Genre Study- Full Draft 1

For my personal investigation there were a few genres that I wanted to look at. Those being: Expressionism; Post-Impression; and Abstract. I chose these because I personally prefer these styles of art to more realistic artwork as I feel as you are freer to express yourself with the marks and colours that you choose to use which I enjoy doing. Expressionism actually developed from Post-Impressionism which was the style used around the late 19^th century/early 20^th century. I decided to look at Post-Impressionism because some of my favourite artists were part of the Post-Impressionist movement, those being Cezanne and Van Gogh. I have seen their work in person many times at different art galleries, the most recent being at the London National Gallery.  Post-impressionist art was created to react against impressionist artwork by exploring lines, colour and form as well as the emotional response of the artist which was the particular aspect that led the Expressionism movement in the early 20^th century. This art style interests me because I like how the artists use lines and colours in their work, I like how they use bold, dark lines to represent the outline of different subjects in their pieces and I also like the variety of colours used in their work with the majority of the colours being very similar with very subtle changes which I feel gives the paintings more life and excitement. In the likes of Cezanne and Van Gogh they tend to use dark outlines and then specific marks with their colours to create tones and shape in their backgrounds and subjects in their pieces which I really like.

I am mainly going to focus on Expressionism for my personal investigation as I feel that it relates quite well to my chosen theme of figures and emotions because the whole purpose of Expressionism is to depict the subjective emotions that things create within a person. I have been looking at the Expressionist artist Egon Schiele and the artist Gustav Klimt who had a lot of influence on Egon Schiele’s style of artwork. I have also chosen abstract as a style to look at because I find the abstract style more exciting and interesting to create rather than trying to make my work look totally realistic. The artists I am interested in looking at currently for my personal investigation are Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Paul Cezanne, Picasso, Edgar Degas, Clara Lieu and Jason Shawn Alexander. These artists all relate to my chosen theme for my personal investigation as they do artwork involving figures and people and I have chosen them all for their style of artwork which I have felt inspired by for my investigation. My plan for my personal investigation at the moment is to experiment using the different styles of art inspired by these different artists to figure out which styles I like and think work best for what I want to do with my theme of figures and emotions and then I can experiment further with the art that I like best from the initial experiments.

Group Activity

We all picked a piece of work from our sketchbooks that we thought best represented where we currently were at with our personal investigation. We chose an aspect of this piece to inspire us to draw something on the large piece of paper in front of each of us. Then we moved places for about 10 minutes, sometimes by one seat and sometimes by several and used our chosen piece of work and the work that was already on the paper done by other people to continue drawing on top of the original pieces. We then collaborated to make all of the large separate pieces of paper into one big group piece.

This was the first piece that I drew.

This was the piece of work done by someone else before I added to it.

This was the piece once I had added to it. I was very hesitant at first, I wasn't too sure on what to draw and was worried about ruining someone else's work.



This was the next piece after I added to it. I was less hesitant about drawing over this piece as I had slowly began to get more confident with what we were doing.

This was the next piece before I added to it. Our teacher asked us to consider using other areas of the page as well instead of just focusing on the area already drawn on.

This was the piece after I drew on it. I decided to focus on line and texture but tried to stick to the similar style that was already drawn on the paper so that . Me and the person next to me also collaborated a little and started to edge out onto each others pieces of paper.

The final outcome was very abstract, with the majority of it being charcoal, other mediums used were pen, graphite and pencil. It was difficult to capture the pencil in the photographs as it was very light. I really liked the final outcome and thought that all of the pieces worked well together in the positions we had placed them. As a class we discussed where we thought pieces best went together to make it a group effort.