My most successful work to date came from my foundation course. For our major 12 week project I chose to do two large scale oil paintings of celebrity singers Nicki Minaj and Jessie J - a close up of their faces.
The idea behind them came from my research into Identity and the use of close ups for portraits. Because I already found this interesting, and have previously used celebrity subjects (that people always love because they can identify the person) I began to search celebrity close- ups and the results were very enjoyable. There were hundreds of snaps of faces of famous people, more importantly, they were very different to those that we are used to seeing in the media - magazines, album covers, promotions, posters, television etc. We always see 'perfect' looking celebrities, and believe them to be so much better and more attractive than us regular people. But this search exposed them for who they really are! HUMANS! (shock, horror) many times had these celebrities been captured whilst unaware - with and without makeup, what I saw was a mixture of oily, hairy, spotty skin. I printed some of these and the people i showed said they felt so much better about themselves.
My unflattering oil paintings were exhibited at our end of year show, and someone took a picture of my Jessie J painting on their phone. They uploaded it to instagram and tagged the star in it.
The next morning on the 3rd July 2013 a lot of my friends were contacting me, Jessie J had posted the picture to her Instagram (which also posted it to facebook and twitter) praising the painting and it ended up getting around 35,000 'likes'
From this, I was front page news in my town, and I also had a telephone interview with free radio, which was aired in the news. I also got asked by Heart FM to go in for an interview at their studio in Birmingham on the 4th July.
As well as this, I was nominated by my tutor for a WJEC Foundation Excellence Exhibition and Awards 2013 - in Cardiff on the 8th November. Unfortunately I didn't win but it was good to attend and have my work exhibited in Cardiff for the following week.
I've put this onto my PPP blog because I find this worrying, it was a good experience at the time, but I haven't gained anything apart from a small amount of confidence and the knowledge that some celebrities have a crazy amount of obsessive fans. I didn't really know what to do when this happened, but it makes me think, what has to happen in order to be successful? How can I earn money from this? The reason I did this course is to find out, but i'm not sure if I know that yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment