Album Cover Assignment

                                               Album Cover

We first got to view many types of image compositions by using various pieces of artwork. The color balance, the elements and the lines all contribute to give the image a direction and a certain “flow”.  The assignment consisted in creating an album cover for a band and incorporating the band’s sound in a composition.

I choose a band called Mellow Mood because of the positive vibes that are released from their music. The album cover simply consists in a sunset as a background and the album name written in a way that forms a triangle, which is the subject of the composition.

Andy Warhol Project

this is my andy warhol image i personally created!

Andy Warhol project

The last projects in photo 2 have been rotating around the famous " Andy Warhol Effect ".
That effect is most known for the Marilyn Monroe photo.  This project was really fun to do because of all the colors that we get to use and mix together,  I also noticed how much it involves our creativity.

It wasn't really hard finding the right color combination and the final result of the image was always different thanks to the different textures and color alternation.

Andy Warhol

More than twenty years after his death, Andy Warhol remains one of the most influential figures in contemporary art and culture. Warhol’s life and work inspires creative thinkers worldwide thanks to his enduring imagery, his artfully cultivated celebrity, and the ongoing research of dedicated scholars. His impact as an artist is far deeper and greater than his one prescient observation that “everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” His omnivorous curiosity resulted in an enormous body of work that spanned every available medium and most importantly contributed to the collapse of boundaries between high and low culture. 

A skilled (analog) social networker, Warhol parlayed his fame, one connection at a time, to the status of a globally recognized brand. Decades before widespread reliance on portable media devices, he documented his daily activities and interactions on his traveling audio tape recorder and beloved Minox 35EL camera.  Predating the hyper-personal outlets now provided online, Warhol captured life’s every minute detail in all its messy, ordinary glamour and broadcast it through his work, to a wide and receptive audience.

The youngest child of three, Andy was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928 in the working-class neighborhood of Oakland, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  Stricken at an early age with a rare neurological disorder, the young Andy Warhol found solace and escape in the form of popular celebrity magazines and DC comic books, imagery he would return to years later.  Predating the multiple silver wigs and deadpan demeanor of later years, Andy experimented with inventing personae during his college years. He signed greeting cards “André”, and ultimately dropped the “a” from his last name, shortly after moving to New York and following his graduation with a degree in Pictorial Design from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1949. 

Work came quickly to Warhol in New York, a city he made his home and studio for the rest of his life. Within a year of arriving, Warhol garnered top assignments as a commercial artist for a variety of clients including Columbia Records, Glamour magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, NBC, Tiffany & Co., Vogue, and others. He also designed fetching window displays for Bonwit Teller and I. Miller department stores.  After establishing himself as an acclaimed graphic artist, Warhol turned to painting and drawing in the 1950s, and in 1952 he had his first solo exhibition at the Hugo Gallery, with Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote. As he matured, his paintings incorporated photo-based techniques he developed as a commercial illustrator. The Museum of Modern Art (among others) took notice, and in 1956 the institution included his work in his first group show.

The turbulent 1960s ignited an impressive and wildly prolific time in Warhol’s life.  It is this period, extending into the early 1970s, which saw the production of many of Warhol’s most iconic works. Building on the emerging movement of Pop Art, wherein artists used everyday consumer objects as subjects, Warhol started painting readily found, mass-produced objects, drawing on his extensive advertising background.  When asked about the impulse to paint Campbell’s soup cans, Warhol replied, “I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and that was it”. The humble soup cans would soon take their place among the Marilyn Monroes, Dollar Signs,Disasters, and Coca Cola Bottles as essential, exemplary works of contemporary art. 

www.Warholfoundation.org

Color Project Photo 2

Sally Mann

Sally Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1951. She has always remained close to her roots. She has photographed in the American South since the 1970s, producing series on portraiture, architecture, landscape and still life. She is perhaps best known for her intimate portraits of her family, her young children and her husband, and for her evocative and resonant landscape work in the American South. Her work has attracted controversy at times, but it has always been influential, and since her the time of her first solo exhibition, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., in 1977, she has attracted a wide audience.

Sally Mann explored various genres as she was maturing in the 1970s: she produced landscapes and architectural photography, and she blended still life with elements of portraiture. But she truly found her metier with her second publication, a study of girlhood entitled At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988). Between 1984 and 1994, she worked on the series, Immediate Family (1992), which focuses on her three children, who were then all aged under ten. While the series touches on ordinary moments in their daily lives—playing, sleeping, eating—it also speaks to larger themes such as death and cultural perceptions of sexuality. In her most recent series, Proud Flesh, taken over a six year interval, Mann turns the camera onto her husband, Larry. The resultant photographs are candid and frank portraits of a man at his most vulnerable moments.

Mann has produced two major series of landscapes: Deep South (Bullfinch Press, 2005) and Mother Land. In What Remains (Bullfinch Press, 2003), she assembled a five-part study of mortality, one which ranges from pictures of the decomposing body of her beloved greyhound, to the site where an armed fugitive committed suicide on her property in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. She has often experimented with color photography, but she has remained most interested in black and white, especially photography's antique technology. She has long used an 8x10 bellows camera, and has explored platinum and bromoil printing processes. In the mid 1990s she began using the wet plate collodion process to produce pictures which almost seem like hybrids of photography, painting, and sculpture.

Mo Yi

Mo Yi was born and raised in Tibet, the son of a man who had followed the Chinese Communist Party's call to bring the socialist revolution to the Himalayan region.

But today he is part of a creative explosion in Chinese artistic photography characterised by its powerful political commentary which takes an often harsh look at the party and the social effects of its policies.

"I am not an ethnic Tibetan, but in the 1950s my father followed the call of the Communist Party, so I was born there," said Mo, a sage-like figure with his bald cranium and salt-and-pepper beard.

It is difficult to picture the frail, chain-smoking Mo, now 52, as a professional athlete, but for eight years he played football for a regional team based in the Tibetan capital Lhasa.

Eventually, however, photography got into his blood and today his workshop is in an old conservatory near Caochangdi, an artists' village in eastern Beijing now under threat from the bulldozers amid plans to redevelop the area.

Galleries in Caochangdi are hosting until the end of June an exhibit on Chinese artistic photographers like Mo for "Arles in Beijing" - a variation on the famous photography festival held annually in Arles in the south of France.

While his intial works had a link with Tibet, Mo's later photos focus more on the Chinese cities he has lived in since, particularly Tianjin, a port close to Beijing.

Working in black and white, Mo often uses a blurred focus to symbolise the head-spinning social changes China has seen in more than 30 years of spectacular economic growth, often putting himself into the scene.

He also conceives installations, mixing his photographs with props as witnesses of an age gone by. One such display used the beds where workers slept during the mass collectivisation campaigns of Mao Zedong.

The most recent individual exhibition of his works, called "Me and My Surroundings", focused on the often wrenching economic and social changes in China since it began its gradual reopening to the world three decades ago.