Thursday, 2 February 2017

Study Task 7: Rationale

• What is your theme:
I have been looking at Lawrence Zeegen's "Where is the comment? Where is the content?" quote, pertaining to the overarching theme of politics. From this, I have been researching style and content and how style is important to effectively communicate, politics in illustration and political illustration itself. 

• How are you exploring it visually?
I began with a very broad approach experimenting with line, texture, shape, colour and collage and how that could relate to my quote in terms of comment and content. What is a political line? A political shape? How can a line have design doing and design thinking? What is a stylised line? From my first 15 pages of basic research, I began to tease apart at the fundamentals of what I like about David Shrigley's Fight the Nothingness - being a tongue-in-cheek 'call to arms' - and how I could make my own political poster / propaganda using the same elements of raised fists, rising suns, a limited colour palette of particular colours that have certain connotations and bold shapes.

• Why are you doing it this way?
I made the unconscious decision to approach in two ways - using design thinking and design doing, style -and- content, both mentioned in Zeegen's original quote. I wanted to take apart Shrigley's work in a diagnostic fashion and rebuild it in a way to explore the quote further, explore propaganda and explore illustration through irony, pastiche and parody. I made the very conscious decision not to include Donald Trump in any of my illustrative work in my visual journal as I am absolutely sick to death of people's caricatures of him in my Facebook, Twitter and Instagram news feeds! There really is no thought-provoking content to be had.

• Materials?
I've experimented with a variety of materials including pencil, fine liner, drawing ink with brushes, Copic markers, acrylic paint, gouache and stamping. Collage was my favourite process to work with as it created a new visual language and helped me to explore the theme of 'style' more and how it can have a more DIY punk aesthetic.

• Any key theorists who have influenced this?
Edward Berneys' theories of propaganda and Ihab Hassan and Charles Jencks' theories on propaganda have influenced my practical and written work. David Shrigley has been a key influence to my visual journal as well as the Conservative posters produced by Euro RPS / Havas and their simplified vector illustrations.

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