Seminar presentation evaluation

My presentation was about Ouka Leele, a Spanish photographer who started being successful in the Eighties. Although she began working solely with black and white pictures she became popular because of her technique of adding colour to her works, so she created a very personal and unique language.

What was more important for her was the staging, the process behind each image she created, as well as the relation she had with the person or the theme she was portraying.

In the feedback we talked about the posibility of adding more information about photography and painting, like talking about the relationship between them and maybe explaining a bit better her influences, because i just mentioned them... but an interesting point would be for example to compare one of her works to some Greco painting (a really important influence of hers), to crearly see the differences and similarities between them.

Drawing inspiration - "Robert Crumb"

Robert Crumb is an American cartoonist that was very popular in the seventies and eighties, i was attracted to his work because he has a different style, it´s nothing to do with the general American comic industry and i find his style more interesting; he was one of the founders of "underground comic" although his stories have been quite controversial because he had a really acid humor.

In his comics he talked about his personal life, always talking about his wifes and sexual life but he has also made other invented stories and characters, like "Fritz the cat" or "Mr Natural"

Talking about his technique i like the way he used ink, it reminds me of Goya engravings. He made some documentaries about his lifestyle, this is one of them:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR9vfcNYBhc

Art History presentation

Henry Matisse and Lucian Freud

For this presentation and for the essay that we have to prepare for Art History i chose these two artists.

For the presentation we had to choose two paintings and compare them, i chose "Portrait of Rose", by Freud and "Odalisque in red trousers", by Matisse.

The main difference i found between this German artist and this French painter was the use of colour, as we know Matisse has been identified with Fauvism, so he used colour in a very simbolic and unrealistic way, while Freud was using more neutral colours, giving to their paintings a strong feel of human meat.

Another interesting thing i found was that for Freud it was essential that the sitter was a person close to him, and that is because he was into capturing how the person really is and not how they pretend to be, so of course he needed to know that person, like we can appreciate in this particular work, "Rose" is his daughter. So this is another difference, Matisse was painting an Odalisque, a women from the harem, just because he was fascinated by her exotic beauty and her body, it´s also important to keep in mind the two periods when these paintings were made, 1922 (Matisse) and 1978 (Freud); the feedback in the presentation was really usefull, they suggest me to talk about the different ways women have been seen throught out history, attitudes to woman, i think  it will be an interesting thing to investigate later on with the essay.