Blog Entry #4: Final Project

For my main final project, my big idea relates to real vs. fantasy in a sense. More specifically it relates to what we think our future will be like vs. how it might be if we keep living like we're living. I combined an image of a city street with an image of a forest line. I'm not quite finished yet but I'm trying to make it look like the forest has overgrown into a world where humans haven't lived for many years. I'm also going to try to degrade the buildings to make it look like a terrible war happened which was part of the reason the humans are all gone. I'm going to use the empty space in the center of the image to convey the lack of human life. This image could serve as kind of a warning against the effects of global warming and war. Environmentalists could use this image in order to promote better treatment of the environment.

My work was influenced by the artist Alexander Casteels that I mentioned in my last post. He takes a darker look into things that would ordinarily seem innocent and childlike. I want my final piece to look serene even though it means that humans have been wiped off the planet. This image from his works particularly interested me. Without that sad little pig, the rest of the image seems like a beautiful dark night on the ocean until you realize that the ship sinking in the background probably caused a lot of death.

I was also influenced by various post-apocalyptic movies such as Cloverfield and The Happening as well as others. For instance in this Cloverfield image, a halfway destroyed statue of liberty is shown.  This image may seem peaceful since nothing is taking place in the image.  But, if we think about what caused this to happen to the statue and what that statue means to Americans then it becomes very disturbing.

A similar effect is gained when we look at this image from The Happening. Again it seems initially peaceful, but then we start to think about why all these cars have been vacated alongside the road. We realize that something very bad indeed must've happened to either scare people away or remove all presence of humans in some other way from these vehicles.

I was mainly influenced by these post-apocalyptic movies due to their increasing presence in modern media. This is due to the Aztec calendar saying that the world will end in 2012. I thought it would be interesting to explore this kind of paranoia that many people feel that's being caused by something that's so very old and somewhat unknown to us.






Since I am trying to show a sadness in this image from the loss of human life, I want to add rain to this picture. I'm going to try and use this method to create the rain. I may or may not include this in my art depending on the quality of the end result, but I'm going to try and add rain since I think it will make the viewer connect with the sadness that this image is supposed to show.