Geraldine Georges analysis

Context
Geraldine George is a free lance graphic designer who has worked on other projects for the New York Times and L'oreal  to get her work noticed. Her pieces are illustrated collages using photographs that she has taken herself. I chose to analyse this artist because of the way she makes her collages look so simple and elegant, it is much different from the other artists I have looked at.

Meaning
There wasn't a lot around about this artist but I did find one article which focused on her collaged works. I can see with this piece how it could relate to a L'oreal advert as the hair hair been replaced by a circle and has dribbles coming down from it, the circles could represent the bubbles and the dribbles could represent the shampoo itself.

In all of her collaged pieces she has used women but says there is no particular reason as to why this "Well I don't know...I'm a girl...it's as simple as that!" But I feel that it gives a sense of purity to it, it slightly shows innocence as you never see the whole of the womens faces, it could mean that they are hiding from the sin of the world if it was to be put into a God like context. 

Things that inspire Georges is Life, death, love, nature, music and feelings. The feeling side comes to it probably by the way that the colour is expressed, how much of it and the colour it is. Nature comes through to me not necessarily on this one but her other works using illustration which focuses on the natural elements, wind, water, earth and fire.

Aesthetic
To create this Georges uses illustration and photography to create the collages.  She says "I don't have a secret process. I just mix collage/cutting of pictures with drawing made with a Rot ring"  She also seems to avoid using any bright bold pieces in her work and sticks to keeping it simple.  

In her work I see a lot of black which is a great contraast to the pur white body in this image, emphasising earlier on my idea of the purity hiding from this sin, to me the black circle looks like it is overtaking her.

Personal Response
I decided to look at this artist because of the way she uses collage, I am going to create something that is quite soft to the eyes compared to my Andy Warhol  inspired collages and something that is quite bold that uses the same type of idea. Overall I really like this piece and the naturalness that it brings.

I have made two digital interpretations based on the work of Geraldine Georges.

 For the first step I put my chosen image into Photoshop and then started rubbing away at bits of the image mainly using the lasso tool, after using the lasso tool I worked into it more taken it out large chunks of the face and hand. I then added in a circle and a square shape and used the different paint brush tools to get different textures and effects.

 I then started to add layers of the colour black on top of the other colours using different paint brushes.

This is my first completed digital piece, the first comparison I am going to make between her work and mine is the use of colour, I saw in other pieces of hers that she used purple and blue that where not to different in shades so they would blend, I then added black on top just like hers so it had the idea of the purity hiding from sin and the contrast between the colours. I have to say that there are other aspects of mine which are totally different so doesn't really match the theme of purity for example I have used a male model and the use of quite bright colours.

 I first placed the chosen image in photoshop then went to image>adjustments>black and white. I didn't want to play around with the threshold as this would make the black stand out to much and I wanted to stick to something that looked more pure white.

 I then started adding box shapes of different colours, taking the opacity down so the image showed through the coloured boxes. It looks slightly like my Andy Warhol inspired collages but less dominant in colour. I also took the brightness up so the white on the image looked more pure like Georges. I then made some drawings and scanned them in so I could place them behind the coloured boxes so the black on the drawigs weren't so bold.

This is my second finished digital piece. I think that this resembles Georges better as it looks more pure compared to the other one as the brightness of the boxes have been taken down, I have used a female model and I have also drawn and scanned illustrations to put on top. The colours came from the models personality, at the moment she can't eat sweets for lent and her favourites are skittles so I used the colours of the different flavoured skittles. The doodles were decided by the fact that I had just used squares shapes for the coloured boxes so thought up of other recognised square shapes. The swirls were added because of the fact that my model likes to use swirling extended lines in her textile work.