Drawing Approaches

Gillian Wearing: Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say''.

'this unit focuses upon perception, observations and visual thinking'

For the Drawing Approaches unit I have chosen the theme of 'Sub-Culture', I then decided to break this down further into studying the elderly sub-culture of Bournemouth.... This may sound like a pretty mundane subject matter but I felt it would allow me to look into vintage photographs, patterns and experiment with these within my work. There's also a very strong elderly 'scene' in Bournemouth so I'm hoping to get a lot of locational drawing, photographs and primary resources. As well as expanding my definition of 'drawing' itself I want to learn a lot more about use of colour and produce portraits: this is an area is struggle with. Faces are scarily hard.

I'm really wary of producing a stereotyped portrayal of a sub-culture and want to use personal quotes in order to incorporate text. I looked at the work of Gillian Wearing and her series 'Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say''. By getting members of the public to write signs on thoughts or feelings; interesting ideas are exposed. I visited the area of Ferndown in Bournemouth and used this idea...people do NOT like having their photograph taken. Finally found a few willing people though so now have some images to work from.