Monday, 15 October 2012

Research Object 2- Joan Eardley



Looking back to when I first started my A-Levels, I was interested in Art surrounding and influenced by the Second World War. I greatly enjoy seeing what artists have done with their work to portray and capture such a historic event. To artists it’s a beautiful disaster in which we can delve into and in a way use and manipulate to showcase talent.

One artist that I love is the amazing Joan Eardley. Her style of Art is not usually something I go for myself but her work really caught my eye and in a way changed the way I viewed abstract painting. Her urban and expressive style of work is truly an inspiration, especially for the project I completed based on the Second World War.

Similar to Eardley, I used expressive and loud brush strokes in my paintings and a very rural and earthy colour to keep the war theme within the image, however I started this project is from one single image taken by Eardley. The image of a family of children very rough and scruffy in war times, gave me the inspiration to do my own 'War Child Shoot'. From there on Eardley influenced me to further my project with the eye-catching photos and even more vivid way of painting.

Below are some of my images and work, Enjoy! 

Link to Joan Eardley's Website: http://eardleyeditions.com/




All images are from the series 'War Child' 2009-2010
Image 1


Image 2


Image 3

 Image 4

Image 5


Piece of art work I produced in the style of Eardley, Based on my own image, Produced on an A1 scale using Acrylic paint. produced in 2009-2010

Another piece of my art work, painted also with acrylics on A1 scale.

Thursday, 11 October 2012

Research Object 1- Ansel Adams


As a photographer, Ansel Adams is someone I greatly admire for the amazing work he produces. I am only just beginning to practice landscape photography, so I felt it necessary to credit a big influence to some of my works.

Adams works predominantly in black and white using a variety of film cameras. A lot of his work is based in the Yosemite National Park in USA, his choice of natural and unblemished landscapes shows the natural beauty left in the world. We live in such an urban world and for Adams to disregard it all and focus on the natural beauty left is powerful. 

He influenced me to take a step back from composing series in which are controversial and made me realize that there is beauty in other forms. I spent a few weeks away from focusing on portraiture and documentary and focused on black and white and colour landscape images inspired by Adams. I did not use a film camera like Adams, I stuck to my SLR but I am now practicing with a film camera to get different effects and qualities. I have included below some of my own images inspired by Adams. 

 Image 1, Taken July 2012
Image 2, Taken July 2012


Image 3, Taken July 2012

Image 4, Taken July 2012

Monday, 8 October 2012

Myself as an artist


My name is Natasha Constantinou, I am 20 years old and live in the outskirts of London. I have studied Fine Art for 5 years and photography for 2 and I am now currently studying Photography with Fine Art at university.

My style and what I do varies from portraiture to Landscape all the way to Documentary photography. My main focal point would be portraiture and Documentary photography in which I have been focusing on throughout my education but I have recently started a few series of images on landscapes. In the past I have done projects based around the war, politics and portraiture as a theme but all for the sake of my education and A-levels. Only recently have I started to focus on producing series of photographs as a photographer.

Just to briefly touch on my images within Landscape photography, only in the past two years have I really started to enjoy and focus on what I have to offer as a landscape photographer. I have produced a few series using a variety of techniques but my favorite series is called “The calm” in which I will post a couple images from on to this Blog.  As I have only just started to become familiar with landscape I haven’t got a lot of detail to go into.

My main focus in photography is portraiture and documentary. What I love about portraiture has to be the emotions and feelings you can send out the audience/public through the human form. By picking the right person/subject, setting, mood and expression, you can create such a controversial and unbelievable effect on the audience. This is the same with documentary photography, there are so many subjects to focus on in this modern and urban world that the possibilities are endless, through one image or a series of images you can have people whom you have never met before, start feeling emotions, whether it be hate or love. Controversial is something I aim for my images to be, I want there to be room for the audience to use their imagination, their interpretation to think up whatever they believe the image may want to say.

As an artist I use my images a lot in my fine art work, I recreate a lot of my portraiture by painting and sketching the image. What I am aiming to do at the moment is create a series of photo’s in which portray how people may hide their true identity/state, with false emotion, then recreate them in a way that can reflect their personality’s and backgrounds through art.

As you may be able to tell, I have many ideas in process at once; I start projects when I first think them up as I believe that’s when I have created some of my best images. Some projects fall together and are complete in a matter of days or weeks others take a lot longer, but everything has its own time process. For example I have 5 series of photographs in process at this moment for portraiture and documentary, some in which only have 1 image in the series so far, others more. On occasions I take one or two images of something that in that moment really catches my eye, I then wait for a series to form around that one image. 

So that’s me as an artist in a very short basic form! Hope you have enjoyed reading about what I do and Thank you for taking interest.


A set of images from my landscape series called "The Calm", Date 2012



 A set of images from my portraiture series, "Hitting Home", Date 2011(in process)

 An image from my series based on fictional fears called "The Slenderman", Date 2012 (in process)