Introduction to my Project

For our Unit 3 body of work we were allowed to chose our own projects to work upon, whether this was am artists style we admire, a particular campaign or charity we would wish to work for or just a concern that we feel passionate about. I chose to work on the world of beauty and the extent people go for it. I mainly gained an interest for the world of beauty when I went to an exhibition to see the work of Zed Nelson who did a project on the global obsession with beauty and youth. Also with personally feeling like I am a more 'natural' person I find the world of plastic surgery, lyposuction and botox rather too extreme and no matter how bad i felt I personally would never result to the stuff. I even find the concept of dying my hair a bit extreme as i would like to stay as natural as possible, therefore by being this sort of person the world of beauty has always fascinated me and I have always been intruiged to why do people go to such great extents for it?
When I started looking into this project my main inspiration was the photographer Zed Nelson to which a particular project he worked on that I favoured for was called ‘Love Me’. His ‘Love Me’ project was based around reflecting on the cultural and commercial forces that drive the global obsession with youth and beauty; he took images of cosmetic surgeons, beauty queens across the world and beauty operations. Some of my other inspiration for this project would be Douglas Alves and Helen Lyon. IO chose Helen Lyon as her work evolves around the view of the woman, she created a modelling piece of a very thin model with the caption "no cigarrette, no tits, no talent" which to me shows the harshness of the beauty industry, i want to look into her work to gain inspiration through how women are percieved in society and behind the emotional falls that women have to fight through for beauty. With the work of Douglas Alves however it is not what message his work is trying to give, but more his style of work Douglasd Alves has an illustrative feel to his work which makes me think along the lines of advertisement and camplaigns, i want to look into douglas Alves because i want to be inspired by his technique and style of his work.with my project I want to explore how the commercial forces drive the beauty obsession today compared to the past and what did people in history thought was beautiful and what did they use to become beautiful (e.g corsets) as well as looking at how the difference in cultures can effect peoples visions on what beauty is but I don’t want to just look into the difference between Western and Eastern culture I would like to go into depth about particular cultures and possibly link this in with the research of the history of beauty and look at if there was any difference between different cultures in the past as well as different cultures in the present and possibly future. I want to explore different media being able to combine both photography, art work and photoshopped together to experiment with the field of beauty as well to look into the world of video.  
 

Douglas Alves

Another beautiful mixed media illustrator/graphic designer, Brazilian born and Los Angeles based Douglas Alves have some stunning images in his portfolio, a 26 years old self-taught graphic designer who worked already for some prestigious company like Coca-cola, Mtv, Microsoft and Honda amongst others…  I like a lot the fact that he’s showcasing his work in large format – You should definitely check his nice flash website: www.nacionale.net and his Balance.

“I was born in I Sao (squiggly line over a) Paulo, Brazil and im 26years old. As a self –taught i started my career in 2000 working in agencies and interactive shops . After 5 years i decided to become a freelancer and i started to do illustrations. I’ve had a pleasure to with great brand names and some of these”