I started the semester off by coming up with my own concepts for my self initiated brief.  Here're the word documents outlining my brief, the artists I started off researching and the various books I've read cover to cover since I started the year.

Conny O’Connor K00185158

2^nd Year Printmaking

Self Directed Brief Concept

The project framework I plan on starting off with is similar to what I did last semester.  My idea is to take the most controversial issues of the world we live in and highlight their hypocrisies and injustices through satire and printmaking.  An example of what I’m talking about is a French satirical cartoon drawn up by the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris when Islam extremists shot and killed 11 cartoonists for drawing satirical cartoons of Muhammad as well as their various acts of violence and beliefs.  In response to this unjustified and brutal attack, a surviving cartoonist drew a new cartoon depicting an Islamic leader holding a fire arm over a dead cartoonist.  The caption is “He drew first”.  The cartoon caused a public outcry and a wide spread hatred for not regular muslims but Islamic extremists. 

I want to work in this manner as puns and play on words have always come easy to me.  I like the clever use of the word “drew” both meaning drawing the cartoon and drawing a gun.  This cartoon is humorous in a dark way and it highlighted not only the injustice of what happened but it also made the public completely against Islamic extremists.  It’s true that a single picture can speak a thousand words.  It also proved that a simple cartoon can change more than a bloody massacre ever could. 

Here’s the cartoon I’m talking about.

This cartoon is one of a few that I’ve looked at but it’s what I’ve started off with.  I plan to start watching the news regularly and draw up satirical cartoons of everything wrong with the society we live in today.  The hypocrisies of our world both baffles and interests me.  The worlds governments supposedly looks after their people and does what’s best for their own countries, yet a lot of the time, the politicians in these positions are fuelled by nothing more other than corruption and greed.  I want to focus mostly on Irish issues as they’re closer to home, but there’s a myriad of things wrong here too.  Here’s a few.  Hospitals often neglecting patients even though their duty is to look after them, people in a position of power who deserve a long jail sentence let off by the judge in exchange for money, various criminal acts where innocent bystanders have been killed and so on.  The point of my work will highlight the fact that we’ll never live in a perfect world, but if we can’t change the way things are we can always laugh about them.  What else are we supposed to do?

Other than poking fun at social issues, I’m very interested in imaginary and mythical creatures inspired by various books, movies, poems and so on.  I’ve always enjoyed drawing animals, deep sea creatures, hybrid animals like the Liger and pre historic living creatures from an early age.  The enormity of many of these great animals astounds me.  These include dinosaurs, mammoths, enormous dragon flies, early evolved sharks etc.  The concept of drawing surreal beings fuelled by imagination is remarkable to me.  Films like “The Lord of the Rings”, “Harry Potter” and “King Kong” as well as poems like “Dante’s Inferno” inspire me to imagine amazing creatures that can’t possibly survive in our world.  Myths that interest me include Bigfoot, Yeti’s, The Loughness Monster and so on.  I want to create prints of these types of living things that allow the viewer to use his/her own imagination to determine what they are and how they live.

Lastly, I’ve recently become interested in graffiti art and the concept of abstraction.  I enjoy the idea of not focusing on a concrete and recognisable image, but rather concentrating on the lines and colours themselves and the deep contrasts that exists between them.  I like the idea of making the viewer use their own imagination to think of what the work means to them.  It could be a memory, a face of someone they know, a feeling they recently experienced or literally anything.  I’m looking forward to exploring these various concepts through Intaglio and woodcut.