Propaganda artist:
Philip Zec:
Philip Zec was a British illustrator and cartoonist. In the 1930s he became one if the most famous poster artist in England for his controversial posters and advertising designs. From 1937 until 1961 he was chief political cartoonist for pro-labour Daily Herald, depicting Hitler and the Nazis as strutting buffoons. His most controversial cartoon appeared in 1942. It depicted a torpedoed sailor on a raft and stated below, "The price of petrol has been increased by one penny – Official." The implication, that war profiteering was the official policy of the British government, infuriated many in Parliament. Zec's original caption had been entirely different; the offending words were added by the newspaper. Zec is regarded as among the handful of great British political cartoonists of his time. His work contradicts that of what was happening at the time, rather than hiding behind make-believe images and designs, Zec is using his cartoonist skill set to showing of the reality of war to create controversy against it and our leading governments. The colour choice of using black and white adds to the importance of the message it is portraying allowing as much detail to shine through to capture the eyes of the viewing audience.
​
J.Howard Miller:
J.Howard Miller was an American graphic artist, who painted posters during World War 2 in support of the war effort. One of Miller’s most recognisable piece was created in 1942 and was titled “We Can Do It!” is now considered to be Rosie the Riveter. Rosie the Riveter was a media icon associated with female defence workers during World War II. Since the 1940s Rosie the Riveter has stood as a symbol for women in the workforce and for women’s independence. Rosie the Riveter was part of this propaganda campaign and became the symbol of women in the workforce during World War II. The simplicity of a single slogan “We Can Do It!” is snappy and bold to capture the public’s attention and boost their morale. The piece itself not only offers support for the ongoing war but it also offers support and encouragement toward females, due to it being a strong feminist piece in which its inspirational image holds historical progression for female workers and their places/role in war and society of the given time.
​
Shepard Fairey:
Shepard Fairey is an American graphic artist and social activist who is part of the Street Art movement along with other artists including Banksy and Mr.Brainwash. Fairey blurs the boundary between traditional and commercial art through type and image, communicating his brand of social critique via prints, murals, stickers, and posters in public spaces. Fairey is perhaps best known for his Hope (2008) campaign, which portrays a portrait of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, in red, white, and blue. The use of only using red, white, and blue not only sticks to the traditional colours that are associated with America but also to me stick with that bold in your face concept that grads people’s attention a draw them into the portrayed message represented. The colour choice also gives of that propaganda pop art feel but with a modern twist bringing posters into the modern world.
Text artist:
Barbara Kruger:
Barbara Kruger, known worldwide for her iconic text-based works, is an American conceptual artist and collagist associated with the Pictures Generation. She is most known for her collage style that consists of black-and-white photographs, overlaid with declarative captions, stated in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed text. The phrases in her works often include pronouns such as "you", "your", "I", "we", and "they", addressing cultural constructions of power, identity, consumerism, and sexuality. Kruger's artistic mediums include photography, sculpture, graphic design, architecture, as well as video and audio installations. Kruger’s pieces often take the form of cryptic statements written in a sans serif font that recalls advertising copy; they’re printed on vinyl and black-and-white photographs and have appeared in museums and public spaces around the world for four decades.
Christopher Wool:
Christopher Wool is an enigmatic abstract painter whose work evolved greatly over the years, bringing together abstract work, text-based pieces as well as photography. Wool combines aspects inherited from Abstract Expressionism (painterly gesture), Pop Art (the use of silkscreens and the influence of street culture), as well as Conceptual art (the use of language). He takes inspiration from daily life and pop culture using advertising slogans, lines from movies and tv shows or other recognizable material in his paintings and prints; one of his most famous pieces “SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS”. The framing of such works as abstract paintings is designed to question what the act of painting is, how it should be produced, and how an image can incorporate multiple layers of meaning that are slowly revealed as the viewer pays attention to the piece. He consciously breaks up the words and phrases on the canvas in a grid-like fashion that makes them harder to read, thus stripping the letters of their meaning in the vocable and forcing the viewer to see them as abstract shapes. Reading them for meaning can often be like putting together a puzzle making the experience like learning to read for the first time all over again.
​
Jenny Holzer:
Jenny Holzer is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick, New York. The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other structures, and illuminated electronic displays. Holzer belongs to the feminist branch of a generation of artists that emerged around 1980 and was an active member of Collab during this time, participating in the famous The Times Square Show. Holzer’s work deploys text in public space to provoke public debates and illuminate social and political injustice by not only displaying and empowering her own opinion and voice but to also encourage others to use theirs. Holzer creates a powerful tension between the realms of feeling and knowledge, with a practice that encompasses both individual and collective experiences of power and violence, vulnerability, and tenderness.
Digital/illustrator artist:
Tim Marrs:
Tim Marrs is an illustrator and Art director for motion. In his collages, Tim Marrs pieces together diverse visual elements to create colourful works of art, his visual language is genre defining and has made a major impact on the aesthetics of modern illustration. Marrs uses computer manipulate to seamlessly merge drawings, photographs, silkscreen prints and movie posters in which he gains his inspiration from different medias to produce his work of advertisement. His work captures the modern world in its full glory by bursting with colour to capture that of the viewing audience. Each layer of colour holds a different significance to the overall final piece as each colour hold many fractions of detail bringing this piece to life. Each image used is significant to the piece and empowers the story in which it holds allowing it to be shown rather than told.
Pop art artist:
Andy Warhol:
Andy Warhol was an American artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silk-screening, photography, film, and sculpture. Warhol liked to use bright colours and silk-screening techniques when producing his work as the screen printing allowed for mass-production of his artworks such as his images of Marilyn Monroe. By using screen printing he could mass produce his work as well as alter and change his colour choices as many times as he wanted.
Feminist artist:
Florence Peake:
Florence Peake is a London-based artist who has been making solo and group performance works intertwined with an extensive visual art practice since 1995. Peake is known for an approach which is at once sensual and witty, expressive, and rigorous, political, and intimate. Peake produces movement, interactive sculpture, paintings that use the whole body’s physicality, text, film, and drawings which respond and intercept each other to articulate, extend and push ideas. Peake creates radical and outlandish performances, which in turn generate temporary alliances and micro-communities within the audience. Her work is captivating and expressive in a way that allows me as an artist to not only witness her pieces but experience her pieces at the same time bring more meaning not only to her work but a new meaning to what art is and how it is created. To me her work brings about a lot of female empowerments, as many of participants in her performance work are women.
Louise Bourgeois:
Louise Bourgeois was a French American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality, and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process. Not only is she portraying her own traumatic stories, but she is also portraying that of many others whose story may have been heard and may still not have been heard. She is allowing her artwork to amplify her story, so people take notice, she is a sound board for many others like her who have experience similar traumatic pasts. Alternating between forms, materials, and scale, and veering between figuration and abstraction became a basic part of Bourgeois’s vision, even while she continually probed the same themes: loneliness, jealousy, anger, and fear. Themes of domestic life and the home reoccur throughout Louise Bourgeois’s work. Early works on canvas and paper from the mid-1940s show a female figure trapped inside a small-scale house. While her room-like Cell structures often contain objects associated with the home. Bourgeois explores the role of female identity throughout her work, often challenging the conventional role of women in the twentieth century.
Tracey Emin:
Tracey Emin is an English artist known for her autobiographical and confessional artwork. Emin produces work in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué. Emin’s work is uninhibited in the way it absorbs and reflects her personal life- whether in seminal installations, her early performances and videos, or her writings. Emin has always been inspired by expressionist painters such as Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele. Viewing her work generates an experience of intimacy as a result of Emin’s emotional honesty in reflecting on meaningful moments from her life as it is explicitly feminist. She creates works that both challenge a nd provide solace to her viewers. Her work is express and beautiful within itself and the meaning behind it, it is also feminist and raw. Her confrontational style underscored her desire to overcome her hardship.
