Jesse Draxler

Jesse Draxler is an artist that experiments with almost monochrome collages of the face and body. I wanted to explore his work on the body as so far in my project I have only really focused on the portrait of the face. By branching out I can explore the mix of face and body when it comes to my final piece where I can mix media and visual idea.

Analysis:

Jesse Draxler is an American visual artist, illustrator and art director, born in 1981 in Wisconsin. Early on in life, draxler discovered that he was color blind, being red-green color deficient. Later on in his life, Draxler embraces this disabillity within his work as he only uses very monochrome colour's such as black and white. He studied at the collage of visual art in St Paul's, Minnesota where he found his passion in art. His work consists of mixed medias and his pieces combine painting, photography and collaging into one. He distorts the body and the face abstracting your understanding of what they look like. When looking at his work, my eyes captured this series of collaged photographs where he manipulates the physical image to made these weird alienated shapes as though he is photographing a sculpture. When collaging this series he first of all takes base photographs much like Pablo Thecuadro, however doesn't distort the face, but distorts the body by layering different images on top of each other. Similarly to Pablo Thecuadro he cuts his images using curves to blend into each image.29 His model is clothed in black clothing, to create that contrast between the grey and white background. He captures his work in natural lighting and later edits his images to have cool toned colours and an almost mist looking cover. In these photographs, he has collaged them to look almost monstrous and abnormal.Abstracting the natural for, he has managed to create almost sculptural looking collages, in which the body looks alienated.

I want to take inspiration from his work and experiment with form and composition.

Contact sheets

These are my first contact sheets inspired by the work from Jesse Draxler. For this photoshoot, I used myself as the model; and wore only black. Then I had my camera set up at different angles in which I would try and distort my body to create these abstract forms. I photographed in natural lighting and for my background I balanced against a white wall where this could contrast well when it comes to using photoshop and editing. I think this was a successful photoshoot, as I was able to create different shapes where I can further develop and collage using inspiration from Jesse Draxler.

Developments

This is a gallery with my first set of developments in which I slightly adjusted the colouring and saturation. To edit these, I first of all selected part of one image then copied and pasted this onto my original image where I adjusted the size and angle to fit and layer correctly. my final step was to crop and use the shadow drop tool, where I created an almost 3D shadow surrounding the edge of pasted image. To do this I go layer>layer style> drop shadow> adjusts the settings of this tool. I think to further improve these edits I will adjust the colour to create almost sinister looking collages by using the blue/grey tones in Jesse Draxler's work.

Further developments in colour

Final physical developments - collaged

These are my final set of developments, in which I physically collaged my previous developments together. To do so I printed off my most successful developments, and then cut the form out and glued them onto an A4 piece of white paper. I think these are successful however, I do think these physical developments came out quite dark. To finalize my work on both, Pablo Thecuardo and Jesse Draxler, I am next going to create series of developments to have a final more professional outcome.

Series

These set of series, are my final outcome from looking and experimenting with work inspired byJesse Draxler. In looking at his work I have explored and experimented with the body's form and layering collages.