Final piece

For the final exhibition of the term I wanted to do another painting. As this is my main area of focus. I had been doing some nature paintings for the off site exhibition (I wrote a blog post about that show as well) and wanted to do a cityscape of London this time. I found an artist called Jeremy Mann who does some lovely paintings of people as well as cityscapes. One of his paintings inspired me a lot.

Jeremy Mann his website: http://redrabbit7.com/

My style used to be quite impressionistic, and lately it has been getting more and more detailed. When I saw the painting of Jeremy Mann I was inspired because he has a very nice mixture of detail and loose strokes that gives a quite dramatic effect.

The painting that inspired me:

The first thing that I did was go out into London and make photographs of views that I would want to paint. Around the area where I live I found some nice scenes which I liked even more because they were quite familiar to me. I found two scenes I liked and photographed them in some different lighting and weather conditions. 

In the end I picked the first ones, made some small adjustments, and started painting. I wanted to put the detail into the horizon line and smudge out the corners. Make the paint strokes quite wild out of the frame. It was a bit difficult because there is a lot going on in the picture and the style is new to me, but in the end I am pleased with it.

Woodworking

While on my quest to learn about the traditional crafts (see my blog post about blacksmithing) I decided to spend some time in the wonderful workshops we have at Chelsea. I chose to do woodworking and make a cruiser skateboard. In the end I made two. Follow my progress below.

The first thing I did was think out my project, draw designs and buy wood.

After the wood arrived (they have a service that delivers it directly to the school, which is very useful when you can only order in huge sheets of about 1.20 by 2.40 meters). I cut up the wood to the sizes I needed and made a press to bend the wood in.

I glued three pieces of 4 mm thick plywood together and put them in the press to bend and dry. Above you can see the glued wood inside the press. And let it out to dry for 24 hours.

Here you can see the wood is nice and bent. I drew on the pattern, cut it out on the bandsaw and sanded it into shape. Afterwards I rounded off the edges and sanded the whole board until nice and smooth, ready to be stained and varnished.

Here are the two boards in their final shape. Now they had to be stained into a design (by taping off some parts) and then varnished.

The two finished boards side by side. 

I have learned a lot from this project and it was great fun to do! I definitely fell in love with woodworking and hope to do other projects in the future.

Walking around

London is such a beautiful city. It has a crazy mixture of old and new that is stunning. I love walking around the city (and there is quite a lot of walking around to do, as it is very big, especially if you are used to a small city like Amsterdam). Here are some of the views I have enjoyed.

When your school looks like this, you know you are in the right place.

Some typical London views.

The parks are absolutely stunning.

Beautiful architecture.

Me enjoying a view.

London Delights

While being in London I have tried my best to do as much fun and inspiring things as possible. There is so much to do and see here.

London has got a lot of free museums. Some of them are the big museums everybody has heard of. They show some wonderful pieces. There is a piece in the Tate museum (which is next to my school) that I absolutely fell in love with called 'Brown Eyes' by George Clausen.

I also love being around Trafalgar Square and being able to pop into the National Gallery whenever I feel like it. There is something to say for the British stealing all that art and having to make it freely available to the people.

But London also has a lot of smaller museums that are absolutely wonderful. Some of them are private ones which you have to pay for but a lot of them are free as well. Such as the Hunterian or the John Soane museums which are relatively close to each other as well.

I have also been to two musicals. Stephen Ward and Once. Both of them were absolutely lovely. There are so many musicals in London and the musicals as well as the theaters are beautiful. 

Another thing I have visited is the Royal Academy of Music. They sometimes give out free concerts. 

While I was there they played Symphony no.2 in E flat by Franz Schmidt. When looking around the academy (they have a sort of museum within the school with instruments by Stradivari and other famous instrument builders) I stumbled upon a smaller performance there as well. It is a lovely place to be if you like classical music. 

There are without a doubt a lot of things I have not mentioned but these were a few of my cultural highlights. 

Trafalgar Square Pillow Fight Day

This is one thing I love most about being in London, there is so much amazing stuff just happening. There was a massive pillow fight in Trafalgar Square for National pillow fight day. 

Here you can see my battle face. I may have gotten a mild concussion and a severe headache from all the blows to the head but I made it out alive.

Off site exhibition

One of the school assignments was to do an off site exhibition with a group. We had to form groups, come up with a theme, hire a venue, set up the show and invite people.

Our theme was Embodiment.

We hired a venue at 40 St Peters Street in Shoreditch and set up our work. Most people used the theme in quite a loose way, which is good if you are doing a show in conceptual-art-loving-London.



As you can see in the picture below, quite a few people showed up and it was a great success.

My work consisted of three nature paintings with a pile of animal bones underneath them. If you like searching meaning behind art you could say the work represents the relationship between the waste of the body and the bloom of nature, where they feed on each other. Otherwise you could just say they are nice pictures to look at. On the left you see my work in the show, on the right how I documented it.

Essay

I had to write an essay about anything I wanted, be it art related. As mentioned in a previous post, I was inspired to write about how your perception can change the view of an artwork and what adds value to a painting. I have attended quite a few lectures that made me think about why we view some artworks as more valuable than others and how our perception of things are influenced by things like the fame of the artist.

If you are interested you can find my essay here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9LaELbguJerQjllV195RkdwWUk/edit?usp=sharing

Art History Festival, real or fake Leonardos

I went to the festival of art history in the Institut Français and attended a lecture called: 'It doesn't look like Leonardo: The inside stories of Leonardos and non-Leonardos'. As you can guess from the title it was about forgery in art, focused on Leonardo Da Vinci's art, as this was Martin Kemp (the speaker) his area of expertise.

There was a whole section of the festival devoted to the issue of forgery. As you can see here: http://viewfestival.co.uk/2014-edition/programme/#fakes

The talk was really interesting. He gave some examples on really good forgeries and how they saw it was fake. But he also talked a lot about how your perception beforehand can change how you see the work drastically. You go in with the idea: This is a real Leonardo, and it looks very convincing. Then someone says it's fake and suddenly you see everything that is wrong with it. This also works the otherway around. This fact gave me the idea for my essay, about which I have written another post found here: http://eenrodermans.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/essay.html

Blacksmithing

I am very interested in a lot of things, and have spent a lot of my time in London devoted to improving my art skills and also trying and learning the more traditional craft skills. One of which I have always wanted to learn is blacksmithing. Imagine my delight then when I went to the Stepney City Farm and found they gave free three hour long taster blacksmithing courses.

It was very hands on and physically heavy, but I haven't had that much fun making something very simple in a very long time.


We started with simply making a spike. It might sound simple but it is much harder than it sounds. The hammer is very heavy and just hitting the metal in the right place is quite difficult. You have to use the short space of time you have while the metal is hot enough to get as much metal moving as you can, and then you have to direct it in the right direction and in the right way. When you do get it right and the metal does what you want it to do, it is the most powerful feeling! To get such a solid material doing what you want, with nothing more than a bit of heat, a hammer and a strong arm.

Then when we had a square spike, we rounded it out and started twisting the spike into a curve. It is a very simple thing, but you can make very beautiful stuff with these simple techniques. I would definitely love to do some more blacksmithing and make some more difficult things!

My metal curve is currently being used as an improvised seal stamp.

Walt Disney's Frozen, lecture on art direction and lighting

There was a talk about the art direction and lighting from Frozen in Curzon cinemas on Shaftesbury Avenue. The talk was given by Michael Giaimo, the art director on Frozen and Mohit Kallianpur, the director of cinematography and lighting. It was a very informative and fun talk on a subject that I am very much interested in within the game art that I do at home. These are the moments that I am very glad to be in London for the amazing things that happen here sometimes.
Here are some notes that I made.

The first step to making the movie was research, lots and lots of research. They went online to look for photo references and found out that 80% of those pictures were from Norway. They took a trip to Norway and made a crazy amount of pictures there. The landscape was heavily influenced by the fjords, and the architecture and character design was influenced by the culture. They showed lots of pictures with all the different style elements they used and how the style came to be.

They gave useful tips as well. For example in the character design they used lots of bright colours and heavy saturation and all the characters except for Elsa as ice queen also had black in their clothing to balance them out.

They showed lots of style elements that you may not have noticed before. For example Elsa's cape as ice queen is literally a snowflake, and the design of the ice palace was based on a snowflake as well. Which apparently was one of John Lasseter's ideas.

The talk then switched over to the lighting and colour choices of the overall movie in response to the mood. They talked about getting a very saturated environment within a snowscape.  And about the odd choice to use yellow (which is a warm colour) for the 'everything-goes-to-shit scene' which, because yellow had not been used in the entire movie except for the happy song by Olaf the snowman, worked very well. It also made a nice contrast, yellow for both the brightest and darkest scenes in the movie.

All in all it was a very informative talk and I am very happy to have been there.