After visiting the place and drawing 3 different pictures of the space itself, the surroundings and mot importantly the artwork, I was very intrigued by the work of Vik Muniz. I was very interested by the way Muniz was able to create mixed-media collages that stem from problems, that at some point, were important to him. For that reason, I decided that Vik Muniz would be the artist that I would trap for this project.
Because of how intrigued I was with the actual work and technique of Muniz, I decided that I want to create something similar to his work in some way. I wanted to be similar yet interesting enough, that at some point, Muniz would actually stop for a moment and pay attention to the piece.
At the point of actually thinking of the piece, the crisis in Syria broke out. I thought that this would be a perfect opportunity to transfer these frustrating emotions of a tragic problem into a piece of art, similar to what Muniz does. However, I needed to think of what i want to show and how.
This picture of the Syrian boy who was found washed up on a Turkish shore, seems to be the face of the Syrian war and the Syrian tragedy. This is why I decided to work with this image as the base for my collage, which is also something that Muniz does with his work.
Here, I was thinking of the different medium that I could use in order to come up with the collage for the piece. I thought of using trash, representing how poorly the Syrian crisis has been handled. I also thought of magazines, painting or even coming up with certain color scheme.
I chose to draw and color the boy in bold colors in order for him to be the main focus of the piece. I wanted him to pop out. This is also something that Muniz tends to do when he does figures or portraits which is very common. Because of the background of the image itself and the way that is made up from just different shades of blue and sand is also made out of a very dull brownish-grey scheme, i decided to do the collage out of magazine as it would be the easiest to control in terms of color choice. Also, I think that magazine is a suitable medium since it is a form of media, and in terms of the Syrian crisis, the media played a huge role in the portrayal of this issue, and of course, mostly with a negative impact. By doing so, I aim to rip up the magazine, as a representation of destroying the poor media portrayal of this devastating dilemma.
After the boy was drawn and colored, i began to cut out the pieces from the magazine. I kept the image in mind when ripping out the pages from the magazine in order to make sure that the color scheme would match.
To simplify the process, I stuck the actual image of the sea on the piece itself so as the magazine pieces would be as closely matched as possible to the image, and make the sea look as realistic as possible. The same was also done for the sand.
I continued to stick the magazine pieces onto the artwork, and eventually the texture and the movement of the water and the sand began to show.
The final product:
I was really happy with the outcome of the artwork and I believe that it would be something that would trap Vik Muniz. Both the physical aspect of the piece, along with the message behind it would be something that Muniz would interested in, since it is in many ways very different, yet the context is different.
