Concentration Statement

For my end-of-year concentration project, I went into it thinking I would simply explore how I could incorporate design structures and portraits together in an interesting way. Each piece would consist of a repetition/radiation/concentration/gradation structure, a pencil/acrylic portrait, and newspaper/mark-making to integrate the two. I used my worst project as my first concentration, because what came out of it interested me and I wanted to explore it further. As I continued with my 2nd and 3rd concentrations, however, I came to realize that I was doing the exact same thing I had done last year---exploring different emotions. The first concentration features a cool-color design and rather sad facial expression, the second had bright, warm colors and an angry expression, and the third had busy colors and an alert expression. So I guess what I am exploring is how design can both be integrated into a portrait and how it can describe the emotional expression of the portrait.

Silkscreen Project

After about 8 weeks of working on this project, I'm pretty satisfied how it came out. Our requirements were to create a silkscreened image of a portrait of some sort--not necessarily a human portrait. In addition, the work had to exemplify pop art in the style of Andy Warhol by reflecting desensitivity through repetition and consumerism/popular culture.

To make this work reflect Andy Warhol, I thought about three things: the way Warhol used bright, unreal colors over realistic prints, the way he repeated portraits of famous people, and (in the border) the way he haphazardly arranged prints (like in his Mona Lisa piece).

I chose to make a conventional idea of a portrait my subject: a head shot of John Lennon repeated 9 times in a simple repetition structure. However, I hoped to expand on this to bring my points across: I alternately colored and wrote text to show the two aspects of John Lennon's personality. The images with bold, almost jarring colors and the haphazard arrangement around the border represent the image Lennon projected to the world: a facade of toughness and edginess. Then, the images with text show the inner, sensitive side of him through his most profound song lyrics, the only means by which he could pour his whole soul into. I almost kept the original image as it was, but decided to add a border of a haphazard arrangement of John Lennons on colored backgrounds, almost like a symbolic border of outrageousness that he put around himself. Finally, I added further song lyrics to the top and bottom borders to try and unify the work more.

This work falls under the conventional definition of a portrait. It reflects consumerism and influence of the media because John Lennon was a very marketed figure and received much publicity for being the leader of the Beatles, his dramatic antics, and dramatic murder.