Bioshock

This blog is titled Artwork so writing about a game seems a bit strange right, wrong! When my boyfriend first told me about Bioshock I wasn't that interested. He was pretty obsessed and spent ages counting down the days till it's release. In his own words this was the game that he was creaming his pants over (hmm men are so crude, though that rant is for another blog.)

Anyway i had seen one of the trailers and thought I would give the game a go. I'm not a huge gamer but the idea interested me. The ideas being a world set in the 1950's style and the soundtrack which was set to include The Andrew Sisters, Billie Holiday, and Bing Crosby. The thing is the trailer Rich actually showed me was one showing the violent side http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoYorK3E4aM and didn't really show off the artwork to it's best.

When Rich got the game (on the day of it's release) he couldn't stop playing it. After watching him play for a while I was hooked. This game is amazing and beautiful and I couldn't stop playing it. Now again I realise that this blog promised a look at art and so far all i've done is talk about a vidoe game but before you judge you should watch these video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsHY0LnbDDw and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZIr9f-V7kk it still shows some of the fighting but focus on the background. The second video seems to focus on this but it's worth seeing both.

My favourtie pieces of artwork from the game are actually the adverts that you see around. They are beautiful. I have actually been looking for some posters of these but with no luck.

Here are a few examples taken straight from the game, hense the delapidation and water marks you can see.

Here are a few examples of these posters within the game.

There are other posters shown in the game which have a slightly different style to them though i find them equally appealing. These are found on the walls of a training centre for the little sisters (the little girls you can see in the trailers) And also when you receive a new plasmid

The actual game graphics are also astonishing. We've just aquired a new HD television and though I thought the graphics were good before they are incredible now. I've found a few shots of the game to give some example

This is one of the first images you see when you start to play. You are in a plane which crashes into the sea. Though this is a still you can see that it is very realsitic.

A key aspect of the games graphics is that the city is under water so they have spent a lot of time making sure that the water effects are of the best quality

The city is in itself beautiful

While looking for posters I also found this art showing a little sister and her big daddy (you'll understand if you play the game) which I thought was beautiful and had to include.

Graffiti

Graffiti is a much deliberated subject most will either see it as art or vandalism. When I was about 17 I met up with a good friend of mine for coffee. On the walk to the cafe he took me down this small alley saying he wanted to show me something. There on the side of a very delapidated garage was his nickname written in blue spray paint. He was so proud of it I didn't have the heart to tell him how bad it was. Though i'm well aware that I couldn't have done any better. A few weeks before he had shown me his tag design which he had done on a chalk board and it looked really good. My friend thought that tagging his name would be really easy but infact, as he found out, the intricate pieces really are an artform.

One look at a website specialising in graffiti will show you thousands of examples of great art. Here are a few taken from http://www.graffiti.org/ which had examples of work from all over the world.

But when most people think of graffiti they think of the type of tagging my friend did years ago. This picture, though a very extreme example shows the type of thing I am talking about

People who instantly condem graffiti as vandalism, those mentioned who think only of the bad examples, either ignore of do not appreciate the complexity of some of the work they see.

While looking for some examples of the graffiti found closer to home (Bristol) I came across the blog of a photographer Matthew Smith. Though I would suggest reading his post, as it seems a more elequantly explain some of the issues I am trying to discuss, i thought i'd extract the key idea as he sums it up nicely
"The criminalisation of graffiti also began to intrigue me. Public space has been adorned by public information for an extremely long time. For a public art form that on occasion is startling in its talent, incisiveness, wit, and execution; graffiti is often the target of rabid disgust from certain sections of society. Granted, tagging can be unsightly and a nuisance, but on closer inspection, contained within, can be gems of modern urban poetry. It is just a case of looking for it, like searching for diamonds in old lumps of coal. As with most things, it is a case of separating the wheat from the chaff, rather than using the lowest common denominator to tar and feather the whole." (full article found at http://www.graffiti.org/bristol/index.html)

Speaking of graffiti that's a little closer to home i'm a big fan of Banksy. There is a well known Banksy piece on the wall of Park street in Bristol


I was really impressed when I first saw this piece i'd been told about about him years ago, funnily by the same friend who showed me his grafftit but i'd never really paid much attention, terrible I know. Now i'm obsessed with him and who wouldn't be he's really tallented. I love the idea of stencils and how much planning really is involved.

Here are a few of my favourites

I also like the art he does on canvas. For example this modern day claude monnet's water lily pond

Fred Tomaselli

Last summer I went to the Tate at St Ives. There were a few good exhibits including a great light instilation. The main exhibition was called 'If everybody had an ocean: Brian Wilson, an art exhibition'. It was based on the life and music of Brian Wilson (the creative force behind the Beach Boys). To be honest i wasn't that impressed but one piece of art really stood out. It was a piece of art called Organism by an artist called Fred Tomaselli.

The pictures of his work do not do them justice. Organism is about 8 ft by 6.5 ft and made using a collection of images set into clear resin on top of a jet-black wooden block. The contrast between the black background and the colourful images is stunning and there were so many different images cleverly interwoven to create the overall pattern. I stood staring at it for ages until my dad dragged me away.

When researching into this artist i found that not only does he use photo of flowers, birds, butterflies, arms, legs, eyes, and noses and acrylic paint in his artwork he also includes unorthodox materials such as Medicinal herbs, pills, and hallucinogenic plants.Jacqui McIntosh describes his work as "visually explosive and decorative, containing more detail than the eye can take in within a single glance. His paintings are the sum of often thousands of individual elements, urging you to look closer, acting like portals into weird and otherwordly realities. Tomaselli's most recent works combine the abstract with figurative. Figures are intrically composed using images cut from magazines. Multiple eyes, noses and mouths merge to construct a face, worms create intestines, flowers bloom from breasts. Tomaselli's figures are both fact and fiction, merging the real with the metaphorical. They inhabit magical and surreal realities, where vivid patterns constructed from insects, flowers, leaves, illicit drugs and body parts swirl around them like a perceivable energy."The use of various drugs within his artwork has created controversy. To the extent that an exhibition of his work in France resulted in blank walls because the French police held his whole collecting in customs. Heres a few other examples of his artwork...

Joanna Hepworth

I think my first blog on art will have to been about something a little closer to home. My friend Jo is a fantasic artist. I've known her since we were in year 9 and still have little doodles she drew when we were bored in lessons. I'm not great at explaining why i love certain art, i'll give it a try, so i thought i'd just put up the pictures and let you see.

The animation seas


Couldn't find muffin

Birdapple


This is one of her animations called 'taking notes' which can be found here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y-lee5HqXU This animation led to Jo being shortlisted for the 2007 British animation awards.

Jo has her own webpage http://www.joannahepworth.co.uk/