Juxtaposing Cessation.

 Original Post Here: http://www.cassfashion.co.uk/juxtaposing-cessation/

As a continuation from my last post ‘Bam. You’re a Graduate.’ I decided to create a post, soon to be a series of posts, which I hope collectively will give readers an insight into my creative process and how I personally work from turning an idea into a finished product. I want to introduce you all to some of my sketchbook drawings, as in my opinion these small experimental, development pieces are just as interesting as the final outcome. I really enjoy seeing the journey the artist has gone through and I like to try and understand different creative processes and see how they work in relation to myself.
I began the project looking at surrealism and explorations of the unconscious.
“The surrealists aimed to liberate the human imagination, and their vision, expressed in the works of some of the greatest artists and writers of the twentieth century, has had a major influence on modern life.”
Surrealism explores ideas behind and including, objective chance, dreams and eroticism and aimed to depict and visually explore the deeper recesses of the human psyche, especially the sexual aspects.
As I began looking at surrealism I began to notice the careful use of juxtaposing imagery and how it was being used to tell a story. It was at this point that I decided that I wanted to create some imagery that told a story and had another meaning beyond its aesthetic. Therefore I had the idea to take two juxtaposing objects, in this case bones and flowers and see how they could work together to tell a story. The first thing that came to me to explore was that of life and death, so I tried playing around with the imagery in different ways such as within a tarot card or within a circle  (which I will explore further in another post).
It was very important to me from the beginning of this project that all the work was hand drawn, as I wanted to try and create a collection of prints as hand-made as possible.
I created these line drawings from a collection of photographs I took at Kew Gardens. I tried simplifying the structure of the flowers as much as possible without losing too much structural detail, so that I could potentially create some more abstract prints using the line forms and so that it would create a clean and graphic image.

 The following drawings are from photographs of some interesting animal skeletons that I took recently at the National History Museum. As explained above after doing some research into the surrelists I wanted to find some imagery that was juxtaposing in relation to form, colour and meaning to the flowers above.

I began drawing these skulls in a similar manner to the flowers but then developed them by beginning to explore different lines and textures in order to see which I felt represented the texture of the skulls best and worked well alongside the line drawings of the flowers I had created.
I then created some sketches and illustrations placing the images together. I wanted to place them together in a way that represented a process or cycle. After looking at images of Tarot cards I began to notice a repetition of circular imagery, as the circle ‘commonly represents unity, wholeness, and infinity’ and so it emphasises the idea of having a narrative behind my images. I also began to develop some of my own tarot card images, which I can also explore in another post.