Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker. He volunteered for army service in WW1 but soon suffered a breakdown and was discharged. In 1933 his work was branded degenerate by the Nazis and in 1937 over 600 of his works were sold or destroyed. He committed suicide in 1938. I have selected two of his woodcuts of portraits just so I could consider how portraits could be done in linocuts instead of etching. Clearly they have a lot fewer lines and, in my mind, they look less realistic. The second one looks a bit like Frankenstein! The black and white is striking however I think an etching has a bigger potential to be more atmospheric. The woodcuts don't capture the subtleties of the face so well and you would need to hope the face had a few stand out features which could help the viewer identify it as the sitter. I prefer the first print as it is less black and white as the lines and shapes are smaller, the second one is too "chunky...
For my second contemporary art blog I am choosing Richard Wentworth. He was born in 1947 in Samoa and made his life in London. Between the years of 1971-87 he taught at Goldsmiths College and has been thought to have influenced the Young British Artists. He does do photography however it was his sculpture that caught my eye. He uses “ready made” and found objects and he is interested in putting together objects that don’t belong together, that are in an unusual setting and are broken. It is not obviously clear what the deeper underlying messages Wentworth is trying to put across in his work. Having watched a few of his interviews I can honestly say I didn’t have much of a clue what he was going on about (and I wasn’t the only one from what I could find). However as a basic message he is interested in using objects in ways they weren’t, on the surface, designed for and challenging our perceptions of what an object is for. He is telling us to not take objects for granted as th...
I had a shot of photographing the moon with my Nikon SLR attached to a telescope which has a 125mm refractor and a focal length of 750mm. I removed the lens from my camera and put on an adapter in order to fix it to the bottom of the telescope. The camera was set on manual and it was on live view to make it easier to see (although it would have been easier to use the astro camera as it has a flip screen to make it easier to see at any angle). I focussed on the telescope then zoomed in a bit on my camera, and focussed again with the telescope. This first photo had a shutter speed of 4000 with a high ISO of 3200 - I was told htis was too high a ISO for the moon although good if taking stars. I kept the shutter speed at 4000 but reduced the ISO to 200 which made it too dark. I reduced the shutter speed to 400 and kept the ISO at 200 which worked well. I zoomed in on the live view to check the level of detail, I could see the crusty craters on the bottom left edge a...
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