Under the Influence - Kelli Crockett

 

Erik Johansson

ERIK JOHANSSON

For my inspirational artist, I choose to pick Erik Johansson. The reason for choosing this person as my artist was because I wanted to try and find someone that would have an amazing portfolio with lots of nicely composed images. I usually tend to look at more VFX artists that do digital compositing for films and movies but seeing Erik’s portfolio and seeing his creations gave me a far more inspiring feel for this project. His portfolio usually consists of surreal photography with scale composting. A Lot of his work deals with having very bright themes to dark themes with the lighting okaying a big role in his composites to match the energy of the composite. 

The composition of his work is what really wanted me to pick him for inspiration, the look and feel of each image give off a chilling feel with the images really having a nice look and color to them. The scenes that are made up are quite unreal but the way he works with the lighting and scaling of each image makes it look much real. His photos usually have one or two subjects in the frame which seem to have a central focal point in the composition with a very strong sense of scale within the subjects accompanied by a very strong light source to give it more depth. I also love how he is able to show us some of the processes that go into making these photos and because they take a very long time to make and are only composed of images and none of the items are computer-generated he only makes about less than 10 images a year. One of my favorite photos of his is a picture of an island in the middle of an ocean that has little cranes and construction trucks fixing up the island which also has buildings on top of it. The images seem to represent the daily life of people and them interacting with normal objects but with a twist to them, not really random but not the usual. I love the range that he has with a lot of his work as well some being the very close distance from the frame or either a very wide range.

For me, this looks very amazing and I would love to try and not replicate one of his images but get something close to what he has made in terms of getting the right composition and beautiful lighting effects that he has made. I want to create something very creative just like him but make it really pop and show the skills that I have. I would really like to do something with a scale similar to his because there are many things that are very small that we tend to overlook and seeing them very large can be a very big eye-opener to us once we see them large. 

Under the Influence Sarah Gohr

Under The Influence - April Lin

Under the Influence Inspiration_Sarah Gohr

The artist I decided to use for my under the influence project is actually a duo, Robert and Shana Parkeharrison. I learned about them my first year of being at UNCC and I have loved their work ever since. I find them really fascinating because they do a large range of things with their imagery. Shana is a painter so they will even photograph things print them out and them paint over it, which I think gives them a whole different level to their work. With them incorporating different elements and mediums to their images, it connects the human/man made aspect to it.

When looking at their images in the series Architect’s Brother it gives me a very vintage feel. Their images look like they belong on wet plates. I read an interview where they talked a little bit about their process, and they use both digital and medium format cameras depending on the feel of the image. When looking at their imagery I get a sense of industry taking over nature in some images. However, in other images it seems more like humans are taking care of nature. Yet again, in other images it seems like the humans could be the problem. I think in this way they open up the viewers to a whole different form of reasoning and questions that helps get viewers engaged in a photo conversation. 

I really love the aesthetic of their imagery. When looking at their images they provide multiple layers that help draw the viewer in. such as depth of field, they like to keep their subject matter mainly in the foreground.  They usually have a plain background that looks like a fogged backdrop again to help keep focus on the subject matter. It also looks a lot like a wet plate. Their images are usually dark a moody with a sepia tone to it. I like that they keep it as a sepia tone because for this set of imagery if it was in color it would not be as powerful or visually pleasing.

The artist I chose for the under influence project is Riccardo Bagnoli. He is an Italian photographer based in Boston Massachusetts, who specializes in advertising, fashion and portrait photography. The reason I chose this artist is because of his ability to create extremely imaginative stories in his photos and to be able to make them look like they came out of a sci-fi movie. In this project I want to use my imagination more and think outside the box in order to create stories with my images.

The main subjects of his art are people. He uses Photoshop to either manipulate their bodies or make them do a task that is unhuman like. In one of his pieces, he uses his imagination to create a setting where it looks like people coming out of eggshells, like they are just being born and are trying to discover where they are. Another one of his pieces, he is showing a person that just came from being in the water on a beach, but instead of using a towel to dry off they are wringing out their own hands and legs.

When looking at most of his artwork, it mostly made of organic shapes. He’s using the world around him to create imaginative scenarios. A lot of his work always seems to have a dark tint to them, almost making it seems like it’s coming out of a movie scene. Looking at the concept behind his pieces, he wants to make the viewer feel as if they are in an imaginative space by making ordinary settings into something that seems out of this world is what makes art stand out.

Under the Influence Inspiration - April Lin

Influence-Dana B

Under the Influence- Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

Under the influence: John Wilhelm

Under Influence - Emi Haze

Ashley Johnson Under the Influence

Ashley Johnson

Under the Influence : Martin Grohs

https://www.behance.net/martingrohs 

I changed the artist I chose to gather influence from, as I became more more interested in the body of work Obvious Desktopgraphy by Martin Grohs. 

Here are my finished works inspired by him.

Under the Influence (of Christoffer Relander)

Under The Influence (inspired by Maria Svarbova)

Nermine Hammam

I am choosing the Egyptian artist Nermine Hammam who is living and working in London. The reason why I am choosing her is because her vision on how she portrayed the Egyptian revolution in 2011. 

Concerned with the the subjective nature of reality, Hammam subverts the stereotypes, unmasking it and portraying it in a different context. She has a series of art work for the Egyptian army during the recent revolution in 2011. For Hammam, she said, looking at those soldiers made her want to transport them to pleasant places, to reassure them that they would be OK. Most of her work of this series was putting a nice background behind the soldiers who were doing their job. It looked like a postcard taking the subject out of its context and transforming it to a much better context with much better circumstances. 

Hammam mentioned in her statement that as soon as she saw these soldiers, she saw how young they were, they had tiny figures and alienated looks; looks of young men who were looking forward to a bright futures for their country as much as the people marching. These soldiers are the sons of anxious parents. They stood on street corners, squinting at the cacophony of Cairo, observers of history, not the angry stereotypes of masculinity through which our narratives of the army are articulated in media.