‘The Eyes Have It’ - Photographs, Sketches, and Reference

During the course of the project I was given over the Easter Holiday entitled, ‘The eyes have it’, I had booked a trip to The Gambia, which is known as ‘The smiling coast of West Africa’, which is where I had taken the photo’s I will include in this document. The Illustrations and sketches I will also include were also drawn in

various parts of the Gambia, with the theme of natural history in mind.

I had taken this photograph on a visit to a place named the Monkey Park. The park was a large area of land where monkeys where able to roam freely throughout the park, and interact with humans who would feed them peanuts (Gambia’s main export) and bananas. I Managed to get this shot by only zooming slightly as the monkeys where very comfortable around humans. I Took this photograph with the brief in mind, and although

I am pleased with it I didn’t produce an illustration from it as the colours where relatively limited.

This is another photograph I had taken of the monkeys when i had fed them peanuts.

This is a photograph I had taken when walking through one of the villages that didn’t usually have any tourists visit. The children in the photo were relatively unfa-miliar with a camera. Although not directly relevant to this project, i thought it was interesting to consider the children’s perception of me, (a white, ‘rich’ tourist) to mine of them (poverty stricken and poor). The way we

saw each other was very different.

The image on the right was taken in the same village as the above photograph. The image was painted on the wall of some form of establishment, and depicts the Gambian prime minister, who the people of Gambia seem very proud of. I found the illustrative style interesting and striking because of its rawness and honesty, and use of colours and illustrative techniques.

The image on the left was taken outside the hotel I was staying in, named ‘Palma Rima’, which is a combination of a reference to the large amounts of palm trees and the name of the owners wife. I took these photographs thinking about the natural history module and how it may be relevant when i get to the botanical illustration project.

This photograph was taken while I was in a place called, ‘The crocodile pool’, which was a place where supposedly pescatarian crocodiles roam and tourists are allowed to pet them. It was only after doing this that i realised that there is a high chance that the animals were sedated to prevent their natural behaviour, which made me feel particularly guilty for visiting the pool. The fortunate side of this, however, is that I was able to

take a lot of photos which provided strong visual reference for my illustrations.

This image was taken at the crocodile pool also. Although I liked the image, unfortunately i had left my camera on a low resolution so could not zoom into the eye as drawing reference, although even if i could i

would possibly reject the image for the same reasons as I did the one of the monkey above.

There were often multiple lizards running around the hotel grounds, which I found amusing as I was not familiar with it so photographed them. I didn’t actually create a painting of this one as I had already created a one of the crocodile, which had some visual similarities with it being a reptile also.

Sketches

The above image is of a scan of two sketches that I had created in my small moleskin sketchbook. I had attempted to make reference to African Pattern. Gambia is famously known as ‘The smiling coast of West Africa’ however my perception of it was that it was a very sad place with a lot of drugs, corruption, and prostitution; all of which are only existing because of lack of money. The reliance on money and

materialism in general made me reflective and inspired to record my thoughts visually.

Similarly to the other sketch book images, these images where drawn in Biro in my moleskin notebook. The theme of the first image is again, prostitution, which was something that seemed to be encountered a lot. I based the images on the currency which is the Gambian Dalasi, as I could not reference people first hand in fear of offending them. I created the second image to accompany the first as I thought the gender difference would fit thematically.

I found Gambian currency very interesting visually, however it is sadly not legaly to bring in or out of the country, which is partially why i wanted to create drawings. I also photographed the eyes of the man on the 50 dalasi note, which is pictured above.