"We're off to see the Jellyfox."

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 This Halloween, me and two of my friends created masks each based on characters from Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy TV show. There are four characters in the sketch and they all have Fielding's eyes and mouth distorted into different facial characteristics. The lowest image displays the four, from left to right: Spoonsnake, Li'l Chrissy, Claw and McCoy. Li'l Chrissy tells of what they are seeking, which is 'the Jellyfox' who will resolve there problems. It's very surreal humour.

 The characters are made up from the collaging method and are painted in four bright colours, so this appealed to us a lot being art students. I chose the Spoonsnake, Natalie chose Li'l Chrissy and Tom chose McCoy. We made the masks in the same method, by painting bits of newspaper in different shades and sticking them all over a cardboard cut-out of the character's face. We added texture as well to heighten the eyebrows and nose, simply by placing more cut-out cardboard onto the mask.

David Shrigley

 About two weeks ago, me and two of my best friends visited the Cornerhouse in Manchester to see the David Shrigley exhibition: HOW ARE YOU FEELING? It was a brilliant experience and it certainly made an impression on me.

 The galleries were divided upon three floors. The first consisted of 3D and interactive elements of his work. He'd placed a black gong in the middle of the room with the appropriately placed word 'GONG' in the centre. There was also a white board where you could write how you felt.

 The second floor consisted of his illustrations. There was a countless amount and they were all highly amusing. They were literally drawings that had come straight out of his head. The reoccurring message throughout all these drawings was that they deliberately had no context to them whatsoever. They are a protest against the pretentious surroundings of art.

 The final floor was a room in which people were allowed to participate in life drawing. Shrigley had placed a strange looking model of a male figure in the centre of the room which was in full nude and once every five minutes or so, would urinate into a bucket. Me and my friends sat around and made a few of our own interpretations. At the other side of the room there was a scene set up in which people were allowed to re-enact. There was a script to follow and it evoked the message that all art is priceless.

Varoom: Paper Tigers Article Summary

 Over the course of several weeks, we looked over four pieces of texts to do with art and it's cultural context. We were to analyse the texts and choose one to discuss through a presentation. I chose the last one which I explain about in the summary below:

 In this presentation I will be discussing Peter Lyles’ article about how Le Gun (an underground illustration zine) is rebelling against the commercial influence on illustrative production.

 The style of writing in which this article is presented is mainly informative and requires only basic knowledge within illustrative culture; thus making it non-academic also.

 This leads onto the next point about who the article is intended for. The article covers basic knowledge on illustration, so the most obvious of candidates would be illustrators. The next would be students studying the subject due to the article’s informative nature and that it involves research aspects - such as the quotes and imagery.

 The main argument being discussed within the article is that Le Gun feels lots of contemporary illustrators are losing the purity of their work due to the commercial rewards they wish to possess. Whilst Le Gun stays true to their work and do it purely out of enthusiasm, other illustrators give into the commercial pollution.

 Commercial pollution comes as a theme throughout the article also. It’s called ‘selling out’ and the phrase has been used by youth culture many times to describe, for example, a band becoming popular and thus giving them the chance to make better produced records. The fact that Le Gun encourages illustrators to use digital technology only as a tool is also a theme.

 The underpinning theory would be that this article expresses the sense of post-modernism in the fact that fully, computer-aided illustrator’s work is becoming far more generic. With the aid of a computer, processes become much quicker and mistakes are easily removable as opposed to something hand-rendered.

 Overall, Lyle points out that technology has come so far now that it is beginning to replace our natural artistic heritage of getting our hands dirty.