2 Fan- Art

I began to think about what makes me a fan of something? What am I a fan of? How can I make art about being a fan without making fan-art? So I focused on my love of cult movies. I’m a big fan of John Waters. I can, and sometimes do, perform a one woman rendition of Female Trouble, Cry Baby and Hairspray. I love MST3K, Night of the Ghouls, Teenagers from Outer Space and The Brain that Wouldn’t Die are some of my all time favorite movies. I LOVE the original Star Trek series and going to sing-a-long midnight screenings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I feel the divine exhilaration of being a fan for these things. And I think that might come from that they’re out of the mainstream, they’re ‘so bad they’re good’, they’re ‘ you either get it or you don’t’ and they bring the joy of the mad, fanatic, frenzied passion of explaining why they’re so amazing, why they’re so genius and why you love it as much as you do.

I believe this largely explains my enthusiasm for Jedward, but we’ll get to that later.

But the problem with visual art is there’s only so much explaining you can do, on average someone will look at a work of art for 3 seconds and move on so the work of art has to try and explain itself as much as possible as quickly as possible. I can’t just say ‘here’s something that’s magnificent, genius and beautiful just because I say it is because I’m a fan of it’. The work has to attempt to express these things for itself. I think that’s why my fan-art works failed.

I love fan-art. It just fills me with a joy and a rush like taking off in an airplane, I goddamn LOVE it. It’s the love, the admiration the passion and devotion you can see in a fans representation of their idol. I love that it’s done purely for pleasure, for the love of the subject and a compulsion to turn that love into an image. I love that it just is what it is, there’s no veil, no pretention just pure expression. I love that you don’t need to be an artist to do it and I love that fans aren’t shy to share it.. because I sure as hell was. (and still am..)

Fan-art makes me nostalgic for then I used to do fan art and drawing fan-art really helped to develop a lot of skills vital to being a drawer and painter.. and a thumping good one too if you don’t mind the lack of modesty. I owe a lot to fan-art as an artist. So I went back to my roots, dug around my school books and folders and under the bed and found some of my old fan-art. So I decided to take myself back to my late childhood, early teenhood and recreate some fan-art of the heart throbs of the moment, JB and Harry Styles.
I looked at the aesthetics of fan-art trying to find some common language that a viewer would recognize as fan-art : Pencil on white paper. A face, taken from a press shot, over shading, defining and highlighting facial features that probably shouldn’t be highlighted, smudging to create shadow (that was a personal favorite of mine) and over working details found most attractive, eyes and lips, capturing a likeness that is instantly recognizable but forgetting everything I’ve been taught and just going back to untrained naivety with a school-girl crush.
I think the result is beautiful, and I’m furiously proud! But the problem is, this wasn’t meant to be a joke, and people find it funny. Even worse, people think it’s mean like I’m making fun of fans. I honestly found this really upsetting, to be seen as making fun of people’s art and skills was not my intention at all, the opposite in fact, it’s a celebration of fan-art! Of the fan-art I used to do and the fan-art I love to see on the internet and on people’s walls! A graduate told me ‘I think to draw anything beneath your ability is an injustice to you and anyone else.’ Which I find very hard argue with. So I am genuinely sorry to anyone this might offend, please know that’s not my intention.

I am still very proud of them though, i think they're beautiful! I still have them pinned up in my studio they make me so happy! :D

I love fan-art