Art - Artist research

 

Artist Research

 

Zaha Hadid

Hadid began her studies at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon receiving a degree in mathematics. In 1972 she travelled to London to study at the Architectural Association, a major centre of progressive architectural thought during the 1970s. There she met the architects Elia Zenghelis and Rem Koolhaas, with whom she would collaborate as a partner at the Office of Metropolitan Architecture. Hadid established her own London-based firm, Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), in 1979.

In 1983 Hadid gained international recognition with her competition-winning entry for The Peak, a leisure and recreational centre in Hong Kong. This design, a “horizontal skyscraper” that moved at a dynamic diagonal down the hillside site, established her aesthetic: inspired by Kazimir Malevich and the Suprematists, her aggressive geometric designs are characterized by a sense of fragmentation, instability, and movement. This fragmented style led her to be grouped with architects known as “deconstructivists,” a classification made popular by the 1988 landmark exhibition “Deconstructivist Architecture” held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Hadid’s design for The Peak was never realized, nor were most of her other radical designs in the 1980s and early ’90s, including the Kurfürstendamm (1986) in Berlin, the Düsseldorf Art and Media Centre (1992–93), and the Cardiff Bay Opera House (1994) in Wales. Hadid began to be known as a “paper architect,” meaning her designs were too avant-garde to move beyond the sketch phase and actually be built. This impression of her was heightened when her beautifully rendered designs—often in the form of exquisitely detailed coloured paintings—were exhibited as works of art in major museums.

 

 

 

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Wright, (born June 8, 1867, Richland Center, Wisconsin, U.S.—died April 9, 1959, Phoenix, Arizona), architect and writer, an abundantly creative master of American architecture. His “Prairie style” became the basis of 20th-century residential design in the United States.

The first work from the new office, a house for W.H. Winslow, was sensational and skillful enough to attract the attention of the most influential architect in Chicago, Daniel Burnham, who offered to subsidize Wright for several years if Wright would study in Europe to become the principal designer in Burnham’s firm. It was a solid compliment, but Wright refused, and this difficult decision strengthened his determination to search for a new and appropriate Midwestern architecture.

 

 

Medieval manuscripts

In medieval and early modern Europe, colours represented man’s place in society and the universe. In everyday objects and sumptuous artworks, colours expressed global beliefs, regional fashions and individual tastes. Most colourful items have perished or lost their original pigments, but we can still appreciate the vibrant hues of the past in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts – books that were copied and painted by hand for over a millennium before the arrival of printing in Europe, and long after. 

Paintings in manuscripts, protected for centuries in bound volumes, form the largest and best preserved repositories of medieval and Renaissance colours. They reveal an extraordinary range of pigments and sophisticated painting methods. Some colour combinations endured throughout the period and into modern times. Others swung in and out of fashion in response to changing tastes, trade and technological developments. 

 

Icon Images

Once believed to be the 'tears of the sun' by the Incas, gold has always been one of the most universally treasured metals.

Found in objects from cultures all over the world, the insatiable appetite for gold was so great that it brought about the demise of entire civilisations.

Desirable for its unique luminosity and rarity, gold is still the bedrock of our wealth and economies. The metal's malleability and brilliant colour has interested and captivated artists for millennia.

From the Greek myth of the Golden Fleece to the legend of El Dorado (the 'golden city' or 'golden one'), ancient narratives about the material have persisted into modernity, cementing the idea of gold as a potent symbol of authority, sacred power and prosperity. 

Due to the Christian spiritual and religious connotations of gold, the colour has become synonymous with the festivities of Christmas, reminding us of the Nativity, wherein gold was presented as a gift to the infant Christ.

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Cyanotype Process

Cyanotype is an alternative (non-silver) photographic process. It is a traditional printing process that does not use silver gelatin paper and is commonly used in traditional darkroom printing. The Cyanotype, also known as a blueprint, is considered among the easiest of all the historical methods and ideal for beginners to start with and schools to teach. The characteristic of Cyanotypes is the blue colour of the print. In the cyanotype printing process, you have to hand coat your paper or other materials with the sensitiser and after drying the sensitised paper is contact printed with printed negatives or objects under the sun or a UV (Ultraviolet) light source. Clearing is carried out in water, no fixing chemicals needed.

Blueprints

A blueprint is a reproduction of a technical drawing or engineering drawing using a contact print process on light-sensitive sheets. Introduced by Sir John Herschel in 1842,^[1] the process allowed rapid and accurate production of an unlimited number of copies. It was widely used for over a century for the reproduction of specification drawings used in construction and industry. The blueprint process was characterized by white lines on a blue background, a negative of the original. The process was not able to reproduce colour or shades of grey.

The process is now obsolete. It was first largely displaced by the diazo whiteprint process, and later by large-format xerographic photocopiers.

The term blueprint continues to be used less formally to refer to any floor plan^[2] (and even less formally, any type of plan).^[3][4] Practising engineers, architects, and drafters often call them "drawings", “prints”, or “plans”.

It has almost entirely been replaced with digital computer-aided construction drawings.

 

Architecture in painting

 

Architectural painting (also Architecture painting) is a form of genre painting where the predominant focus lies on architecture, including both outdoor and interior views. While architecture was present in many of the earliest paintings and illuminations, it was mainly used as background or to provide rhythm to a painting. In the Renaissance, architecture was used to emphasize the perspective and create a sense of depth, like in Masaccio's Holy Trinity from the 1420s.

In Western art, architectural painting as an independent genre developed in the 16th century in Flanders and the Netherlands, and reached its peak in 16th and 17th century Dutch painting.^[1][2] Later, it developed in a tool for Romantic paintings, with e.g. views of ruins becoming very popular. Closely related genres are architectural fantasies and trompe-l'oeils, especially illusionistic ceiling painting, and cityscapes.