Ways of Seeing

The artist Brian Mifsud was born on March 29, 1997 in Queens New York. He now currently lives in Manhattan and studies in Brooklyn. The artist drew inspiration from Tom Phillips “A Humument” to create his own versions of this style of composition which combines both language and art to convey anything the artist desires. 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. In this case Brian made three compositions with a theme that juxtaposes with the theme of the original Book. In this exhibit Brian chose the book Hunger Games Catching Fire which has more of a darker and serious theme to it so Brian juxtaposes this theme by making it a bit lighter and more into a comedy. To help convey this Brian also change the title of this composition to Off the Hinge.

Brian created the compositions using a variation of sizes of Micron pens mainly using 0.25, 0.35 and 0.45 mm. Also he used a Faber-Castell Brush pen. For his first design, your idea he creates a composition the perfectly conveys the title of the composition that being your idea using the universal symbol of an idea being a cloud which can be seen in different forms of media, from comic books to cartoons you can see the thought bubble used to convey an idea. The artist also uses different techniques like repetition of the clouds and variation of the cloud sizes to help create emphasis on the main large cloud surrounding the phrase your idea. This composition helps to also convey the theme Brian is trying to get across because the imagery of clouds gives the feeling of dreaming and happiness to help create that lighter theme.

For his second design, Unity, he first had to envision what color combined would make a nice color that is not too harsh so he came up with two colors blue and red which when mixed created a nice purple. So with that Brian colored in one half of the page with red and the other half of the page with blue so when they met in the middle they created a nice shade of purple to show the unity between the colors. The purple line in the middle also has this rhythmic vibe too it that also gives it a nice sense of design.

For his third design Brian wanted to have another design that was in black and white but also did not use the words on the page for his design either. In this design Brian tries again to convey a lighter tone compared to the darker tone of the book. In this composition we see a nice soothing line that goes in a type of wave formation that with dark lines that fill up around the line but not touching the main line with a gap between it. This to the artist gives the composition a lighter tone.

With his composition Off the Hinge, Brian wanted to convey certain ideas that can change the darker tones of the book too the lighter tones of Brian’s new creation. The work of alternated texts along with visual images creates a new story from a preexisting one. It creates more room for stories that have yet to be told as the original source is left as inspirations behind those stories.