roll to create texture and shape

A4 paper

a mono print of my father doing a squat A4 paper 

for this print I used a mixture of hard ground etching and an acrylic medium for aqua-tinting 

the pink is the acrylic medium - you can cover areas you do not wish to be 'bitten' by acid, therefore controlling the intensity of the black when inked

'My dad' each on A4 paper

'Me' charcoal and oil paint on A4 paper

'My mother' oil pastel and oil paint on A4 paper

'Phoebe' charcoal and oil paint sketch on A4 paper

another of my dad. Oil paint on A4 paper

Leazes Park

My most recent painting is based on Leazes Park near my university halls. Taking photographs of the scenery, I then collaged them together and then made this painting from a section of the collage. 

Artists who have inspired this piece: David Hockney, Sofia Neptuno, Cecily Brown and Andre Derain, Karl Schmidt Rottluff.
The piece is approx 75cm x 75cm and is charcoal and oil paint on board.

THE FINAL PRODUCT!

the collages - the top one inspired this painting. 

DETAILS:

                                                                

                   

my studio

Some more articles for The Courier

See below some other articles I have done for the student newspaper's art section, first a review of a Fine Art show at Northumbria University, and then another on the effects of the Internet on art culture amongst our generation.

a new painting!

Using some old board I found in a skip at uni, I started using my photographs and collages to draw out a vague landscape in charcoal. I then automatically chose my colours of oil pastel and oil paint to bring life to the drawing. This is currently a series of sketches - I want to refine my technique before I start on larger paintings.

the finished sketches! Seen next A4 paper for scale

sketches/experimentation for final project

As I get more stuck into the project, following on from the Hockney-inspired photo collages http://rosieminney.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/hockney-inspired-photo-manipulations.html, I was then interested in further combining the idea of technology and nature. 

I am intrigued by how our generation is so de-sensitised by the Internet; how we can easily recognise anything, pixelated or not, because more likely than not we have seen it online. However, how much have we seen in real life? From this, I would like to culminate in an abstract painting, which vaguely resembles the natural world - we have to get up close to recognise even our own environment.

a sketchbook excerpt - a study of fragmentation I created using my photo collages. We know what it is, yet it does not look as it is meant to --> we are desensitised by the Internet as we regularly do not see things in real life

 some mono prints based on photographs

I drew into the mono prints with oil pastel to bring colour and life into the experiments

I then began collaging some of my photographs together. I wanted to create something that from afar seemed recognisable, but one has to get up close to realise that everything is not what it seems - again, how we seemingly immediately recognise something we have not originally seen in person, over Internet. I then edited the colours on my iPhone to further bring into use the idea of technology

I then began collaging together my prints, my photographs, and my charcoal drawings. The idea here was to take original artwork, emphasise scale, and to bring in the use of technology to create one large collage which was made purely from print outs - no first source artwork. This is to represent how data and images are manipulated and spread through the Internet, whilst we remain oblivious to how things have been altered. 

A close up, showing how the print can sometimes seamlessly blend into the photograph