Artist Research

For my Power of Words project I chose to look at the following artists, I chose these artists mainly because they have worked with text and words in their work.

• Barbara Kruger 
• Lawrence Weiner
• Jenny Holzer 
• Edward Ruscha

Barbara Kruger was a good artist to look at because she layers imagery with pilthy and aggressive text which adds power and control in her work. I found it clever how she would incorporate messages or statements into her work to get a reaction. Bellow is her 'We will no longer be seen and not heard', I thought this was a good image to pick as it showed a rebellion of the children and adolescent teens getting a voice heard. Her work screams power and that's what I want to incorporate in top mine. The next artist I chose was Lawrence Weiner I found his work interesting he had what seemed to be a poem spread out on the walls in a gallery in blue block writing, to me it reflected the power of the poem. It was quite a sad poem so the blue was symbolic of how the poem was upsetting and also the layout it showed a sense of falling down, and giving up like a domino heading for the ground. It made me think how colour and layout could influence my work.

The third artist I chose to look at was Jenny Holzer, she would write explicit and or controversial statements on top of coloured paper and she would expose them on streets and fly posters. This gave a sense of secrecy to whoever wrote them because they wouldn't know. It also showed how the statement itself showed power and not by imagery or drawings. I found her work simple yet powering. The last artist I looked at was Edward Ruscha who would write phrases on top on pastle or acrylic background washes. I really like his work it was simplistic yet it spoke out. I loved how the colours would reflect the words or phrases. In his 'smells like back of old hot radio' the piece came to life I could actually smell the hot radio and if hot radio had a smell it would definitely be the shade of brown he used in his background wash. I found this inspiring how a few colours could make the words stronger and more powerful.