Goya, disasters of war

I stared looking at Goya's series of prints called the Disasters of War by looking into how it came about, I found that he produced 82 prints between 1810 and 1820, but were not put out until 1863.

I began looking through some of the prints he created, I think they were possibly political statements etchings and I read that they were in relation to what he had witnessed in the Peninsular war in 1807 – 1814.
The first image that really grabbed my attention was this one...

"Disparate general (General folly)"

I consider myself quite a morbid person, and while I was looking through these images although very powerful and violent, they did not shock me. Although it made me think about what kind of reaction he wanted to give to the viewer.

The more I looked at this image, the more I noted the darkness in it, in tone and in message, to me obviously on purpose.

I noticed the background has little to no detail in it and I noticed this in a lot of these etchings... they all appear to have a darkness in the backgrounds, it gives me the feeling of emptiness all around what is happening in the etchings. Here is another example of this I found.

"Modo de volar (A way of flying)"

"El caballo raptor (Kidnapping horse)"

I liked these, I liked the darkness to them again both in appearance and message, and it made me quite interested in trying out etching for myself. :)

Mary Morrison

On Tuesday an artist named Mary Morrison came to visit our class to give a talk on her work, She is based in the Scottish Borders and was brought up in the Isle of Haris where she left at the age of 18.
She uses oil paint in different solutions, she explained that she can never come up with the same effect on a canvas twice and every piece of work is unique, Mary works on flat and can sometimes work on several paintings at once as they are oil paint and take forever to dry! She is inspired by the isle she grew up on and incorporates the waves in most of her paintings. She then moved on and was inspired by Abstract Musical Notation and eventually put two and two together and created beautiful work. She was then inspired by tide tables and grids and mapping and then continued to add them to her work to make interesting works.
She is currently based in WASP Studios in Selkirk and has been for the last 12 years. WASP Studios opens once to twice a year and is open on the 1st and 2nd of October and there are 13 other Artists based there.
Mary helped with the Bard Mhealboist project.

"Undersong"

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This is her studio, as you can see from the picture its rather messy!