Good News Guys!

UCAS changed today and I've got a letter from Lincoln University.
I've got in! So happy! Off to uni I go! :)

The difference with my work...

Artists like Wassily Kandinsky produce some childlike drawings but these are very intentional and calculated to look like that rather than mine which isnt intentional as I cannot see what I'm doing. However there are blind artist who can't see what they are doing but there work looks just as good if not better than someone who can see. People like John Bramblitt paints at an amazing standard using his fingers to 'see' which is a technique I used. I used my fingers to feel the paint so it was easier for me to paint.
As you may be able to see from my exhibition, my work is unique to me. Unfortunately the photo didn't show the colours as bright as they actually are. I observed people looking round the exhibition rather like I did when we went to London. I noticed that it was the bright colours and energy which attracted people to my work, even if they were next to the guns of someone else's work. I think my exhibition would have been better if my three final poster designs in the middle were printed off bigger as this would make it easier to see the details of the posters and also attract viewers from afar. This would also make it obvious that they were the final pieces.

Painting in the dark

These are the two paintings I managed to do in the dark. Lets just say they didn't look like that when I was doing them...they looked different colours and different shapes. But ahh well, I like how they look!
Now I would need to look into partially sighted or colour blind artists!

Exploring race more "What If..."

What if the most common race of the population was black rather white?

Well in this photo in a group of about 15 teenagers, only two of them are Caucasian. You may think that this is in a different country but in fact, its in Birmingham - somewhere which has a high population of not-Caucasian individuals. You'll generally find that Caucasians are the minority in a friendship group and at schools.

What if Prince William married a black woman?

Would this be allowed? Would he have had the blessing off of the Queen? Would the general public have gone so crazy about the royal wedding?
To be quite honest, I have no idea.

What if the queen wasn't British?

I was seriously thinking about using my nan and putting a crown on her head but I don't think she'd appreciate that.
But oh wait there's no need for Photoshop with this one because the queen is in fact foreign descent. Many people do not know this but the queen is in fact not fully British at all! If you think about it, the queen may be able to trace her bloodline back to royalty from many many years ago but in those times, royalty used to only be allowed to marry royalty. So that's royalty from many different countries. Many different races.
The Queen can supposed trace her bloodline back to the pharaohs...the pharaohs are Egyptian which is African which is not Caucasian.

What if the Western World was more racially black/asian than white and the rest of the world was more white?

Well the world wouldn't be like it is today. In fact it would be the total opposite.

Can't imagine it really. But Yinka Shonibare explored this with the black man being the master and the white people being servants and slaves in some of his work.

What if there was a soap opera set in Birmingham with many asian/black characters reflecting the population? 

Soaps like Coronation Street and Eastenders have about 5 not-caucasian characters out of about 60 - 70 characters. Is this a proper representation of the population today or is it more diverse?

Well it depends where you go but there does tend to be more than that, especially in the cities which are very diverse so you would expect soap operas like Eastenders (set in London) and Coronation Street (set near Manchester) to have more black characters..even if they are extras.

Birmingham has a very high percentage of asian/black people so if a soap opera was to be set there they would have to represent the population accordingly otherwise it would have no truth in it whatsoever. Would the soap do so well if a lot of the characters were of a different colour anyway?
Only one way to find out!

What if the children's cartoons were of black/asian origin?

I know that nowadays little children's programmes, the characters aren't any race but in fact brightly coloured like blue, green, yellow, red etc. But how would children react if the characters were black? Or if the main character in an older child's program was black?
Would scooby doo have been as successful if the characters were all/partially black?
People generally wouldn't have thought of them as American for a start and therefore wouldn't have been able to relate to them as much...well that's what I think.

What if superheroes started off universally black/asian?

Well there would be a whole lot more black superheroes that's for sure. There are about ten out of loads of superheroes which are well known...Storm, Black Panther, Bishop, Blade and War Machine to name a few.

The only way there would be loads more black superheroes would been was if the western world was more black/asian people than white.

What if superhero films were more interracial?

An obvious choice would be to use my family's heads in the photo poster. My dad's white and my mum's black and me and my siblings are mixed race so we are an example of an interracial family/group.

I have already done using my family's heads but that was on one of the conclusions of my experimentation. I have decided to use photo posters, particularly this one which is the one which I rearranged myself so it looks more real.
I have still left some of the heads/character skin tones as they were in the original rearrangement because I thought it looks good as it was before I would've changed their skin tones. If superhero films were more interracial, it would represent the nation a lot better because the majority of people aren't just one race, they have lots of different ones.

Just thinking...

Michael Jackson
Would he have become as famous as he did if he didn't change his appearance?
These are questions we'll never be able to answer.

This image and Michael Jackson himself makes my point of the pressure of the media and people in general to conform to the stereotypes. At his time, the music industry was more white dominated and he thought that he had to be white to be famous and make it big. Was he right?


This is an artist's conception of what Michael Jackson would have looked like if he had aged naturally. Now he's not looking stunningly beautiful or anything but its a lot better than what he turned out to look like. He looks normal. But is normal enough to make it in the music industry?

More things to strengthen my work..

I'm going to do a small few more blind paintings but instead of being blindfolded, I'm going to wait til its dark outside and do them outside in the dark...rather than being blind, I'm going to be partially slightly. I wonder if this will have any effect on how I paint!

Seen as I believe I have nearly done the final piece for this project, I have started to explore other routes and aspects of my work because I could have gone in so many different directions for this. If the work I do is strong enough, I could exhibit it next to my other work as it relates.

I can also do more research. I could easily take this project further and keep it going for a long time but I obviously have to come up with a final piece and exhibit my work.

Strangely, how soap operas changed the world

Soap operas aren't often celebrated for contributing to the good of society. Whether it's the materialism of Dallas or the idle gossip of Neighbours, they are better known for being shallow and addictive than for bringing about social change.

But around the world the genre has succeeded in providing "educational entertainment" - a blend of public service messages and melodrama that has enraptured millions of viewers.

Here are some of the things soaps have achieved;

Gay Tolerance

In 1989, the British soap Eastenders aired the first gay kiss on British television, prompting one British newspaper to run the headline "Filth! Get This Off Our Screens". Actor Michael Cashman received a brick through his window.

"On the second kiss there was barely any fuss. By the third kiss barely anyone noticed," Cashman wrote in The Mirror newspaper.

Another first occurred in 2007 in Vanuatu and Fiji, when a gay character appeared on screens in a series called Love Patrol. It has since been aired on TV in other Pacific Islands - a region where homosexuality is profoundly stigmatised.

"People are saying we actually do have gay men in our community too and they have rights," says Robyn Drysdale at the University of New South Wales, who has studied the reaction.

"There is a lot of discussion going on around human rights, and respect and an increased understanding of quite marginalised populations. That hadn't happened before."

Girls' Rights

Poor people didn't own television sets, so PCI Media Impact soon realised it could reach more people through radio. In 2002 it created a radio drama called Taru, set in the Indian state of Bihar, which challenged the preferential treatment of boys over girls.

The series' researchers found that girls in rural Bihar didn't celebrate their birthdays and decided to tell the story of a plucky young girl who petitions her family to throw her a party - and wins them over. Listeners across the region followed avidly as a little girl planned her birthday party for the first time.

In his follow-up research, Arvind Singhal, professor of communication at the University of Texas at el Paso, saw birthday celebrations for girls popping up around the region.

"It had the elements of an infection," he says.
Taru also led to the opening of several schools.

More research on media and stereotypes to strengthen my work

The first piece of research states:

"The media have and will continue to portray a self-serving negative stereotype of the African-American community. The societal and economic factors of racism have become more than just a bias. They are also a profitable industry, in which the elite will continue to suppress the lower class in order to maximize profits. According to Harvard professor Cornell West, 1 percent of the elite holds some 48 percent of America's wealth. This means that media, racism, and stereotypes will continue to be employed so that those elite can be sure of their continuing economic stability."

http://www.yale.edu/ypq/articles/oct99/oct99b.html

The second:

"If we assume that the media perpetuates stereotypes, what can be done to combat them, or has our society become numb to these stereotypes? What do the media messages say about women in society? About men in society? About race, gender and class?"

The answer to this is in the link below

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/local/scisoc/sports03/papers/lgataullina.html