Reportage

REPORTAGE 

Within Art, Reportage is to report something visually, such as quick sketches but it can also be used in photography and other medias. 

ARTIST RESEARCH - LOTTIE STODDART 

Lottie Stoddart is an English illustrator currently working in London, her main mediums are ink, pencil, splashes of colour and etching. She specialises in visual reporting/reportage and wanders London drawing everything she sees. 

 

ARTIST RESEARCH - DINA BRODKSY

Dina Brodsky is an artist currently working in New York, she travels around and her main focus are landscapes which I thought linked in with reportage because of the focus on what's happening around her. Her main media is paints and she manages to paint really detailed on small materials.  I found a nice quote that sums up her work nicely too;

'There is something dreadfully lonely to her cityscapes. It is not only because they lack people, but because they lack people in places where we have a right to expect people to be found.'

 

ARTIST RESEARCH - JOSEPH CHRISTIAN LEYENDECKER 

Leyendecker was a 20th Century Illustrator who had an interest in self promoting and he soon developed his own personalised art style. His work is interesting because of the sharp attention to detail and the smoothness of the skin of his characters. The colours he uses work's well too as though in the first picture below he uses warm colours, he contrasts it well with the outside and I think it makes the picture seem colder and a little hostile. The sharp jawlines of his male figures and the details of their clothing and muscle interest me too as it adds more attention to detail and makes the figures look realistic. The contrast of his male figures is interesting too as you can see with the younger male figures they look strong and slick whereas with his older male, the hands look wiry and he portrays the older man as angry but harmless whereas the younger male figures have more of an air of authority and look more dangerous than the raging older man. I like how the artist depicts his characters with such an attention to detail that you can almost tell what they're thinking of. 

ARTIST RESEARCH - YUN-FEI JI 

Yun-Fei Ji was a Chinese illustrator who was raised during the Chinese cultural revolution which influenced his work as from the pictures I've used below, his figures look distracted, sad and hopeless. His choice of colours are interesting because he uses reds, blues and yellows within his work and even though these are the primary colours, he's still created his work so that it look natural and earthy. Yun-Fei uses traditional Chinese art methods as his media is Chinese ink and rice paper scrolls which give his work a really nice effect and makes it fit in with other traditional Chinese art. Most recently he focused some of his 'water art' on Hurricane Katrina, using a form of reportage to show it in his art which you can see in the last picture, Yun-Fei's own words on his water art were; 

"I saw this natural disaster as an example of government failure. And after the financial collapse, I saw similarities- how the government failed to do its job as a watchdog. It's very disproportionate in both cases how the people who put in all the work paid the price, and the people who benefited from all the work paid no price."