Saul Bass was an American graphic designer and filmmaker, best recognised for his designs of motion-picture title sequences and film posters. Bass adopted a very distinguishable minimal style. Bass was heavily influenced by the Bauhaus movement of the early 20th century, which was prominent throughout his education years. He loved the abstract, minimal aspect of it along with it's often very simple yet bold colour palettes and high contrast. It is evident that there's this influence in his work. Contrast plays a big part in Bass' designs, usually featuring a silhouetted form or text set against a warm tonal ground. He is more interested in producing imagery over type as he stated that text would often distract from it, hence the clever use of negative space in his works.

   

    

     

A.M.Cassandre, real name Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron, was a french painter, commercial poster-artist and typeface designer who worked throughout the early and mid 20th century. He is one of the greatest poster-artists to ever live and he pioneered the art. There is a clear influence from the Art Deco period which he was working in. The elegant lines, blocky shapes and bold, capitalised, condensed text are what give that iconic period look to them. To create these stylistic posters, he used a combination of airbrushing and stencils. Cassandre liked to use diagonals in order to create dramatic perspectives in his work, often exaggerating the size of things to add more grandeur. 

   

    

    

Mouse and Kelley, more formally known as Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley were a duo of artists, most recognisable for their psychedelic posters of the 1960's and 1970's, particularly their concert posters for the band 'The Grateful Dead'. The pair took heavy influence from the Art Nouveau movement, most notably Alphonse Mucha and Edmund Joseph Sullivan. They often stole artworks from others and reworked them into their own designs. Their work usually features a multitude of vibrant colours and intricate designs which I think personally is too much, particularly when there's type involved too, it becomes hard to read and at times difficult to even distinguish the imagery. 

Nicholas Uribe is an American artist currently based in Colombia. He is not a big name in terms of popularity, however he's somebody I follow on Instagram and somebody who's work I really admire. He is very active on social media, often doing live videos and sessions of his paintings, showing off his technical skills whilst also teaching the audience too. He works in a variety of media and posts a lot of sketches to his socials, however it's the acrylic and oil paintings I'm most interested in. The subjects of his paintings aren't anything particularly interesting, the characters depicted don't usually display much emotion, but it's the expression of Uribe's own work which is intriguing. He loves to be very thick and expressive with his marks, not just using basic skin tones either, but adding blues and greens and reds in the shadows to create that more realistic sense of depth.

   

   

   

Angela Sung is a travelling artist who tours the world painting various subjects in often random locations. She is not well known, but I follow her Instagram and she is one of my favourite contemporary painters whom take inspiration from myself. Her colour palette is one of the most intriguing things about her work. It's not always representative of what she's seeing. The colours are often exaggerated and made to be much more vibrant than they should be. The block colours give an almost digital feel to her paintings sometimes. There also tends to be a lot of fine edges between surfaces and tones, which would suggest she uses thick, flat brushes to apply the paint in such a linear manner, which I like the look of actually. I think the expression of these strokes in what defines her work.

Following on from the work done in class, I then took an even more creative approach by finding random things around my house and placing them together in certain ways to create simple and abstract sculptures to represent that theme of dogs or cats. Each one may be interpreted differently by the viewer.

   

This one below was made using a desk lamp, adjusted in a way such that it creates the basic form of a dog. The wire coming out the back forms the tail while the subtle black edging against the flat white surfaces give the illusion of an outline of the legs/head. I also like the fact that much like the beginning of a sketch, the joints where each section bends can clearly be made out, almost like the shoulders of an animal.