Secret 7 - Basquiat Research

Basquiat

• Jean-Michel Basquiat was a Neo-Expressionist painter in the 1980s. He is best known for his primitive style and his collaboration with pop artist Andy Warhol
• Jean-Michel Basquiat emerged from the “Punk” scene in New York as a gritty, street-smart graffiti artist who successfully crossed over from his “downtown” origins to the international art gallery circuit. In a few fast-paced years, Basquiat swiftly rose to become one of the most celebrated, and possibly most commercially exploited American “naif” painters of the widely celebrated Neo-Expressionism art movement.
• Despite his work’s “unstudied” appearance, Basquiat very skillfully and purposefully brought together in his art a host of disparate traditions, practices, and styles to create a unique kind of visual collage, one deriving, in part, from his urban origins, and in another a more distant, African-Caribbean heritage.
• Basquiat’s work is an example of how American artists of the 1980s could reintroduce the human figure in their work after the wide success of Minimalism and Conceptualism, thus establishing a dialogue with the more distant tradition of 1950s Abstract Expressionism.

I wanted to use Basquiat's style in combination with my own because he has a very appealing aesthetic. His use of colour, lines, collage and textures within his work are captivating.  My initial idea for this project was to focus on my illustration and take influence from profound artists. I wanted to create my own interpretations from their work and put it into my own style. This approach allows be to become familiar with ways on evolving my own designs and taking them into new directions. 

This video for A$AP Ferg, Young Thug & Freddie Gibb's track called 'Olde English' is sick. The animation has been done very well in recreating basquiats style.

After studying his faces I Practiced combining both of our own elements. There were different potential combinations. Ears, eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth/teeth, eye bags - etc. 

For my work taking influence from Jean Michael's art, I used soft pastels as the medium because they had a closer artistic vibe to paint than pen or pencil. I incorporated my lips, eyebrows, and bags under the eyes, which are used throughout my illustrations and combined it with his abstract usage of lines.

I felt like it fitted well as basquiat had painted a lot of faces and body forms throughout his art career

The final result wasn't the best in my opinion. I didn't like what I had done to the eyes, I felt like I had overdone it with the pastel. The first picture of the pastel drawing looks better because of the simplicity and white space. For submission I could always use the face from the first picture because I went and scanned it in at the time because I liked how it looked. Still not 100 percent sure whether or not I will go forward and submit this but I think I will come back to edit it as it's very smudged.