Artist research #3

Artist research on Takashi Murakami

            Takashi Murakami is a Japanese artist dealing with sculpture, digital media, performance and even factory-produced textiles. He is a well-trained artist receiving degrees in Art from The Tokyo National University of Fine Arts. He is world renowned and especially famous in Japan.” Takashi Murakami's work has been exhibited in prestigious museums all over the world, including the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and a recent solo retrospective exhibition at the Bard College Museum of Art”  In class specifically we have seen two of the ads he worked on as well as a few sculptures. “In 2000, Murakami curated an exhibition of Japanese art titled Superflat, which acknowledged a movement toward mass-produced entertainment and its effects on contemporary aesthetics.” It seems like in all his work I have viewed there is a mass production, industrialized side to it. He is most famously known for his collaboration with Marc Jacobs to create hand bags for Louis Vuitton.

http://www.takashimurakami.com/biography.php 

            He is known for his main character Mr. Dob. This character appears in many of his works digitally and in physical form. This character as well as others appear in the line he created for Loius Vuitton and in the advertisements for the new hand bags. The New York times reported in 2003 that the handbags were flying off shelves and that the supply was not keeping up with the demand. “Waiting lists in stores from San Francisco to Berlin still number in the thousands, and People magazine recently lamented (or celebrated?) the fact that the only humans who actually seem to be able to get their hands on his totes which sell for more than $5,000 apiece are ‘A-listers’”. Murakami was not exactly happy with all the hype that had happened as a result of his collaboration. He saw himself as an artist not as a fashion designer or hand bag maker. He was quoted by the New York Times saying:  "I need to rebuild the wall between the commercial art and the fine art I do," he says. "I need to focus on the fine-art side of me for a while." He knew that his new found fans knew him as a hand bag designer, not as the artist he wanted them to know him as.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,452870,00.html

I find this very interesting because even though he was a famous artist prior to the collaboration, the Louis Vuitton gig made him famous world wide. He even thought that his artwork was selling for too much now that it was not worth that much. He enjoys being an artist not a fashion designer and seems to me like he is not in it for the money. I myself have been struggling with the whole idea of doing art for me and doing art to put food on the table so to speak.

Murakami’s sculptures and artwork is very striking when first viewed. It seemsto appear childish at first but when looked at more closely you begin to see the puns and darkness of his work. Big bubble characters with large eyes and bright appealing colors eat other helpless characters in the scene. Or a sculpture of an anime looking man holding on to his genitalia and a stream of white spiraling around the person. Although his work appears to be geared toward children because of the colors and bubbly figures, it is not something I would show my eight year old sister. The New York Times said “Murakami purposely engineers a neo-Pop Art universality to his work, making his art both effortlessly accessible and intellectually provocative an ingenious feat. His sometimes sincere, usually ironic, often disturbing plays on the empty smiles and bright colors of cartoon cute are designed to appeal to the preteen in Tokyo”. I wonder if the preteens in Tokyo have seen his sculptures of anime people such as “Hiropen”?

http://www.takashimurakami.com/art.php

I like his work but also am still trying to figure out a lot of it. I also like working with very bright vivid colors. I know that bright colors are often associated with children and pre-teens, but I still use them. I am not directly trying to target that age group with my art and I feel that Murakami is not either. I am also getting in to the fashion side of art more recently and Murakami is best known for his collaboration with Louis Vuitton. I wish to target a different type of fashion. Rather then a $5,000 handbag that only “A-listers” can get their hands on, I would like to design graphics that will go on athletic clothing. Under armour my main inspiration.

Murakami seems to be a very interesting person and artist and I do want to explore further into his different types of work and see what he will come up with next.  

revised rant

So revised idea: scarf printed with white moss print.

continue with the after effects
- light streaks coming in
-light streak saturating photo
-moss image
-shapes showing in to design
-designs on clothing

good portfolio style

final project rant

So I am thinking as of now to create a new ID design from a macro photo much like I did from the last project. Then compare that design to the light design I created and the moss one that I put on a white background. I want to print two scarves and hang them like a tapestry on the walls for presentation. Also, I had the idea of projecting the original photos on the scarfs for the crit. I don't know if I will have time to do all of this though so it is a work in progress.

projects

Research: Daniel Vosovic

     Daniel Vosovic although not what all may consider as an artist, is rather a fashion designer who has taken his work to the next level by incorporating textures inspired by photographs. Vosovic is a Michigan native and graduated from FIT. Most people may recognize him from Project Runway, the second season. He was a favorite then and a full career bloomed out of the reality show. He now engages in art direction as well as working in New York design houses and creating his own fashion collections. He has also written a book titles “Fashion Inside Out”. He launched his first own collection in February of 2012. This collection is where I based my research. source1

I first found information on Daniel Vosovic while looking at the First 2 Print website. This is a website that prints in mass quantities designs onto fabric. The description on First2Print.com describes simply that his collection “exemplifies the possibilities of using artistic photographic imagery created as a textile prints”. The print the site was speaking about was for the Fall/Winter collection of 2010. This was his first full women’s’ collection. He was inspired for this collection while walking through a NYC park on night. He observed the effects of time and nature on the elements of the statues and sculptures. He was exploring the idea of creative destruction. “Vosovic created completely original prints and embroideries derived from studying the aging process of oxidized copper, broken marble, and other materials in various stages of transformation.” The dresses appear to be direct prints of the photographs. He accentuated the fashion clothing by his presentation of them all. He placed the models on plain white pedestals while playing nature films in the background. Source 3

In his Spring 2011 collection he also started experimenting with digital printing again, to create what looked like an abstract print was actually a close-up photo of wolf fur, deer fur, burnt ash, and wood. He focused a lot on natural textures and made them “fashionable”. Source 4

I even surprised myself how I found an “artist” that was doing something so similar to what I did for this last project. He was inspired by the textures he saw in nature and created fabric out of these macro images. I did come up with my idea on my own prior to even knowing that fashion designers were doing this also. I took photos of highly textural objects within nature and rather then printing them in photograph form onto fabric, I made them digitally traced images. The end result of his work and what I would like to do with my work is the same, fashion. His is high class NYC fashion and the output I would like is Athletic clothing, but it is still textiles.

I am only going to analyze the fabric itself because I know nothing about high-class fashion styles. The fabrics he created were very interesting. Although, while looking at them I can tell that they are a photo or relate closely to a photo, I could not recognize and pinpoint exactly what the photo was of. Using the texture of oxidized and weathered statues is very out of the box and conceptual. Also, the use of wolf fur in his 2011 collection is even more interesting because it correlated with humans. We wear closes for warmth and wolves have fur as their “clothing”.