This is an exhibition of 7 artists' current work at The Reg Vardy Gallery from the 19th untill 26th August 2011. All contributors are students at the University of Sunderland, who have just completed their second year of Fine Art BA (Hons) Degree course. Everyone has exhibited previously at the University, many have already recieved commissions and had solo exhibitions and been part of joint exhibitions across the North East of England.
There is no compulsory end of year show to mark the work made during this challenging middle year of studies. The art created can often be overlooked and dismissed as merely a transitory stage of an artists development. Second 2 None sets out to prove that art work made during this time is full of colourful and compelling originality, and definately worthy of its own show.
Through the media of painting, drawing, print, sculpture, digital image and video, the art works exhibited explore escapism, colour and form, capturing fixed moments in time, humanity's effects onthe environment, the look and feelin gof movement, fragmentation, family relationships and sorting out what the mind wants to tell the world.
This year I decided to focus on why I have been playing video games so much and work through my problems with aggoraphobia, looking into my previous works, actions and thoughts and using my work as a means of therapy. As World of Warcraft has become a huge part of my life in the past couple of years I decided to base my escapism around it and develope pieces of work to do with avatars, another world outside my real life. Mostly using photoshop since I mostly did paintings last year, but I plan on using paint for some of my work. My influences are from a sci-fi/anime/fantasy art magazine called Imagine FX, H.R. Giger, Interactive video games, sci-fi, fantasy art, myth and legend, dragons and beasts, and artists like Paulo Uccello and H. R. Giger and Dan Scott who is one of the digital artists from my Imagine FX magazines.
Battle of Salamis, 23rd September 480BC by Wilhelm von Kaulbach. Website
Upon trying to mend myself from my anxieties and escapism I wrote down a log of bad memories which I believed to have caused it, after trying out a few ideas for my work I decided to use my log as a story and combine my main characters story with my own. This was one of the ways in which I could tell my story without me actually telling it, but through my character. After much experimentation and rewriting I began working line art images into the story and combined the two. Each paragraph per page with a line art image to go with it summing up the paragraph. I experimented with scaling, letter fonts, image size and portrait or landscape. Mostly working with in game screen shots and positioning my characters to create the expressions and poses needed for each paragraph and then drawing them as line art images on photoshop.
I then went on to experiment with more screenshots and draw in some of the information like health lost in battle, healing done to me, damage done to the enemy and also included other peoples characters in my images.
Gamon Stands Strong
Experimenting with layering and using some line art images from majuub's story and works from the year before I created 2 layered images of line. I found these to be a little different to my usual style but I found them show that alot is going on in the images, all of the characters interracting playfully and fighting.
Untitled
Untitled
After watching a digital artist named Yapi Santiago who draws characters like me, I decided to commission her to produce a piece of work to my specifications. 2 characters sharing some alone time in the comfort of eachother, tier 11 armor, specific weapons, in un'goro cave.
After experimenting with positioning and trying to create work that had some sort of story or captured an event. I began placing specific characters together and trying to perfect my line art drawings some more.
A Time To Mourn
The Wolves Are Upon Us!
Experimenting with color I began colouring one of my line art images to try make the image complete, adding a moon to the image and putting in a background I felt the image was better than the original but still lacked the look I was after.
‘I have always been interested in video games from a young age, completing them and moving onto the next, but in my teen years I had a hard time and it resulted into my escaping into my gaming and virtual worlds. My work is mostly about the most challenging game I have played and still not completed, which i have made lots of friends around europe. My work helped me deal with and understand my escapism and deal with my problems with aggoraphobia and the need to deal with my problems rather than escaping into the computer screen and not feeling or thinking about anything but the game and what happens there.’
Finally nearing towards the end of my experimentation, I decided to involve backgrounds and more characters than usual, creating fight scenes, events in game and adventures of the characters on my account and guild members or friends. I found these images to be very successful and I will begin to work these onto canvas with paint as the end of the year approaches.
Defending- This one being one of them I felt worked well but I made the goblin characters too large and drew a foot coming through the cloak so minor changes need to be made.
Spell Reflect- This one was made from a memory of a friend in combat with the opposing team, the alliance. His character Onika a warrior fighting against a human mage and winning, placed in an arena making the image extremely better than the original characters in a blank space.
Double Attack- This one is a boss fight featuring my raid group of 10 people, features 2 tanks, 3 healers and 5 damage players and the boss is Chimaeron in his lair. Characters and boss placed onto a background, drawn as line art. This will be my final piece painted onto a big canvas with a video or sound piece of this encounter. This will take part within the Reg Vardy Gallery or Shaun Space during August within University of Sunderland's Ashburn House.
Majuub's Statement
2v2
3v3
Relentléss
Majuub and the Dragon
Majuub and the Dragon Pop art
When I had my Shaun Space crit, I was often asked how some others who didn't know what my work was about would think my work was about, find it interesting or would it fit into art practice. Even though I do believe that my artwork works as it is, I decided to use a different style of artwork and voice my opinions of that in my work. As seen above I used Andy Warhol's massproduced Popart images to make my own versions and created my own version of Paulo Uccello's St. George & The Dragon and also made a pop art version of that too.
Majuub's Entry (my entry) 0 votes
Asiohu's Entry 9 Votes
Naara's Entry 2 votes
Fennic's Entry 6 votes
While studying at uni I also started an online competition for some of my guild members to take part in so that I could see what others would do with the subject I was using and gave them a brief which was 'Drunk and Disorderly' which meant that they could use anything in the game so long as their work was of a character in a drunken state with an entry fee of 50 gold. The Winner was Asiohu who won over 1000 gold in WoW currency.
I also started hosting in game events on a friday evening with gold prizes called Take My Quest, dressing my character up and appearing in one of the zones in game at 20:00 gametime or 19:00 English time. Once those who signed upto take part arrived to my location they were given a quest to collect items from killing creatures or playful games rewarding the first to hand in the quest or to win a competition or challenge a gold prize of 500 gold and second and third place a smaller prize depending on how many sign up for the events. My inspiration for this was from watching Sharm's WoW parody music video, Take My Quest.
Some of my work involves people I have often met online within the game and from my guild Dark Elders of Darkmoon Faire. However in my painting Double Attack and other works, I mostly involve certain people from my raid group, also featured in many recorded and edited videos of raid encounters. These characters/people are:
Double Attack
Unfinished painting right now but it is going to appear in the reg vardy gallery when completed in august based on my raid group pushing on through the game content trying to be the top raid group on the server. Most raid nights feature either clearing most of the raid content in one night or 2 and progressing onto attempt the more challenging encounters, this requires alot of knowledge of tactics of bosses, how to play your class and communication.
