King Maud Lai’s portfolio

Ucas ID: 103-309-7591

Sketches

Natural Form

Buttons

Objects in Kitchen

Intention:For people who cook, Kitchen objects are usually functional rather than decorative. In this project I wanted to create artistic images of functional objects.

This sketch is a copy of Picasso’s drawing. Unlike other surreal objects, the objects are straight forward and simple. At that time I wondered whether I had to go into the symbolic meanings of the utensils.

Janet Karam’s drawings of bottles and glass are feminine and simple. Kitchen is a place in which over 80% of the time is used by women. That kitchen wares look feminine is understandable.

Patrick Agcaoili used a very simple way to draw bottles. They were mainly outline drawings but the colour was more central than the forms. I like colourful things.

T.Graham’s drawing of bottles are bold shape, simple with no details. Although I like simple figures, I want to make it more feminine. Thus I used Janet Karam’s way to twist the simple kitchen utensils I drew

Apart from drawing, I wanted to use collage too. Marirosa Hofmann ‘s way of using collage to depict bottles looked oriental. She used a lot of Japanese paper and pattern in her work.

Sandy Frazier used collage in depicting vessels which are very colourful and eye catching.

Jill Baerton’s bottles are simple in outline but with curly pattern inside

I made some screen prints of different kinds of utensils. I printed it with Yellow, blue and orange as to make it looks like Sandy Frazier’s picture.

Kitchens are usually well organized. No one likes a messy unorganized kitchen. DeRoser’s way of organizing different bits of his abstract paintings inspired me.

Such a way of organizing the visual images are evident in many of work in this project, but I made the squares and shapes more irregular.

I used the still live picture as the major subject, use computer technique to elongate it and cut it into small shapes. When I tried to put in colour, I found the cracks and squares too thick and the lines of the utensils were too thin. Thus I draw another still live picture. Then treated them differently by the techniques I acquired during the research process.

Different ways of presenting the final piece were explored. I liked the jigsaw way of putting 4 pieces ( including Keifer’s collage, one colourful and one plain, Hoffman’s way of sticking Japanese papers, and a sketch of still live drawing) together to make one piece was given up because after I had discussed with the workman, I found that it would be very difficult to build up such a frame with four pieces of work.

Apart from using 2-D images, I tried to develop 3-D objects of kitchen utensil. 3-D products seem more realistic and close to life than 2-D images as far as kitchen objects are concerned. Kitchen is a place where you put your hands in and getting your hands dirty than a place where you just sit down and relax. Thus I tried to make some ceramic work.

Obscured

The followings are series of work leading to the final piece of “Obscure”.

Theme I tried to develop different ways to depict obscurity, mainly obscured images in pictures and photos.

At first I tried to draw obscured nude female bodies. I thought that nudity is a taboo in most society, thus nudity could be a subject to be made obscure. However, as we could only draw pictures of the model and we were not allowed to take photos of the model, thus I gave up using nude body as the subject.

Toilet is always a private place ‘obscured’ from others.

At that time, as a foreign student, the school building and the landscape at home were salient to me. Thus I used school building and the cottages in the neighborhood at home as the subject to be ‘obscured’.

I tried different techniques of drawing blurred images.

As the school buildings are more than 60 years old, I chose old cottages in Hong Kong to make them more comparable in terms of the age of the buildings. Old buildings do convey a sense of mystery.

I tried to use Chinese bamboo drawing to obscure the Chinese cottage.

I used some Chinese painting techniques of drawing bamboos stems to obscure buildings . I also modified the way of drawing Chinese bamboo to obscure the Chinese cottage.

Bamboo stems are usually drawn straight, but I made it wavy and darken them while making the cottages behind brighter and lighter, suggesting that the subject is the cottage.

The colour of the trees are much darker than the red brick building. As I looked at the main building from the art room through the window, the mist and condensation in white were highlighted, trying to make the school building double obscured. Some of the barriers that prevented me from knowing my school more are temporary, just like mist.

Clay Work and Textile

Cartoon(School magazine)