Psychedelic poster art

Wes Wilson 

Wes Wilson is known for designing psychedelic posters during the 1960's, creating a font that had the illusion of melting or moving, this psychedelic style was very popular during the period of time and had links to the peace movement.

The posters themselves use a very limited pallet of colours, no more than 3, these vibrant colours contrast against each other to bring the text forward they also create a bright poster to add to the psychedelic nature. Wilson's use of font makes it very difficult to read due to the wavy shapes and morphing of the letters, the audience would have to study the image thoroughly in order to read the message, however this was precisely its purpose as a lot of these posters advertised events for a certain social group, so there was an element of exclusivity in his work.

Andy Warhol

Born on August 6th 1928 in Pennsylvania, he graduated high school in 1945 where he then moved on to study commercial art at the Carnegie institute of Technology. After that he moved to New York to start a career in magazine illustrations and advertising.
Warhol first started gaining attention for his ink drawings of shoe advertisements this led to RCA records hiring Warhol to design album covers for them.

Chuck Close 

Born on July 5th, 1940 in Washington, most of his early works were large scale portraits based off photographs. Throughout his career he has learned to add to his artistic arsenal in order to create his own distinct style of portrait paintings. 

Although over the years his style has changed somewhat the technique is still the same, as he will grid every photo he copies and copies section by section.

Close suffers from prosopagnosia which means he is not able to recognise faces easily, and it was later in his career when he started to wonder why he was always drawn to portraits when he realised that subconsciously it was because it helped him to remember faces.

Later in his life in 1988 a spinal artery collapse left him severely paralysed and bound to a wheelchair, however this only slightly dented his career as he went on to take a greater interest in the photographic side of portraits. 

Personally I really like Chuck Close's portraits, I like the bright and vivid colours used in each painting they bring a sense of liveliness to the piece. 

The grid method is also a great way of breaking up the composition, having many different segments coloured but together creating an accurate portrait. By creating all these different segments he is able to add emphasis to the shaded areas, this technique is also effective because it creates texture adding more life to the painting. 

Francis Bacon

Born on the 28th October 1909 in a nursing home in Dublin, Bacons early life was rough and not easy to deal with, after leaving education and being kicked out of his home by his father after a strange incident. He then moved to London and resorted to theft in order to get by after being fired from multiple jobs, he then found himself in Soho drifting through 'Londons homosexual underworld'.

He returned to london in 1928 after spending time in Berlin and Paris to pursue a career in interior design. 

Crucifixion was his first painting to gain real attention, however a lot of this reception was negative and this caused Bacon to stop painting for almost 10 years and caused him to destroy a lot of his early works. 

It wasn't until 1944 till Bacon started seeing success from his paintings, but from this point on he was known for his graphic and emotionally raw style.

Personally I find Francis Bacons work a bit disturbing, all of his pieces seem to be dark and sinister, they never have a sense of happiness or joy and although this is likely to be caused by his troubled past the paintings remind me of something out of a horror scene. 

Although his portraits don't carry that same serial killer atmosphere I'm still not a fan of them, its evident that they emotions being conveyed through them are ones of suffering and depression but its hard to gauge the facial expressions of the people in them, due to the morphing of their faces, so in my self portrait in the style of Bacon I didn't morph the face so much 

Bacon uses the colours in the photos to show the emotions, solid colours used for the background and washed out pale colours for the face.

He creates a stretched effect on the face using longer brush strokes, and the use of white looks as though he's used chalk on the face.