Module 1 Chapter 9 Archimboldo

This was quite a quick chapter to complete. I started out looking at Archimboldo's work online. There was a surprising amount of it. The paintings are very clever but don't appeal much and they do really have a grotesque air and slightly sinister feel to them, however they are really well done. It made me wonder how people of his time reacted to them. Of the varied series that he made I preferred the flower based portraits, they are softer, more appealing and  less repulsive.

I also looked at some modern examples of work in the style of Archimboldo. Some were brilliant, IE the one below, others funny and some just plain scary, IE the banana face

I really wanted to do this exercise with actual fruit and veg but when I worked out the cost implications of how I envisaged the piece I decided to use pictures instead and spent a great afternoon googling exotic fruit and veg. I was entertained by how puerile some of the images were. 

I also decided to do a vegetable piece based on one of the flower portraits.

 I used spinach for the body 

Samphire for the arms. Blueberries and star shaped courgettes for the epaulets with asparagus shoulder decoration. Red chillies across the chest and some weird hairy fruit for buttons. The ruff was a base of sweetcorn. The face, bean sprouts. The eye a half walnut shell with a fleshy seed as an eyeball

I then layered the ruff with pine nuts and cauliflower to give the ruff detail, added an apple for the cheek, chillies for lips and blueberry brows. 

The hair was made up of lychees, red cabbage, star fruit coloured raspberries, some pomegranate, physallis flower, thyme, some strange tubers and a seeded exotic fruit that looked like a crab

I really enjoyed doing this but when it was done felt as though ~I had only just created a base to work on further with drawing and detailing but I decided to leave it there