babel. oh babel.

Jorge Louis Borges; for three weeks our entire class hated you just a little bit. Sure, you had some nice prose, but, really, nobody wanted to do it.

Our first project of 2nd year was to create a piece for the wall of the Illustration Dept's seminar room, based on 'The Library of Babel' text by Jorge Louis Borges, and a particular wall-art period in time. We went up against the 3rd and 4th years to produce something for this, which sort of added to the misery.

My final piece was based around 'contemporary graffiti' and focussed mainly on the quotes, 'obviously no-one expects to find anything' (in regards to the librarians constantly searching for knowledge), 'young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter' and 'MCV, perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (very much consulted in this area) is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last page says Oh time thy pyramids.'

I also quite liked, 'for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences'.

In the end, I wanted to poke fun at celebrity and how some people mindlessly worship these people even though they haven't done anything particularly great, but I didn't want to take it too seriously, because, well, I was poking fun at it, so I threw in some bits of literal babel here and there.

I could have probably picked other celebrities, or spent more time getting a proper likeness, but basically, it's supposed to be Britney Spears, Jerry Springer and Bono.

I like birds?

I've done a lot of bird-related shit recently too.
First off, was my first proper silkscreen print:

Then there was my etching, where I was the victim of quite horrendous foul bite. Still, not too bad for a first timer, I thought?




I've also been using a lot of quotes from films in these works, my summer project sketchbook had snippets from No Country for Old Men and these quotes are from Say Anything and Brick. I started with the text and wanted to illustrate something that I thought looked cool, basically.

who said summer ended months ago?

This was my summer project, give or take some sketchbook pages of inane rambles. Our brief was to have a look at past projects and the work of some selected artists and then produce a final that 'highlighted our interest in drawing'. I chose to look at the work of Charles Avery, Vija Celmins and Juan Casas, because I like stuff that looks real, stuff that's done in line and stuff that's fun. Basically.

So that was my summer project sketchbook, and all of that became this: