Life and Death - Beginning Concept and Idea

Life and Death 

I began my project on looking at Life and Death, after being inspired by Rankin's response to his journey with coping with the recent death of his farther Alive: In the Face of Death that is available to view at the Tate and there was also a documentary about it on Channel 4.

From this research I will continue to look at death and how people remember the dead.

I wanted to explore a lot of different ways of drawing, and risk taking when it comes to line for this project so I started with a lot of spray diffuse and stencilling. I took a lot of visual inspiration from tattoos that people got to remember a death of a family member. Many of them tend to be a portrait of the deceased but also there were many roses and skulls.

Sucessful pieces:

 

I think these specific pieces really captured the look that I was going for, a faded creepy kind of skulls and neat roses that looked like they were slowly still blooming forever.

I found from doing the skull studies that they looked less comical if you take away the jaw bone so there's a less of a funny grin and more of a mystry of how there is a missing piece that potenially envokes the sense that it was lost during battle or disease.

However, I had to expand on this in terms of depth as the images of skulls and cross bones has been done numberous amount of times by artist today. The continuation of research into the theme of death looking at burials and traditions my inform more visual images that can be used. So through this decision I have dropped the idea of the skulls.