Tuesday 19th April 2011:

I looked further at the work of Nathan Ford today (who I discovered at the Affordable Art Fair). I really like his use of oil paints, particularly in the pieces ‘Anon’, ‘Fraser’, ‘Painted’, and ‘Reuben’, because they convey the emotion of the subject well. I quite like the ‘distressed’ look which he creates, but I also wanted to just experiment with the medium of oil paint.

I remembered from my peer review that it was suggested that I try to show the realisation that the children from the primary school had when I told them (and they came around to the idea) that the bully can also be a victim. I thought it would therefore be a good idea to paint the bully shouting at the victim, but the victim is actually the same person.

I think that this has turned out quite well. The painting of the ‘victim’ has turned out more in the style of Nathan Ford, than the painting of the ‘bully’. However, this could perhaps be interpreted as the victim feeling more distressed than the bully. Although I don’t particularly want to use oil paint in my final pieces, it was interesting to explore this material as it creates some nice realistic effects, which help to show the reality of bullying. I also hope that it’s easy to tell that the bully and victim are the same person, so I may have to see people’s reactions to this page.

I then wanted to show this realisation with words, but in quite a different way so that it would contrast with the oil paint. Perhaps the idea of using letters from magazines came from the use of collage that Michelle Thompson uses. I think that this works well with the oil paint, but is also different enough to stand out and show this realisation.

This piece also relates well to my idea of having the same person posing as the victim and as the bully in a photo (and perhaps in a poster idea), to show the fact that the bully can also be a victim. As this seems to work quite well in my sketchbook, I will explore this further digitally to see if it works just as well.

I also prepped some more sketchbook pages today, so that I am able to continue developing my ideas and incorporating the background to work well with the image.

Target for today: Look at the work of Nathan Ford and respond in sketchbook to show the realisation that the bully can also be a victim. Prep more sketchbook pages.

Target for tomorrow: Look at the work of Ralph Steadman and respond in sketchbook looking at both the bully and the victim, create a page (by using the information from the ‘Bullying’ book) to show the three main different types of bully, and digitally create an image which shows the bully bullying the victim (which is actually the same person), to show that the bully can also be a victim themselves.