Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg work has had a very strong impact in the late twentieth century visual culture. His work is inspired and influenced by the developments of post-war american art.

His work is quite experimental and he has been using different techniques, but one of the bases of his works has been the collage techniques. Collage was initially developed in 1920 by Dada artists such as Kurt Schwitters. The collages in Rauschenberg's work contains layered image sequence or image sentences that sort of creates a narrative that the viewer can sort of read through the progression of the images. The way that he distributes his collages are quite different, it demands a different kind of looking, you sort of have to look at it quite a few times to see all the images, looking at each image individually and then perceiving the composition as a whole.

I really like the composition of this collage, even though there is a lot of images in the collage and there is not that much white space placement of all the images are quite interesting and very well thought of. The tones in this collage are very interesting, because I think they go very well, the reds and the greens and the 60's and 70's images have the sort of same tones which makes it ascetically pleasing. This collage communicates very well his inspirations of the post war,which was one of his main inspirations in his work in this period of his career.

I really like this collage, the way that he combined the images and the colour is very interesting, it looks like if it was drawn on top of the collage. I have always admired Rauschenberg's work and I love the page layout, especially in this work because the way that he cut out the big stop sigh and all of the buildings on the back , create a feeling of a city. What I love about this collage is the way the images are placed , is quite unique. The different buildings with different colours make a very nice composition. I really like how some images of buildings are cut out nicely and some are square images in the middle of the collage. I believe it might be New York because of the Statue of Liberty that is in the bottom of the collage, and I really like that it is a square image, and not necessarily cut out nicely.

Cropping Workshop

• Bold exciting

P: Focuses more on the expression of the face

M: The size

I: The negative space

• Close up of a detail

P: You can really see the detail of the sign with this crop

M: Not straight

I: The image inside the sign

• Crop to define

P: The crop really focuses on the gun and I was not very sure how to crop it so it could

focus on the gun and still making look good

M: It might of looked better without the arm in the crop

I: The irregular angled crop

• Make look distant

P: That you focus your eye to the man in the picture and pay more attention to the background behind that in the normal picture

M: I could have used a different method of cropping to make it look more distant

I: Where the person is in the picture

• Narrow Vertical

P: Just lets you focus specifically on the little kids face and it makes it more emotional than the full picture

M: Too much background in the back, I should have cropped it up to the top of the kid.

I: The expression of the kid

• Crop to abstract

P: Even if it is the same piece by repeating a part of the image it looks completely different

M: Size

I: It sort of looks like eyes that are looking towards the same direction

• Crop to enhance the emotional impact

P: Placing the baby in a vertical way

M: The contrast in the picture

I: The size of the face it enhances the expression of the baby

• Wide angle horizontal

P: The facial expression of the child is stronger and more impacting

M: Cropped half of his head

I: The doll

• Depersonalise a photo with people in it

P: The triangular shape of the crop

M: It disfigures the woman a bit to much

I: The black space between each triangle

• Narrow angle vertical

P: The silhouette formed with the shape of the crop

M: The angle

I: The angle creates of an illusion of her feet

• Depersonalise a photo with people in it

P: The separation of the mouth

M: The difference of colour in the mouths

I:The repetition

Collage

We had a first class of image and we started seeing collage. A collage is a piece of image that has been created with two or more images that have been assembled, creating a new piece of work. A collage may include different materials such as news papers, magazine cuttings, photographs, clippings , found objects and glue in them together to create something new and different.

The word collage is a french word that comes from "coller" meaning glue that was coined by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the beginning of the 20th century when collage became a distinctive part of modern art.

We did a series of collages in class, we had 15 minutes to create a collage out of news papers, and images from magazines. We had a list of collage themes which we all discussed and from there we had to chose one word out of the list and do a collage that represented that word. surrealism, composition, rhythm, contrast, editing, juxtaposition, texture, humour, narrative and repurposing where the ten word list. I chose the word surrealism because it was one out of all the words I knew the most.

The first collage that I did I think was not really good, I was very nervous and I was working a bit under pressure and I forgot about composition and page layout. I needed to leave more white space as well and it was not a very successful collage, but we did a critique of the first set of collages and they all told us we needed to make them less busy and leave a little bit of white space to make it more interesting. It also was not very clear and you could not see clearly the word that I had

This was the second collage that I created after having critiqued the first collage. I thought this one was a bit more successful because I planned it out a bit more, I decided to leave more white space which does make it more interesting. I tried to make it more simple than the first one and less busy and I think it is more interesting and it relates more to surrealism than the first one. I still do not think it was a great one but it was better than the first one, it sort of also has a bit of contrast and rhythm as well so it is not very clear but it is still better than the first one.

This was the last excersice that we did in the class, we had 15 minutes to produce as many collages as we could, we had to come out with a strategy to produce as many as possible in that time, I chose to make the collages out of images that I had already. The ones i produced at the end where not my favourite because I did them so quick I really did not have time to think them through and I do not think they are as successful as the other ones.

Rebus

Today at the VCT lectures we stared talking about Rebus and how it is a way to communicate an idea or a sentence using both images and text. I had seen rebus before but I did not know it was called this way. Rebus is to use a pictogram to represent a syllabic sound. Pictographs were used as the earliest known form of writing that where found in Egypt and Mesopotamia from before 3000 b.C.

We had a look at Paul Rands and Allan Fletcher posters and discussed how rebus was used in the design field and how they used rebus in his work. They incorporated this form of communication to help their work become a stong piece.