Reggie Pedro, English Illustrator, Born 1972

Pedro’s work depicts the interplay between the representation of characters and his unique painting technique. Although inevitably influenced by his London upbringing, the main subject of Pedro’s work is human emotion, civil unrest, love, boredom, isolation, exuberance and spirituality.

Pedro is best known for his record cover artwork for Mercury award-winning band Gomez between 1998 and 1999, for which he won an award for best illustrator within the music industry in 2000.
He was then commissioned to produce another four record covers for the band, resulting in his work appearing in music stores world-wide and being seen by the mainstream. It is this work that he is most recognisable for today.

Awards include Best Illustrator within the Music Industry for work done in 1999 (2000); winner of the Parallel Media Prize, where he was awarded £4,000 for Best Illustrator at the Royal College of Art ; and winner of the Painters-Stainers Award of Excellence at the Royal College of Art.Reggie Okerheire Pedro's approach to his work would appear, at least in a non-literal sense, to be a reflection on his perceptions and experiences, growing up in London.

I really appriciate Pedro's work in many ways. For example in how his characters are portrayed within the bold use of colour, outlines, flat planes and surfaces, occasional handwritten text sometimes giving a hint, or emphasising a theme or subject-matter within multi-layered images that trigger the viewer's imagination through their glimpses of possible narratives.

This is exactly what I want to achieve in my current sequence illustration and at the moment I am strongly influenced by the work of Pedro. It is when dealing with these aspects of the work, ignoring the urban settings, the fact that Reggie attempts to give life to his paintings is a clear display. Also, the way that Reggie uses the visual medium of paint to articulate his ideas shouldn't be seen as a technique which has been given little thought or as 'an outdated medium in today's computer generated image world.' But on the contrary, paint which is essentially pigment like any other use of colour can be used, and has been used in a variety of ways depending on whose hands are using it and how they view the world around them in relation to how they treat the medium. His paintings are the site of tension between representation and creative intervention, between seriousness and upliftment or humour.

'There is a lot of struggle that takes place in the creation of his work, struggles within figuration, semi-abstraction, and abstraction. His will is to render our existences as sincerely as possible without losing sight of his creative artistic endeavours.'

Dave McKean English artist, Born 1963

Bill Sienkiewicz.

Dave Tench McKean is an illustrator, photographer, comic book artist, graphic designer, film maker and musician.

His work incorporates drawing, painting, photography, collage, found objects, digital art and sculpture.

His work during his early career was often compared to that of Bill Sienkiewicz, (as presented above, left). The similarities are clear to see between the artists' work and it shows that Sienkiewicz work had strong influences on McKeans work.

McKean's striking and influential works have won him many awards, a worldwide following of fans and admirers, and a highly-respected reputation as an artist. Underlying his many different artistic styles, accomplished in a variety of media — line art, painting, model-building, photography, digital manipulation and typography.

The reason I decided to research the work of McKean was because of his many styles and vast media which is a way I like to work. I find his approach influential: for example using materials, collage and found objects to represent his images which is what i am trying to achieve with my current narrative project. By having a structure to my sequence and clues that are embodied with in my choice of media. Not only this but his choice of composition works very effectively.

Besides the production of his spectacular mainstream comics, McKean ambitiously kept busy with loads of other projects. Best-known of these are his legendary covers for the 'Sandman' comics, written by his friend Neil Gaiman. After the completion of this best-selling fantasy series, McKean's covers, digitally manipulated images of painting with scraps of ripped-up lace and over-exposed photographs, were collected in the volume 'Sandman Dust Covers'.

Gregory Crewdson

Research Strategy...

Vertical thinking is a type of approach to problems that usually involves one being selective , analytical and sequential.

Lateral thinking is a term coined by Edward de Bono, a psycholigist and writer. He defines lateral thinking as methods of thinking concerned with changing concepts and perception. Lateral thinking is about ideas.

I am studying the work of Gregory Crewdson as I find it visually incredible through the technique of staging a scene in an illustrative way and capturing mysterious scenes in his photographs. I am going to look further into his work in two ways, by identifying veritcal and lateral reference points.

Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer born Sept 1962 and is best known for elaborately staged, surreal scenes of American homes and neighbourhoods. He lives and works in New York.

The Natural Wonder collection (1992 - 1997)

Vertical

Early photography are reminiscent of the many hours spent playing in a 'shabby acre of woods' between his fathers church and a row of subdivision split levels.

As an adolescent, Crewdson lived with his family in Virginia. Troubled by the tensions between his parents, this seemed to have an effect and project dark emotions onto nature in his work.

White Flight and Economic Depression

Beginning in the mid 1950's and particularly in the 1960's, poor working class African American's and Puerto Rican migrants began to move into Brooklyn. The change in demographics coincided with the changes in the local economy. At the same time, locally rising energy costs, advances in transportation, and the invention of steel, encouraged beer companies to move out of New York city. As the breweries closed , the neighbourhood deteriorated along with much of Brooklyn and New York City. In a five year period the hometown of Crewdson was transformed from a neatly maintained community of wood houses into a place of abandoned buildings, empty lots, drugs and arson. Crewdson briefly mentions elements of his childhood like this and how it has affected his future work.

There is a particular image of a transformed leg in which it becomes the part of the body incorpoarting itself and becoming one with the landscape. 'Theres a confusion and collapsing of the bounderies that hold the body apart from its surroundings.' The vines are growing into the leg and sprouting thorns and this photograph carries narrative and fairytale qualites. Crewdson states that in these series of 'body part' photographs it was heavily affected by the break up of his marriage.

He intentionally grounds mysterious or unknowable events within recognisable and iconic situations, which is the domestic American landscape.

He describes himself as an 'American realist landscape photographer.'

Lateral

Creative influences in Crewdson's work are most obviously surrealism, nature and mankind.

'Crewdson's imagery points to the existence of a raw and undomesticated God'

As mentioned previously, the photograph where a foot is embedded with thorn vines has many suggestions to influences, such as faitytales and fables. The thorns moving through the flesh of a charred leg resemble the briars encasing sleeping beauty's slumbering castle, and the fleshy vines that surround a rotting hand in another photograph look like the leafy beanstalk jack scaled to confront his giant.

In his early work he is hugely influened by the work of artist Marchel Dumchamp, in particularly the piece ' Etant Donnes', in which the influence of the body and the 'peephole' technique are highly recognisable. The main relationship between Crewdson and Dumchamp's work is that they are both only interested finally in the image and not the installation.

This fantasy approach clearly highlights the mood in his work.

He states ' I am interested in creating tension between domesticity and nature, the normal and paranormal or the artifice and reality all creating a mysterious illusion.'

He also uses icongraphs of nature and the American landscape as methaphors for psychological anxiety, fear or desire.

Overall, I think his work is determined by is own strong style and working method and the influences discussed, surrounding the combination between fantasy and reality.