Banksy

This is a post I planned to do around the time I was doing the spray paints of the birds and the cars, but never quite got round to it, so just imagine it was posted then!

Banksy’s street art is probably some of the world’s most well known work, although at the same time no one really knows exactly who he is or much about him at all. His work is generally satirically humorous, but also conveys a message or meaning – often a political or social one. Recurring subjects in his work include rats, apes, policeman, soldiers, children and the elderly. Ever since first seeing Banksy’s work I’ve had an interest in it and the more I research it and the more images I find online of his the more I want to know. A few years back I painted a copy of one of Banksy’s pieces of work and then did my own painting inspired by it, but I have always wanted to explore his work further and to also do some spray painting of my own.

Originally Banksy would do his spray painting free hand but then went on to realise it would be much quicker to use stencils and would lessen his chances of getting caught. The spray painting work I have done is also all with stencils, but this is mainly because for my first time spray painting it wouldn’t be a good idea to try and do it free hand. A lot of his work just uses the colours black and white with the incorporation of just one other brighter colour, such as red, meaning I have used a similar colour palette to him.  I am impressed by the way in which he successfully manages to create such detailed and realistic artwork using just black and white and this is something I have tried to do in my own spray paintings. By focusing on the darker shades in my car drawing and using them to create a stencil, I feel as though I have managed to create a car spray painting in a similar to style to Banksy’s, although obviously not to the same standard. I originally planned to spray paint both areas of black and white and I think this would be a way to improve my spray painting and could be something to explore in the next stages of this project. As well as this I could try and find a way or incorporating a small amount of red into this image to make it more related to Banksy’s work. My stencils were made by cutting sections out of a page from my sketchbook and Banksy’s are most likely done with acetate and cut out by a computer so I think if I had the same resources I would be able to create a sharper spray paint.

One of the prominent themes throughout Banksy’s work is that of the environment and global warming. Coincidentally, my two spray paintings both relate to that: the car in the sense that it is creating the pollution and a large part of the page is taken up by the engine fumes from the car which are air pollution, and the birds because they would be affected by air pollution and global warming and they are part of nature. 

Below I've included some of Banksy's work that I particularly like.

Mythical Research

Throughout the research section I had been doing a small amount of mythical research and created the pieces of work below, which are inspired by the ancient ideas of the elements.

Water

Air

Earth

Fire

These didn't link that well with the rest of my project as I hadn't done much other mythical research so proceeded to do some more. This began with an in depth work document, which I went on to summarise with an illustrated mindmap, that explored the elements and their meanings in a variety of different cultures. 

Mindmap

Wave collage

I went back to do more research work on the element of water and wanted to continue using the materials of ink and bleach on a variety of papers to create a wave inspired collage. I covered textured wallpaper with ink and planned to bleach it too but liked the effect without ink so left it as it was. I experimented using different dilutions of ink in order to achieve different tones of blue.

Wallpaper effect

Wallpaper effect using diluted ink

I covered a page half in concentrated ink and half in diluted ink and then experimented with different dilutions of bleach to see what patterns I could achieve. 

Diluted ink and bleach

Concentrated ink and bleach

Using all these papers cut to different sizes and shapes, I then created a collage of a wave inspired by a research image from my original visual research.

Wave collage - final result

Recycling a failed collage

My surface texture collage was quite unsuccessful due to my choice of materials and the fact that making collages isn't really my strong point in art, but instead of letting it go to waste I used it to do some printing with.

Failed collage

One aspect I did like of it though is the fact that I used mud to paint the leaves at the bottom.

Mud painted leaves

Printing with the whole of the collage wasn't very successful as the background area and the actual leaves didn't really have enough texture to give a good effect when being used for printing, so in the end I just printed with the leaves I'd cut out myself from textured wallpaper and I was happier with the effect these achieved. 

Print 1

Print 2

Giving the grass a haircut and drawing with a twig

I next went on to do some drawings and sketched using the photos I took that were inspired by Andy Goldsworthy, that I mentioned in the previous post. The first one I did was a very finely detailed pencil drawing as I wanted to focus on the details of the whole photo before zooming into sections of it to use for textured sketches.

Detailed pencil drawing

 After doing this pencil drawing I played around with it until I found sections that I liked and thought would be interesting for sketching. The two sections I chose are shown below.

Section 1

Section 2

I wanted to use some unusual and innovative materials for these drawings that also related back to the element of earth. For the zoomed in section of the pine cone I used black ink but drew it on with a twig as opposed to a pen. After doing the drawing in black ink I realised it would benefit from another colour to give it more depth and texture so I also added in orange ink.

I wanted to draw the leaf drawing by getting the colour from the the leaves I'd photographed, but after playing around with them for a while and doing some sort of science-y experiment stuff to try and get the chlorophyll out, I realised that probably wasn't going to work. Instead I used grass to get the green colour, which involved going into the garden with scissors and giving the grass a haircut as well as a lot of rubbing grass across the page. Leaving just the green areas on their own didn’t give the drawing much definition and made it extremely difficult to see any outlines of shapes, so I also added fineliner over the top. I varied the density of the lines from the fineliners to create lighter and darker areas and to define the form of the leaves. By viewing this drawing from a distance its structure is more visible as the lines from the fineliner merge to create areas of tone.

Drawing of section 1 

Drawing of section 2

Andy Goldsworthy and how he inspired me

Andy Goldsworthy is an artist who uses natural materials such as twigs, leaves, stone, snow, etc, to create sculptures and installations which he then photographs. Some pieces of his work are meant to only last a short while, whilst others are there for the long term; for his short term works he often only uses his bare hands, teeth, and tools he finds to prepare and arrange the materials.

Goldsworthy says: "Each work grows, stays, decays – integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its heights, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expressed in the image. Process and decay are implicit." This therefore makes photography an important part of his artwork as it captures each piece in the stages of its life cycle. The cycles of nature could also be represented in his work as some common patterns are circles, spirals and curves, and these shapes have been influential in my own photos in his style. 

I have used his work to inspire me in the earth section of my research and have made some sculptures and installations on my own using natural materials of which I then photographed. 

Goldsworthy's ice sculpture

Patterns in sand inspired by ice sculpture

Goldsworthy's spiral stone installation

Spiral of shells

Above are a couple of examples of where Andy Goldsworthy's work inspired my own photography of natural objects. As well as these I also used some of my own original ideas, such as using a pine cone and rose petals, as can be seen in the image below.

Pine cone and rose petals

Bleach and Ink

One of the more unusual techniques I've been using in my art has been bleach and ink, which is where you paint the page with ink (I used a bottle of quink) and then bleach out areas with household bleach. I had used this technique before in the earlier stages of this art course and had enjoyed it and wanted to explore it further. It also felt relevant to the work I was doing and seemed to have a connection to the element of water.

I was inspired by artists who had done drip paintings such as Jackson Pollock and combined this style of painting - as I felt it linked to water - with the technique of using bleach and ink. Below are two paintings I did in this style, which I did on my table top easel to make them easier to do.

Bleach painting 1

Bleach painting 2

The work I did for this section, which is the water section of the research, was not actually done in this order as I messed up my timetable slightly so the next bit was done at a later date.

I did further research into artists who used bleach and ink in their work and whilst I wasn't successful in finding any professional artists, I did find some amateur artists whose work inspired me. In particular I liked the idea of using wax as a resist before painting the ink across the page, so this was something I tried next. The image I chose to use this technique on was inspired by Hokusai's wave printing.

Hokusai's Wave Printing

My bleach, ink and wax interpretation