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Frida Kahlo
Life
Born-6th July 1907
Died-13th July 1954

Frida was a Mexican painter. She spent most of her childhood and adult  life at La Casa Azul her family home in Coyoacan. She was disabled by polio as a child. She was a promising student hoping to go to medical school until being injured in a bus accident when she was 18. The bus accident caused her life long pain and medical problems. Despite the tragic accident she found interest in art and her new goal in life was to become an artist. Frida had great interest in polatics which led her to join the Mexican communist party in 1927 she went on to meet Diego Rivera he was also a Mexican artist and the two married in 1929. They then spent the late 1920s and early 1930s travelling Mexico and US. Frida spent this time developing her art style, her insparation coming from Mexican folk culture. She painted mostly self portraits. In the 1940s Frida participated in exhibitions in Mexico and the US whilst working as an art teacher. Friday health started to decline as she had her first solo exhibition in before her death in 1953.

Art

Frida Kahlos art was surrealist self portraits of herself inspired by Mexican folk culture and represented her feminist views and her representation of the female form often defining societal expectations of what a woman should be. Her paintings often reflected her life experiences and her physical pain.

relevance

Even though you may look at this artist and question what relevance she has to the deconstruction of gender I believe Frida Kahlo is an essential artist that paved the way for gender nonconforming artists and artists that step outside of gender roles. Frida was considered an icon for the chicanos (feminism movement) and the LGBTQ+ movement. She defied the roles and conformities of a woman yet she is a strong feminism symbol. she didn't have to conform to the expectations of what society said a woman was she was strong and respected for who she was as an individual.

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Theory

This Art work is in my opinion one of Frida Kahlos most influential art works, it has the most depth in terms of feelings and her life, it gives us a perspective of being in her shoes. Iv noticed in many of Fridas Art works she uses a lot of visual symbolism such the column in the image represents the chronic pain she was in. There's many visual representation in this piece the broken column and nails represent different types of the pain she experienced, in my opinion the back brace is holding her together I think it visually represents how its a hindrance to her life but its also stopping her from falling apart its there to help her and support her.

color

In this image in the background the sky is blue in my opinion the blue sky represents Fridas healing from the accident but I think it also represents her sadness and struggles with her pain. This shade of blue shows a lot of emotion and intent I think it gives the view the emotion nd feeling that she was both feeling mentally and fiscally.

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Theory

This artpeice by Frida Kahlo depicks two images of frida,the right image depicks frida in traditional mexian clothing with a picture of her husband Diego with her heart attached as if its fuelling her very being , whereas the left contradicts this as it shows frida with a wedding dress whilst she is cutting the veins attached to her heart , bleeding onto her dres. These two images represented the sides of her personality Diego liked and disliked. This image was created after her divorce with diego and it shows the two fridas holding hands wich represented how frida could support herself.

In fridas kahlos art she often used blood as a representation of union, family , her womanhood and her pain. In this image I belive the use of blood represents her heartache for Diego eventhough she was an independant woman. I also belive the right portrait of herself represented an idealised version of herself according to Diego, however the left side showed her true self and how she wished to express herself.

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Art

Olivia parlays art focuses on making art out of household items that have gendered stereotypes. Turning these items into symbolic art pieces with make us question gender stereotyping.

Relevance

Olivia Parlic work tries to break down and understand gender stereotyping she does this by using genderd household items and making them into a symbolicpice of art breaking down gender steriotypes and questioning why we as a society gender items is exactly what I want to reflect in my FMP I want to deconstruct the concept of gender and question why as a society we put roles and societal expectation on gender.

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So far in the course I have enjoyed experimenting with many different mediums such as wax resist, clay, making wooden sculptures and animation Iv also enjoyed learning and researching about many artists such as Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti.
I would like to experiment further with clay and working with charcoal
I want to improve on trying to understand the artists works and why they where created I need to go in more detail of why I am drawn to an image to understand how to improve my own work.

My project proposal is called Gender Deconstruction. Gender has always been a topic that interested me even when I was young I was puzzled by why blue and pink where gendered colors and why girls had to where skirts and boys had to where pants I never like the idea of having these two categories I preferred to have freedom on what I could do and were so I wore pants and my favorite color was blue. Now gender and identity is one of my favorite subjects I'm drawn most to how gender is perceived in society. gender is often seems to be a divide between to types of people both sides given roles and expectations by society. I view gender as less black and white, gender is fluid its a spectrum there is no defining definition of what a man or a woman is. People have different ideologies of what gender is and what defines it in there eye. I chose the deconstruction of gender for my FMP to explore what gender means to me and how I view it within society. I never liked being in a category of man or woman it made me feel like there where limitations to how I could express myself and how I could identify, then I changed my pronouns to they/them and discovered that I'm non-binary I felt as if I had freedom to express myself how ever I wished. This is something I wish to show in my FMP, the freedom of expression and how it makes people feel.

I will evaluate my work by discussing on this pallet what is working and how I am improving and developing my work. I think I will talk to people to ask advice and upload this here. I want to develop my creativity but I also want to discover how I am learning and I will write a full project proposal on this site.

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this artwork to me raises the question of why we gender objects and why as a society we put gender roles and expectation that don't have any relevance to how society is today. why are heels a female genders shoe why is it only socially exactable for woman to wear heels this is relevant to my fmp because I am exploring how gender is viewed in our society. the light shade of white and the red and also feminine colors red especially is a very gendered color its seen as an attractive beauty standard.

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Life
Born-1984

Kim Leutwyler is an artist based in Sydney Australia. There art has been in galleries across Australia and the US Kim wanted to study accounting after they finished there high school education but they impulsively enrolled in the art history program at Arizona state university. They focused mostly on ceramics and printmaking. They achieved bachelors degrees in studio art and art history they then graduated from the school of Art institute of Chicago with painting and drawing degree as well.

Art

kim Leutwylers art focuses on people that are apart of the LGBTQ+ community as well as allies of the community but there work mainly focuses on gender identities such as gender nonconforming people. There art focuses on gender as a social construct.

Relevance

There art has great relevance to my FMP as they study mainly different ideologies and expressions of gender and how every individual expresses there gender identity differently.

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Iv already experimented with what gender expression means to me if you look at my art that I created independently Iv drawn portraits of people with features that go against stereotypical beauty and gender standards I'm drawn to creating images like this because of its individuality and uniqueness.

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If you look at this image you'll see why I chose to draw her as I found her unibrow (very much like Frieda Kahlo) inspiring this model is called Sophia Hadjipanteli. She is confident and strong in who she is and doesn't care about the beauty stereotypes she sees beauty in who she is as an individual.

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This is another image of a model with a unique image. She has a unique facial structure, I was drawn to her because of how strong her jaw looked and how broad her nose bride was these features are often associated with how a masculine facial features but I find it inspiring to see how structures can work on any gender. we don't have to categories beauty as one defining image of what different gender identity's should look like beauty is a lot like gender its fluid, the way we view beauty and gender in society is based on the male gaze and the idea that whatever is attractive is also the standards for beauty when in my opinion beauty shouldn't have a definition of what you can and cant look like.

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I created this by taking pictures of my face in different angles on the computer then printing them out after that I cute them into pieces and experimented with the placement of them on the page once I was happy with the placement I stuck them down with glue.

this art work was inspired by hannah hoch I was inspired by her technique and thought it would be useful to represent gender as she breaks down and reconstruct the human face I thought this would be a good analogy for gender and my personal gender identity. in this image there are many different angles and sides to my face this is to represents the complexity of gender and the fluidity of gender as it can change one day I can feel more masculine and the other day I can feel more feminine and ill present more fem or mask.

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I experiment a lot with switching gender stereotypes and trying to break gender roles however to better deconstruct and understand gender I wanted to remove the aspect of gender complete so I created this image which shows a genderless person. whilst creating the form and structure as well as the color I tried to stay away from using anything that could link it to a gender. the best way to represent gender and why we have stereotypes is to present a person with none of these stereotypes I believe this will raise the question of why we gender thing so heavily because looking at this image you will automatically try to put it into a gendered category and in doing so you'll question why we do this.

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this image represents the removal of gender completely similar to the image above

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We are put into a category when we are born these categories are male and female and they are determined by our biological sex and this is the concept of gender that is widely accepted however it's proven sex and gender are two different things while biological sex may be determined by our physical body gender is a far more complex Concepts the concept of gender performerty is that if we are assigned female at birth and there are expectations and roles that we are expected to full film anyone that doesn't fit into this categorisation is seen as not the norm and is treated by Society as unusual and wrong this concept of gender performance he was to help us understand as a society that gender and the roles that come with it or a performance in or Society structure of the term woman and man don't have a defining definition as these two binary genders as we understand them evolve over time as do the roles and expectations that come with them

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Kim Leutwyler artworks mainly focus on the people they draw and how they express themselves. This particular image is quite androgynous as it shows a person with stereotypical feminine features that present stereotypically masculine this is shown by them wearing boxes with the word handsome which is stereotypically a word used to complement masculine features it is also shown by the pubic hair on the armpits which is another stereotypical masculine feature. Another way they present this person as masculine is the use of contrasting colours in the background. These Colours or blue and orange and dark shades however in my opinion do you say contrasting colours in this context represents the contrast in gender expression

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The person focused in this image is a drag queen I believe in this image is the use of what the breasts being removed with the colour showing through the back represents the complex gender expression as there is pink at the top which is a colour associated with feminine and blue at the bottom which is a colour associated with masculine and yellow in the middle which in my opinion represents gender expressions that are not in the binary watching this there is a yellow triangle on their face which in my opinion represents that foetal features can't put you in a category of gender.

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with this section I used blue which is a masculine color how ever I used rounded more feminine shapes in the face to create a more softer feminine structure to the face

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with this section I was exploring beauty standard and how we create an image of how we think genders should look. I used red as its seen as a beautiful and sexual color as well as the long eyelashes and the rounded lips I tried to better understand why we categories certain facial features as attractive for certain genders to better understand what gender is in our society.

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to create this 4 sided face I went to the wood works department and drew a rough design of the face the measured it out to make it even then tracing around the drawing on the paper onto the wood I then cut out the faces from tow pieces of wood with a hand saw and then sanding the down and painting them using acrylic paint.

I tried to mix everything Iv experimented with so far into one art work iv included the none gender aspect and the gendered stereotypes and the representation color has with gender and gender nonconformity

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Materials

First to create this piece I had to think out how I was going to do it and come up with a plan so I sketched out a rough idea of what I wanted it to be and sketched out a few ideas and picked on of them I decided on a ring of words around the main character genderless person because it would draw your attention into the art piece and to the genderless person and also help you look around the peace and understand what it's about I used cardboard and paper to create the words the main figure and the circle behind the main figure I painted them with acrylic paint and the stand is made of wood that I made in the woodworks department

Meaning

I thought the best way to represent gender would be to remove all aspects of gender all together as it makes us think why we put so much emphasis on gender in the first place so to do this I decided on painting a genderless figure as the main piece for the art then around I decided to have the words “gender is not defined by your perception” this as well as the eyes surrounding the eyes represent the meaning of the peace the eyes around the figure are pointed to the chest and the crotch as these are areas on the human body which people like to assume your gender the most so that eyes represent the perception of society constantly looking for ways to categorise people into a gender

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To create this I started with a canvas drawing out a rough idea of the placement of the face after this I used black wool to outline the face sticking it on with PVA glue then using different shades of yellow I glues the wool in a pattern trying to recreating lighting and highlights with the shades of yellow and lastly I got to balls of wool and I sowed them to the canvas and added a few strands of wool hanging from the canvas to create he hair.

In this image I tried to experiment with representing gender threw colors more I used yellow in this image to represent the gender neutral aspect of this person I decided that yellow was the best color to represent gender nonconformity and its helped me think of ideas for my final out come and how im going to use color to represent gender.

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For this image I used: acrylic paint, fabric ,hot glue ,beads , paper and nail polish

with this I was trying to switch gender roles using feminine objects and color on a male using bead as necklaces and piercings and nail polish on the nails as well as a skirt my idea with this was to break down gender stereotypes by contrasting them with the opposite sex.

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materials : fabric ,buttons , acrylic paint, blue pastels, white pastels, black pastels.

With this image I decided to not only represent objects and color of the opposite sex but to also wanted in this image the main focus to be on the facial hair on this woman as its seen as socially unacceptable for a woman to have hair however I tried to break the stereotypes by embracing the facial hair.

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I decided to explore all ways to present gender with this image I leaned more toward stereotypes with a very masculine person I used the dark charcoal to extenuate the definition in the jaw and I used blue in the eye as its a stereotypically masculine color I also used straight blocky lines to extenuate the sharp edges of the masculine face I thought it was important in my FMP to try and show every side of gender.

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With this image I used continues line I believe this was the best medium to use to create a complicated angry scrambled emotion and I think it was successful this image was to represent how gender dysphoria can effect people I was trying to create the emotion of frustration and being trapped in a body that you don't identify with and the struggles that come with it everyday.

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When I first joined the course my main goal was to learn more about artists and how they created their art and why because befor I joined the course one of the main things I struggled with was generating ideas for my art and drawing them from my head. I also wanted to have the opportunity to experiment with different mediums and learn how I could use them to create different effects and grow as an artist.

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Over the course I have achieved many new skills and have grown as an artist. I have achieved many of Michael's I set myself at the start of the Year fullstop I've improved on idea generation now I can confidently think of a clear idea for my projects and be able to execute it. I've experimented with many new mediums such as watercolours, acrylic paint, fabric, continuous line, photography, animation, woodworks, clay, charcoal and pastels. Each medium can create a different effect and can convey different emotions and meanings that can improve your art as an example I've use wax crayons and watercolours to create a Henry Moore inspired artwork using this technique creatives are dark sad and painful emotion it helped put emotion and meaning into my work. Because I've learnt and how to put meaning into my artwork I find it a lot easier to evaluate other artists work I understand how artists use colour, line, shape, form, space and texture to help cat attention from the viewer and make the viewer think. The last thing I think I have improved on its organisation it's still something I struggle with but it's vitally important in a professional setting in any are related job you have to be organised and the goods at time management. Being in a learning environment has helped me understand that and although my time management and organisation is far from perfect I still believe it's something I've improved on.

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I think this year there is room for improvement the main thing I need to improve is my time management and organisation even though I have improved them it's still something that needs a lot of improvement. Another thing that needs improvement is my writing this year the thing I've struggled with the roast is writing and keeping up with my work. I need to work on giving myself more time and organising my writing better. I need to work on researching more when given an assignment to better understand what I'm doing and it makes it simple to do my writing assignments.

That is a lot of learnt from doing my FMP I've made a lot of mistakes that I've learnt from I could have gone more into detail with my idea generation exploring what I wanted my fmp to be and what I wanted to say with it. I also should have done more research on gender and specifically how it affects others and others opinion on it. The final out come was the hardest out of everything as I made many mistakes when I first came up with the idea I didn't fully think it through and didnt draw up a clear plan I made a lot of last minute decisions and was a bit too ambitious about the size of it due to the lack of time I had I also didn't think about how I was going to present it as an example I didn't consider how I would be able to make a stand and have the wheel behind spin I luckily managed to draw up a quick idea and I made the stand in Wood works but if I had organised and planned out what I was going to do I would have had no issues.

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materials: clay and acrylic paint

With this model I was trying to experiment with how to represent gender in form and how to represent it through a human body because my other experimental work has focused on the face where as this shows a chest with top surgery scars.

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this art work was inspired by Henry Moore I used the same technique as he does with his wax water color art works this art work for me has a lot of emotion and pain and its represents the mental scars and suffering that people experience in life in terms of hate, misgendering and the constant abuse trans people go threw as this image shows a tired hurt sad old person it represents how society negatively effects people from a young age to despise there identity.

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For this image I used continues line continues line is a good medium to use to show emotion and that's what this image is about it show the complexities of finding your identity and discovering who you are its shows the struggles and confusion and the different path we have to walk threw in life to find ourselves and our gender identities.

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Male, female, them, us, me
nerves and energy make us what we are

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Up until now most of my experimental work has there been about finding your gender identity or the struggles that come with finding your gender identity but was this image I tried to take a different approach to gender all together I tried to show an image of a person who was happy with their gender identity and happy within themselves and content which is why I used to blue it is as to me it's a very calm and collected comfortable colour it represents contentment

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With this image I tried to do the polar opposite of the image above I tried to show an image of a person struggling with their gender identity as I thought it would be a good contrast to have these two images with very contrasting colours and contrasting concept as this image shows the frustration and stress of having to find your gender identity and living with the stresses of having different gender identities in society as it's not well accepted and there is a lot of abuse and hate in society people with gender identities that do not what coincide with the gender norms

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This image was inspired by Henry Moore and I used clay to create this this image represents to me femininity I decided to lean more it towards the binary genders because I wanted to show all aspects and all sides of gender all together so I used a lot of Smooth curves and very stereotypical form for the female body