Julia Bamber

Interspersed throughout this blog are gifs of my artwork. I achieved this effect by using Photomosh.com, which allowed me to put an animated filter of 'scanlines' and 'bad tv' on the photos, then download the moving image in a gif format.  This is mode of presenting photographs was inspired by the animated photos accompanying the news articles in the newspaper's featured in the Harry Potter world (Harry Potter Films and Warner Bros. Pictures 2012) . Whilst the images in Harry Potter's news articles looked much more realistic, I wanted to make my images look more like what this technology may have looked like in its stages of development. The reason being that I wanted to distinguish these photos from the animated meme gifs available on social media (which mostly appear in high quality film), but also just out of appreciation for the old aesthetics and imperfections of old televisions. Moreover, the scanlines and glitches draw attention to the composition of a di...

One of my professors mentioned to me how the use of previous work may relate to memory and time - an avenue of thought I am now curious to explore more thoroughly. Previously, my reasoning for incorporating my old work was that:  1. They feature nature in some way, thus I have left other old works up on my wall since they do not relate to this theme of nature I am interested in.  2. They were on my wall, and I wanted to make space for other collaging material.  3. I wanted to see how placing these old works in a new context would change the way I looked at my artwork. To elaborate , when thinking back to Ugo Carrego's Concrete Poetry Manifesto , I wanted to see how adding all of these "graphic stones" would feel like when read all together: what would this visual poetry sound like? 4. I wanted to incorporate some of the studio environment and the context of my art into the artwork itself.  Looking at them through this new lens of memory and time however, first conjur...

Before beginning this blog I was wondering whether or not I should submit this collage/painting to the first crit of 4th Year. My confusion arose from the fact that I had initially created it for a competition and used photographs of old artwork in it, and some Hamma bead creations made by my youngest sister. In order to find the answer to my queries, I emailed one of my professors who informed me that since it was just the summer project it would be allowed. Nevertheless, I should make sure to document what is from previous and other people's work. With this in mind, I would like to highlight these key pieces of the collage and where they came from: 1. The orange square features a square of tracing paper with dots drawn using a black G-tec C4 fine liner. I cut and folded them into shape during my second year of fine art undergraduate studies at Newcastle University in the zine-making and book-binding strand with Theresa Easton when I was learning how to make Turkish Map folded zin...

I'm glad to say I've finally finished the painting.  I'm rather surprised at myself as the lava person ended up a bit cheesier than I expected: with a lava heart. Nevertheless, the more I look at it, the more complete it seems to me. With pink, red, and the flower of a rose being a traditional symbol of love, exposing the heart of the lava man creates traces of a narrative for the viewer to embellish with their own imagination.  Furthermore, in making the background to the lava man and rose, I came to the realization that what had made the initial white and black background so good was its clear unblurry black and white lines that I was redefining with the white Gelly Roll gel pen. Ergo, I could preserve the high level of polish achieved with the gelly roll pen and the divide that my youngest sister liked so much, by redefining the black lines with a black pen on the other side, instead of filling in the gaps with a white gelly roll. It's also worth noting that I replac...

These are my trials of various techniques to draw and paint onto the PVA sheets. From these first three, I've decided to go for the sharpie pen and acrylic option. To my dismay, the sharpie actually ended up blending into the black mountboard even with the PVA sheet behind it. Consequently, I have repainted th e shells of the ladybugs with tubed scarlet watercolour. With the use of thicker and blobbier paint and paintbrushes, the ladybugs look more baloony than normal. Despite being less realistic, it is my view that these more baloony ladybugs work to the advantage of the composition since the thicker legs stand out really well against the PVA sheet and black mountboard background. Looking at the completed ladybugs, I also opted to paint over the stray one on the right of the wrapping paper with some extra blue sky. The only problem now is that we now have a surplus of blue sky that looks unnaturally empty. This morning I tried adding two black heart butterflies with a design insp...

Noting down the progression of my painting/collage: > Paint when you are certain, and when you aren't - write. When you have written all you can, and you are still undecided as to what you should do, try tidying up, embroidery, or Bloons Tower Defence 5. Failing that try some sketchbooking or collaging to generate new possible ideas to implement onto your painting.  > Today I have finally finished the area around the pink moth. Atleast to me it is finished; my youngest sister absolutely detests the light yellow field, and thinks I should paint it in light green instead. I, on the other hand, strongly disagree. Light green would make the white, green and red combination look too christmassy in my eyes. I also think it would throw the whole collaging composition off balance. My youngest sister also suggested I turn the red circles on the yellow into more realistic looking poppies, as opposed to just leaving the implication there by placing the circles on the yellow field. Altho...