14/09/2015 - Grayson Perry

Week 02

Grayson Perry

In today's lecture we watched the first part of Grayson Perry's channel 4 documentary titled "Who Are You?". the task is to write a critical response to this.

Critical Response:  To sum up this documentary, Grayson Perry gets a few different people and his aim at the start was to do a "portrait" of them. The way he goes about this is the particularly interesting part, he gets to know the person in front of him and the information he gathers from his time with them will determine the final outcome of the piece of work he provides. The best, and clearest example from this first part was a politician who Grayson could not find any vulnerability with so the final piece was a large vase that Grayson Perry smashed and put back together so the cracks were clearly visible. This was to show the vulnerabilities of the politician but also the vase was decorated to show the life and history of him. I have not come across this kind of thinking for an art piece before but I find it an almost satisfying resolution as the final piece is personal and does not just draw on the physical form of the subject but also their life and personality. Too often there are portraits that just represent a figure, lifeless poses that may hide the true state of that individual, but, what Grayson has done, is inject some much needed humanity to his pieces to correctly reflect the individual.

Also: after a talk with a lecturer on my chosen theme, it has now been slightly altered. I will now pick 5 short stories which I will pick from 5 separate areas of mainly mythological history. More on this later in the post. I will then design and develop a character from each of the stories to improve upon my character design and drawing ability. The idea behind this is to also show potential employers that I can design a character based on someone else's work which is a core skill for character designers as they often work to someone else's ideas. Along with this I will also work up my own concept for a world using professional guidelines and also create story beats for a story set in this world. By the end of term 2 I would like to have done some character designs for my own characters in my world.

My first thought for a short story to use is "The Fall of Icarus" (Ovid, 43 B.C - 17 AD). I first thought of this because I have read it recently and Ovid manages to invoke powerful images of his characters onto his readers and I was particularly captivated by how I imagined "Hunger" in this tale. I have also decided that since "The Fall of Icarus" is Greek mythology that I will choose other areas of the world to find a short story from, such areas I will search into are Scandinavia, Eastern Europe (Slavic tribes), the Roman Empire, China and India. Of course I will be selecting only 5 short stories and preferably one short story from different areas. This could all change though as I may change my criteria for the short stories to more modern/classical time periods but I feel these time periods would limit the fantastic characters I can create.