Week 3

This week I have been looking at Hannah Hoch who influenced me, in particular ‘the technique of photomontage as a form of art’. creating surreal collages with photographs, I saw this as an opportunity to look further into similarities that run in my family, first looking into my fathers side, using imagery of my ancestry up to 1871, with dates and information about the history of our genes and DNA. I collaged these photograph’s with relatives all the way to my generation, responding to Hannah Hoch’s weimar period helped me identify recurring characteristics and features, by collaging photos and visually seeing similarities, which helps me to identify dominant genes and to start noticing traits in generations before me.

Also speaking to my grandparents, uncle, aunties, cousins and siblings I can see personality traits and ways we may do things the same way or even different ways and working out why and what genetics we share. I will continue to research my family, looking into my mothers side and respond to it with using resources from artists, galleries and techniques; stand work, making samples and responses using forms of DNA as inspiration. I plan to spend this week continuing to research and responding more in depth to my discoveries. I have been experimenting with different styles of collaging to test and notice different traits and comparing faces, overlapping, merging and side by side.

Picasso is another artist who influenced my experimentation as the famous ‘weeping women’ painting, looking at the geometric shapes and little parts to the piece, reminded me of a puzzle. I decided to respond to this with cutting up portrait photos of my family, and putting a face together with the features of many different people from my family and ancestry. When I last saw my tutor for a one to one update, I was told I should have more variety of scale in my book, so to improve, with this response I enlarged some of the images and decreased the size of some to make it more abstract, to make it more influenced by Picasso I then went over the collages with oil pastels and using his sharp, strong type of random yet structured drawing with the similarities that were shown linking people in my family together, I wrote down all the similarities, where they link and where they came from. This experimentation is solving my questioning and is helping me discover my genetic information which I will now use these further into my project by creating illustrations and patterns on photoshop to develop my ideas.

http://thecreativehours.com/creative-exercise-hannah-hoch-and-collage/