Pop art uses common everyday objects and things that are popular at the time, I’m not saying that the Opera House is a common everyday object but it is quite popular and recognisable. I used the technique that Roy Lichtenstein used in some of his art works and that is the dots. There is nothing sophisticated about my pop art piece and that is something that pop art is known for. My piece was very colourful and that would not be seen in any “high-class” art pieces in any gallery (as far as I know) and this is what pop art was trying to establish, it was breaking away from the pack that was contemporary art.
When I think of art in general, where there is a certain area that grabs the view's attention and with the art pieces that I have come across i found that the center of the piece is the brightest part and the outside of the piece is darker drawing the viewers attention to the center. I thought why not have the outside bright compared to the middle image being relatively dull whilst doing the same thing of drawing the viewers attention to the center.
As senior vice-president of industrial design at Apple, Jonathan Ive is one of the world’s most inspiring product designers. Born February 1967 in Chingford, London and studied industrial design at Northumbria University (it was called Newcastle Polytechnic at the time). After a short time at the London design agency “Tangerine”. Tangerine was created in 1988 and design specialized products and delves into research involving their client’s needs. In 1992, Apple, which was one of Tangerine's clients, offered Ive a job. He worked on some projects with the company before accepting a full-time position and since then he is in charge of the Industrial Design team responsible for most of the company's significant hardware products. Reporting directly to the CEO Steve Jobs. Since 1996 he has been responsible for leading a design team widely regarded as one of the world’s best. Recognized with numerous design awards, Apple products are featured in the permanent collections of museums worldwide including MOMA in New York and the Pompidou in Paris.
Jonathan Ive (on the left) with Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs
Critics regard Ive's work as being among the best in industrial design, and his team's products have repeatedly won awards such as the Industrial Designers Society of America's “Industrial Design Excellence Award”. Ive was the winner of the Design Museum's inaugural Designer of the Year award in 2002, and won again in 2003. In 2004, he was a juror for the award. “The Sunday Times” named Ive as one of Britain's most influential people on 27 November 2005. Ive was also listed in the 2006 New Years Honours list, receiving a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire), for services to the design industry. A recent “Macworld” poll listed Ive joining Apple in 1992 as the sixth most significant event in Apple Inc. history. On July 18, 2007, Ive received the 2007 National Design Award in the product design category for his work on the iPhone. “The Daily Telegraph” rated him the most influential Briton in America on 11 January 2008. In July 2008, Ive was awarded the MDA Personal Achievement award for the design of the iPhone. In May 2009, Ive received an Honorary Doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design. “Fortune” magazine named Ive as the "world's smartest designer" in 2010, for his work on Apple products. Jonathan Ive’s iPod design is my favourite of all of the products for Apple as when the first iPod came out it was so different, nothing like it was out in the market and in my opinion has had the greatest impact on the market and on how designers now think about a similar product. When all of Apple’s competitors saw the iPod they immediately tried to come up with a similar product but all of theses other products looked exactly like the iPod. Apple products are easily recognisable and are the benchmark in my mind in their designs, which Jonathan Ive and his design team are responsible for. Some of Jonathan Ive’s Designs for Apple
The piece of art work that I liked the least was “Valliant Struggle No.11” by Chen Wenling in 2006 I think that it was a bit too over the top and was too extravagant. I like the meaning behind it and the message that it portrays is well portrayed and easy to understand but it was unfortunately not easy on the eyes.
Chen Wenling says he was a playful child, “always monkeying around”. His parents were so poor that he had to make his own toys—of which his sculptures are, in a sense, grown-up versions. He shot to artistic fame with his Red Memory series (2001-07): more than 100 outsized figures of naked boys at play, all covered in shiny red car duco. While the red boys (a colloquial expression for newborn sons) were bursting with innocent fun, Chen Wenling’s focus has since shifted to adults and their vices. Many of his more recent works involve pigs, which he finds a perfect metaphor for Chinese people today. In Chinese tradition, he says, pigs are seen as “gluttonous, lazy, dirty, horny and stupid as well as content and happy, while science has shown that pigs are very clever. In my eyes, the pig also symbolises speed … and enormous productivity.” Chen Wenling depicts pigs as human and humans as pigs, interdependent almost to the point of fusion. In Happy Life—Family (2005), a mother stands on a pig’s back holding her baby; in Valiant Struggle No. 11 (2006), a couple cling desperately to a giant golden sow of success.
There was more than one piece that was the stand outs for me and they were “Appeals without words” and “Blue 750”. The people with their backs against the wall made by Jin Feng in 2006was a stand out for me because I felt that the message behind it was so strong and there was nothing abstract about it the message was a clear one. The wire vehicle by Shi Jindian in 2008 was a stand out for me because of the detail included and it something that you are left pondering on how this particular piece was made.
Jin Feng is as much a social activist as he is an artist—he even refers to his works as “cases”. His goal is to bring before people’s eyes “the many problems in this society which are almost impossible to solve” and the ethical failures that underlie them. In 2006 he stirred outrage and some public soul-searching with twin statues of the ancient philosopher Confucius, crying so hard that his face melts away. “What would Confucius say about today’s education and morality if he were still alive?” Jin Feng says. His fifteen-metre-long photograph Appeals Without Words (2006) shows, at half life size, eighty-nine rural villagers queuing to present shang fang—petitions to the authorities. Standing or crouching with their backs to a wall, they are covered in a mix of black and gold paint, conveying their ties to the land, their poverty, and the idea that their long wait has turned them to statues. But their grubby squares of cardboard and paper are empty. Their patience is pointless, the artist suggests; no one is listening.
Shi Jindian’s sculptures are made of steel, yet they are light, transparent, almost ethereal. After searching for years for “a material that was brand new, completely untraditional”, he settled on steel wires. By trial and error, he learned how to crochet the two-dimensional strands into three-dimensional forms, using tools of his own devising. His wire meshes start out as wrappings around some common object. When the mesh is complete, Shi Jindian destroys or extracts the object, leaving only its steel exoskeleton. The result, he says, is a kind of fiction, a virtual reality that can be walked around and touched. Surrealist René Magritte painted a pipe along with the words: “This is not a pipe.” Shi Jindian does something similar in sculpture, making not-quite-replicas of items from musical instruments to machines. His Blue CJ750 (2008) is a replica of the Chiangjiang [Yangtze] 750, a military bike based on a pre-World War II BMW. It took him three years to make, but he found deep serenity in the toil. When people touch his sculptures, he says, they also touch “the state of mind that emerges from the labour of my hands: tranquillity and calm”.
The origins of the Collection go back to the late 1990s, when Judith Neilson engaged Wang Zhiyuan, a Chinese artist then living in Sydney, as her art tutor. He introduced her to the astonishing explosion of creativity taking place in China in the wake of the “Opening Up” that had begun in 1989. Mrs Neilson began buying works, but soon ran out of space to hang them. She and her husband then decided to open a gallery that would make the exciting world of contemporary Chinese art available to all Australians. Only a fraction of the Collection is on show at any time. The entire contents of the gallery are rehung twice a year.
This outing to “White Rabbit” I believe was essential as I now have a further understanding or art and have come out with an appreciation for the work that goes into making art works like the ones I saw at the gallery. I saw techniques used in some paintings that I can take and use in my designs e.g. there was a painting that was dark on the sides but was light in the middle and this makes the viewer focus on the center of the painting and is where the viewer first looks.
