Artist Influence and Response - Cristo Dagorov

An Artist who has influenced my Project and an Artistic response.

An artist who has influence this project is Christo Dagorov, a Bulgarian born (25/11/1970) self-taught painter and sculpture who is particularly known for his incredibly detailed drawings. He creates these drawings using pencil or silver-point on paper or freehand engraving on steel plates. Dagorov produces hyper realistic art work which is entwined with surrealism. I really like his detailed lip drawing series which are influenced by truth, lies, the important, and the unimportant and different types of communication.

This is evident in drawings such as ‘Slavery’, ‘Negligence’ and ‘Wealth’ which highlights first world issues to the audience such as our dependence on technology, neglecting animal habitats and human greed. Unlike Lora Zombie who presents her views of current affairs in an exciting, bright and bold way, Dagorov’s drawings are understated and highly detailed with the subject matter not being immediately obvious. Dagorov presents his work in this way because it encourages the audience to study the work and interpret the message behind it. I like his work because it makes you question human behavior, a theme of which, is an integral part of ‘self’.

'Indiscretion'

This drawing is called ‘indiscretion’; the meaning of this word is one’s speech or behavior that displays bad judgement. The drawing is of a man trapped behind mesh and metal bars that blend into the outline of lips. The drawing of the man and lips are realistic but the surreal aspect to the drawing is that these elements are disproportionate to one another Dagorov has done this to show the scale of which the person is consumed by the situation they find them self in – or the consequences of the words they have said – making them a prisoner of their own mouth. What I like about the person is that you can only make out the nose of the face – making them identity and gender-less, Dagorov has done this to allow the audience to interpret who or what the figure represents and allows them to project their own image onto the drawing making it more personal. He has used crosshatching to put texture into the drawing and has allowed for lighter tones of grey around the lips and darker tones within the mesh to give the drawing a sense of perspective. I really like the Idea of incorporating images of people into human body parts such as seeing a person looking out from within an eye rather than just the eye on its own. This is an Idea I can take forward in my design Ideas.

I have responded to Dagorov by drawing my own mouth using pencil, instead of drawing a surreal image inside the mouth I decided to focus on trying to recreate the realistic texture Dagorov achieves though crosshatching with the idea of incorporating a more surreal element into it once I have gotten the hang of drawing the lips.  Hence this drawing is a practice of technique piece rather than carrying a message. Where the lips I drew where quite small, I found it hard to be delicate enough with the cross hatching so areas of the lips are more of a ‘flat’ grey than a smooth transition from dark to light grey tones, If I were to do this again I would draw it large scale like Dagorov so I have more leeway when creating the texture. I think the overall shape of the mouth, like Dagorov is realistic, however the top lip is a little thick, I intended for the pencil to fade out sooner than it did however I lost the original lip line and I started the lip detail too high up so it extend over it. I think I have managed to get a 3D effect like Dagorov with the tonal range I have used, Though I would make the top lip lighter and the bottom lip darker as well as shade more in the lip partition to try and get more of a 3D perspective to it. To expand on this Idea I could add the image of a worried looking eye to represent ‘hind sight’ which falls into the theme of communication and how we all say things we regret but don’t know it at the time.

http://www.christodagorov.com/index.php