Parade American/British Pop Art

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid-1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news, etc. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material. The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it

 British Pop art

The Independent Group (IG), founded in London in 1952, is regarded as the precursor to the pop art movement. They were a gathering of young painters, sculptors, architects, writers and critics who were challenging prevailing modernist approaches to culture as well as traditional views of Fine Art. The group discussions centered on popular culture implications from such elements as mass advertising, movies, product design, comic strips, science fiction and technology. At the first Independent Group meeting in 1952, co-founding member, artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi presented a lecture using a series of collages titled Bunk! that he had assembled during his time in Paris between 1947–1949. This material of "found objects" such as, advertising, comic book characters, magazine covers and various mass-produced graphics that mostly represented American popular culture. One of the images in that presentation was Paolozzi's 1947 collage, I was a Rich Man's Plaything, which includes the first use of the word "pop″, appearing in a cloud of smoke emerging from a revolver. Following Paolozzi's seminal presentation in 1952, the IG focused primarily on the imagery of American popular culture, particularly mass advertising

American Pop art

Although Pop Art began in the late 1950s, Pop Art in America was given its greatest impetus during the 1960s. The term "Pop Art" was officially introduced in December 1962; the Occasion was a "Symposium on Pop Art" organized by the Museum of Modern Art. By this time, American advertising had adopted many elements and inflections of modern art and functioned at a very sophisticated level. Consequently, American artists had to search deeper for dramatic styles that would distance art from the well-designed and clever commercial materials. As the British viewed American popular culture imagery from a somewhat removed perspective, their views were often instilled with romantic, sentimental and humorous overtones. By contrast, American artists being bombarded daily with the diversity of mass-produced imagery, produced work that was generally more bold and aggressive.







When researching I didn't learn much, I mainly focused on the gaming side of the 1950's.
I actually learned quite a lot from looking at a video, I learned all about the history of gaming going through 1958 to 2004, I found out that the first ever real game was not 'Pong' as most people think but it was actually a game called 'Tennis for two' which was a two-dimensional, side view of a tennis court on the oscilloscope screen, which used a cathode-ray tube similar to a black and white television tube. The ball, a brightly lit, moving dot, left trails as it bounced to alternating sides of the net. Players served and volleyed using controllers with buttons and rotating dials to control the angle of an invisible tennis racquet’s swing.

Tennis for Two was first introduced on October 18, 1958, at one of the Lab’s annual visitors’ days.

Pong was one of the earliest arcade game's and was what really started of the gaming industry.

I also learned that one of the people that worked with Atari actually went onto create the American  franchise 'Chuck E Cheese'

Parade Abstract painting

Based on Jackson Pollock's work we were told to do some automatic painting which we would eventually base around our own pathway









At first I found doing this a little bit fun, but it eventually got boring, its just not my thing, although I like the black picture I hate all of the others, they just look like a mess to me and I find that with my style of drawing messy just doesn't work with me.

Parade paper characters 2

 I finished the character I was creating from before

 I didn't like the legs that I drew in the original design so I tried doing another one and decided to stick with the new one

 

Parade targets

After creating a load of characters out of coloured paper, I will now be making them on a bigger scale  using cardboard as a support mechanism to keep them stood up.

After I have done this I would like to try making buildings and backgrounds maybe.

I'm not sure what to do after these but so far I'm really liking the characters I'm making. I find that the shapes I'm using make really interesting looking characters, I know a lot of other artists use this method to create characters but I've never really thought about doing it so I would like to try using it more in the future, I will defiantly be experimented with it in the future.

Parade Paper characters

I decided to cut out some shapes using coloured paper and I recreated the characters I had designed before

The face was the hardest part on this one as the facial features really small so I had to redo them many times as I kept losing them or they didn't look right

This one is a work in progress as you can tell

Parade 1950 Abstract Expressionism

Abstract Expressionism is a type of art in which the artist expresses himself purely through the use of form and color. It non-representational, or non-objective, art, which means that there are no actual objects represented.
Now considered to be the first American artistic movement of international importance, the term was originally used to describe the work of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky.

The movement can be more or less divided into two groups: Action Painting, typified by artists such as Pollock, de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston, stressed the physical action involved in painting; Color Field Painting, practiced by Mark Rothko and Kenneth Noland, among others, was primarily concerned with exploring the effects of pure color on a canvas.

Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York City at the centre of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris.



 



Wassily Kandinsky

Russian-born painter Wassily Kandinsky is credited as a leader in avant-garde art as one of the founders of pure abstraction in painting in the early 20th century.

Born in Moscow in 1866, Wassily Kandinsky took up the study of art in earnest at age 30, moving to Munich to study drawing and painting. A trained musician, Kandinsky approached color with a musician’s sensibility. An obsession with Monet led him to explore his own creative concepts of color on canvas, which were sometimes controversial among his contemporaries and critics

It is likely that Kandinsky had the condition known as synaesthesia which allowed him to hear colour and see music.  The power of this ability was first brought home to him at the age of 26 when, during a performance of Wagner’s opera Loenghrin, he experienced the mighty  sound  of the symphony orchestra in a whole range of vivid colours that evoked scenes of Moscow.  He knew immediately that he wanted to paint them. 








 

 

I personally haven't learned much from looking into Abstract Expressionism, I learned how bad people were during this time, I mean I knew that after the War things weren't exactly peachy but I never really knew just how bad it really was and how desperate people were for something good,  I got this feeling from looking at all of the videos and seeing all of these advertisements for new products.

Apart from this I haven't learnt much, while I do enjoy learning about these sort of things and find it interesting, I just cant get into it as much as other people.