Category: Coursework

The artist Brandy Ortiz was born on 1997 in New York, NY. She currently lives and studies in the city she was born in. She was inspired by the works of Tom Phillips in his A Humument book to create compositions that combined linguistic language and art into three pages of her vision. Tom Phillip was an English artist who purchased a cheap book to use as the basis of an art project known as A Humument. Behind his artwork,  he paints, collages or draws over the pages, leaving some of the text peeking through in serpentine bubble shapes, creating a found text with its own story, different from the original. Ortiz made compositions with themes that juxtapose from the original theme from the novel Brimestone by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. While Brimestone theme was thriller, the artist decided that her artwork would have a softer tone. Within her creation of Glass Child contains Ocean Breeze, Picture Perfect Family, and Love Exists, each having their own messages that relate to a gentle tone.

Ortiz used Pigma Micron Pens(0.2, 0.5 and Brush), Faber-Castell Brush Pen, pencils(HB-6B) and a pair of scissors as her materials for her artwork. For her first design, Ocean Breeze, she shows a silhouette of a boy relaxing in a beach setting with the sun rising. She first made outlines of the boy and the waves by using the micron pens. Afterwards she used the Faber-Castell Brush Pen to ink the ocean and the sun. While having the top half of the page not inked and most of the image within the bottom area leave a visual sense of figure and ground. Figure and ground is the relationship between positive and negative space. The revealed message that the artist created says “Cool dawn air. Hear the surf thundering. Smell the salt air of the invisible ocean beyond”. The boy in the image is taking in the soothing sensation of the environment that the text creates.

For her second design, Picture Perfect Family, she first creates an outline of a frame within the margin area of the page with the micron pens. Next she uses the Faber-Castell Brush Pen to black out the rest of the page leaving out the frame and the revealed text. The revealed message that the artist created says “Family and friends perfectly never changed. Countless dinner parties, weekend parties, living room”. The message conveys a family that enjoys getting together for parties in their living room. A frame is a boundary made from either a rectangle, square or circle that is placed on the edges of the paper or the margins drawn within. The concept behind the frame was to transform the text to make it look like a family portrait since the idea behind the message was family gathering.

For her third design, Love exists, she used scissors to cut out pieces of the page to reveal words from other pages. Instead of blacking out the page to show her message, Ortiz creates a message from cutting out certain words from various pages to show all on one page. The revealed message that the artist created says “Love was fantastic to obtain in the vast world”.  The artist made a heart in the lower left corner of the page while everything was shaded by pencil to show low key. Low Key is when the values of an image are predominantly dark. The idea behind the message was that love is a great feeling to have in the world we live in. The heart shows that love will always be there even when surrounded by darkness. With her vision of the humument, Ortiz wanted to show her ideas of different messages of through the language and the art she depicted. Even though each page had its own concept the overall tone was pleasant.