I had a really interesting tutorial with Wendy she told me about her thoughts on my progress and interestingly she suggested that what my work struck her to be about a generation of people rather than a sub culture in particular. I think I agree with her but it took a little while to come around to the idea. I realise that I am fascinated with other artsit’s that look at groups of people. Looking back of the course at the artists I’ve looked at they’ve included Nan Goldin, Larry Clarke, Jeff Wall, and more recently Spencer Murphy, and Anthony Luvero. There’s definitely a particular melicoholy that comes through when I mention most of those names. i am particularly drawn to a darker and sombre visual approach to image making. I’ll cover more about those in more depth in their own post. Right now We’ve made an action plan to carry on shooting they way I am and to hone in the working with text, that’s the most important part.

To recap on my working with text

I started out with very basic starting points. They were’ve very effective and I sought the advice from Wendy to go and collaborate. Here are my first attempts below.

I then sought the help from Tom O Boyle from Salty Gecko designs, he offered to attempt a few ideas. They were a lot better but I felt that it wasn’t quite there and I was also worried about how viable it would be with us being so busy and it being an unpaid project.

I like the hand written style that Tom touched upon in his last image. I’ve researched other artists like Anthony Luvero and Barbara Kruger in another posts here

Kruger POST HERE

Luvero POST HERE

I defiantly think that there is something in the personal hand written like Luvero uses and also the boldness of the words chosen from Krugers Work that I can utilize in my own tabluexs.

Moving on from there I got involved with another graphic designer; James Clarke. The same issues were apparent with him also. Lack of time and it being unlikely to get of the ground. Hear are some of his ideas….

I framed the images and James took the portrait for me whilst I was in the image. As for suing the text it was a good start but I’m a little un sure on how this is going to work out, it doesn’t seem to fit the feel of what I was aiming for. It’s better than my attempts so far and I’m also aware of the time restrictions on working with someone else it’s not looking hopeful. Below are some examples of work I shot with James trying to work text into it.

I think that James’s placement and the size of the text is a lot better then my first attempts. I did get that Dymo printer with the intention of using that. It would share the same characteristics of the parts I like with James’s attempt it might be more success-full.

I really think that it’s working a lot better. What I particularly like about it is that I’m lending from the punk sub culture with the lyrics from modern punk rock bands and the dymo label has a very low fi culturally appropriate feel to it with the early punk days and zines ect. On a purely aesthetics level I think it works and so does Wendy which is great I just need to refine it and experiment some more now. I made the image by scanning the physical dymo label and composing it in with photoshop. It was a little tedius but not too much trouble.