This document discusses environmental influences on creative work. It references several artists who respond to and are influenced by their environments, including Iosif Kiraly who photographs locations over time, and Sean Hillen who combines images from different places to explore ideas. Students are given tasks to create artworks that incorporate environmental influences, such as making collages set in imaginary locations inspired by Henri Rousseau, or using collage to explore ideas about truth in situations like Sean Hillen.

1. Environment

2. This is the last project you will
ever do here in this environment,
but don’t be frightened by that
thought.
It’s your chance to really shine. Build on
everything you ever learnt about art, everything
you wanted to do and didn’t do yet and
Stretch your artistic muscles and prove yourself.
There’s no time like the present. (Show off as
much as possible. It’s going to be brilliant).

3. BRAIN STORM BLUE SKY THINKING
THINKINGTHINKING
Tim Harford: How frustration can make us more creative
Creative thinking - how to get out of the box and generate ideas: Giovanni Corazza at
Look at these fella’s talking
about ideas. Stay with them and
listen because their saying what
we need to hear.
The Köln Concert - Keith Jarrett
Give it a go. Thinking on your feet.
Keith Jarrett / Music.
Robert Rauschenberg / Art.
They make work from a starting point of
not knowing. They get on with it and make
something. They both respond to their
environment.
A result of
consequences and environment
Vera Brandes

4. Iosif Kiraly
Iosif Kiraly @ 18th Street Art Center
Task 1
Watch this

5. Iosif Kiraly
Iosif Kiraly makeS his photographs over long periods of
time. He revisits sights time after time. Taking more and
more photographs that he then uses to make a finished
work.
Over the course of a week you are to:
i)Pick a location and photograph it.
ii)Think about the evidence of your chosen environment
and the traces that show it’s used by people.
iii)How does your environment shape you?
iv)The Bauhaus and Black Mountain College are just two
Art Schools / environments that have huge influence on
the people who attended them.
Photograph Assemblies, Lunch time ques, classrooms
Include visual clues that the space you are photo
Revisiting environments. Documenting via photographs.

6. Iosif Kiraly
Once you’ve taken your photographs you need to print them A4.
Tape the photographs together in the manner of Iosif Kerlay in order to use them
as the basis for a monoprint.
This is the part were everyone is going to be
ambitious from the very start.
Lets thing BIG!
Not that big

7. Your Mono print needs to done an A3 sheet of paper.
Let’s be ambitious from the start.
TOP TIPA) When you are walking around school looking for a location make sure you
choose somewhere that you can return to and take more photos of in different
conditions, different people present and absent.
B) Use masking tape to stick your photos together.
C) Make an A3 mono print using your collage.
D) Use very little ink on your printing plate. All you need is a thin layer of ink to
make your print.
1, 2, 3…
Let’s goTask 1 The doing part

8. Relationships with interior and exterior space
Create and install an art intervention
OUTCOME:
Document your art intervention. You
must photograph both the
installation of your work as well the
final outcome as it could be removed
at any point. Present this in your
sketchbook as well as samples of the
materials used and a write up of the
process and relevant artists.
Task 2
An art intervention is an interaction with a previously existing artwork, audience, space or
situation. There are many spaces in Fortismere School that provide suitable places for an art
intervention.
Art interventions are associated with the Dada movement and Neo-Dadaists (20th
century),
however art interventions are made by contemporary artists working today.

9. Zander Olsen ‘Tree Line ‘
This is an ongoing series of constructed photographs rooted in the forest.
These works involve site specific interventions in the landscape, ‘wrapping’
trees with white material to construct a visual relationship between tree, not-
tree and the line of horizon according to the camera’s viewpoint.’
Sean Griffiths
’My dream of levitation’
Doris Salcedo ‘Shibboleth’
Dan Bradica

10. Henri Rousseau
France 1844 -1910
The Great Artists
- Post-Impressionism – Rousseau
Listen to this
This documentary discusses Rousseau’s life and
ideas. Make time to watch it. There’s loads of
info here. Food for thought. Paying attention to
this documentary might provide the spark you
need to set you off on your own journey of
exploration.
Henri Rousseau
Myself: Portrait Landscape
1890
Task:
Rousseau made up all his locations and his
connection to them. Most likely he never left Paris,
but he claimed to have travelled the world. The
construction of subject in his paintings is made up.
It’s a great big fantasy.
It’s fiction
& fantasy
Task 3

11. Think back to Picasso. Well, during Rousseau’s life Picasso and a few of his
avant-garde friends thought Rousseau’s work was great. They loved it and Picasso
would buy his paintings and hang them in his own studio. Picasso organised a
banquet in Rousseau’s honour. The banquet was a kind of making fun of
Rousseau and an event to honour him. Portrait of a Woman 1895, was the centre
piece of the event. Picasso bought the painting in a junk shop for 5 francs.

12. Task 3a:
Take on board what you now
know about Rousseau.
Make a collage where you make
a fantasy setting, fantastic
setting.
Task 3b
Make another collage. This time
look at Rousseau’s “Myelf:
Portrait Landscape”, and make a
setting that visually coherent
image into which you will
include a self portrait.
(Maybe you can depict yourself
in the role of a profession…
Painter, police officer, teacher,
pilot, teacher…)
Henri Rousseau, Myself: Portrait Landscape, 1890

13. Sean Hillen b. 1961
Hillen is interesting because he takes his experiences of being Irish artist and
tackles ideas concerning Irish identity during the troubles, a time when the British
public where not being presented with a balanced perspective of what was going
on in Ireland. Similar to Rousseau, Hillen imagines two different places and mixes
them together. He re-addresses his concerns by relocating what was happening
on streets of Northern Ireland and relocating it to the streets of London.
No Photoshop is involved. The collages are all made by collection images from
magazines and cutting and gluing them down into compositions that express the
narrative Hillen is engaged with.
Hillen returns to Newry (2006)
Seán Hillen short film
Sean Hillen on Imeall (TG4 2010)
Watch these

14. Four Ideas for a New Town #1, 1982,
mixed media 30 x 32 cm
Hillen says:
“I photographed the figures in
this black and white scene in
the Bogside in 1981. The
boy
on the right is wearing a Celtic
scarf with holes cut out for
his eyes. He's staring at me,
because he heard my
accent, I think, and was
unhappy about what I was
doing there”.

15. Four Ideas For A New Town, #7
1987, mixed media, 44x28cm
Hillen says:
The building is the Royal Festival
Hall on the South Bank in London,
built as part of the Festival of
Britain in 1951.
It's a lovely building with concert
halls etc and until lately, anyway,
an excellent program of
exhibitions. I'm fond of it too
because I lived in the area for a
long time and used to mooch
around there a lot.
In fact, this montage has been
exhibited inside that very building
twice; in 1991 when I won a prize
in the South Bank Photo Show
and in 2000 in an interesting show
called Revealing Images.
I was playing, obviously, with the
flames and flowers.
Permanent Collection, Imperial
War Museum, London.

16. [Did you watch the films?
If you took the time to do so, well done. If not you need to do the research.
The research you do is always going to make a positive contribution to your
ideas and work. Broaden your horizon. However, your research needs to be
meaningful. Explore and understand an artists ideas. If you’re not
understanding the work you’re looking, think about it some more. Talk to your
peers and teacher about it. Be informed and give your opinion.
Task
i) Document Sean Hillen’s works content. Focus on his series The Troubles and
Irelantis.
ii) Produce a collage that explores/explains ideas concerning the truth of a
situation.
Your collage should be a work that is refined and you’ve taken time over. It
should be a double page spread.
PICASSO ALERT. Guess what? It’s Picasso time again. In the unfolding of Cubism
Picasso invented collage as we know it today. You’re about to use a process
that Picasso created in the early days of cubism.