Kate Gumpert

SUPER BOYS & SAD GIRLS

CHUCK CLOSE who is an artist working with pixels. Not the way most people work with them, but he uses them to create the little boxes in his artwork, that finally make up the portraits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Close

The thing that amazes me most is how he paints. I have seen part of a television documentary where Close painted the selfportrait. He actually uses the pixels in a photo, and enlarges these to become little squares of multy coloured scribblings, that ultimatly form the image. Chuck Close is paralized from the neck down. He needs both his hands to hold the paintbrush up to the canvas, but that does not stop him from creating art.

Here's what Close actually thinks of computers, according to the Museum of Modern Art: "Some people wonder whether what I do is inspired by a computer and whether or not that kind of imaging is a part of what makes this work contemporary. I absolutely hate technology, and I'm computer illiterate, and I never use any labor-saving devices although I'm not convinced that a computer is a labor-saving device." He is an inspirational artist and I wanted to take his ideas of creating images but challenge his theory and use pixels digitally, in the medium where they really exist.

MARK LAWRENCE's paintings which are created by pixel's technique.

http://www.imagekind.com/MemberProfile.aspx?MID=56A09F95-58ED-4998-913F-85D6818AB14D

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR and feminism movements challenged me intellectually. I am interested in feminism as a discourse that involves various movements, theories, and philosophies, which are concerned with the issue of gender difference. For example, postmodern feminists argued that gender roles are socially constructed and that it is impossible to generalize women's experiences across cultures and histories. What is more, the French author and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex a detailed analysis of women's oppression. As an existentialist, she accepted Jean-Paul Sartre's precept that existence precedes essence; hence "one is not born a woman, but becomes one". Her analysis focuses on the social construction of Woman as the Other, this de Beauvoir identifies as fundamental to women's oppression. She argues that women have historically been considered deviant and abnormal.