Artist Analysis

Artist/ Maker: Duncan Grant (1913) 
Title: Rug Design
Materials and Techniques: Hand-knotted woollen pile

Duncan James Corrowr Grant was born in 21 January 1885 and died on 8 May 1978. He was a British painter and designer of textiles, pottery and theatre sets and costumes.
Grant attended school in England from 1894, where he was educated at Hillbrow School, a preparatory school in Rugby, and St Paul's School, London.
In 1913 Roger Fry founded the Omega Workshops, a group of artists designing furniture, pottery, carpets, textiles and stained glass. Duncan Grant designed pottery and textiles, like his carpet, for the Workshops. The outbreak of war…
( http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O89728/carpet-grant-duncan/ )

I have analysed the tiny repetitive lines on this Rug Design, which I consider very powerful because of the quantity of it on overall. The long stretched rectangles covers up half of the overall design which balances the equation of half long stretched rectangles and half repetitive small dashes.
There are seven overall long rectangles three in the middle with same colours and two on each sides of the middle three. Again this balances the look of the design.
All the slanted dashes are slanted to the same direction which is quite significant, as it can indicate the signal to walk on the right side of the rug when people walk pass each other coming from both directions.

(http://www.carpetbags.co.uk/bags/euroglad_greengeo.php#  )

Here is an image of a carpet design bag, which I found it on an online shopping website called “Carpet Bags”. I found this quite similar to the Rug design work produced by my artist Duncan Grant. A technique I used to compare the two designs at the very beginning is by squinting my eyes to match the two designs by two different designers. The colours in both textile designs are very similar despite Grant’s Rug Design has more portion of red (colour).

Loretta and the influence on carpet bags:

“In 1974 I was asked if I had any ideas for items for sale for our local charity stall that friends were setting up together at a local country horse fair. It didn’t take much thinking about........”

(http://www.carpetbags.co.uk/about.php )

Jasper Johns

Title: Numbers 0-9 (1959)

Medium: encaustic and collage

Jasper Johns Jr is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.

The numbers 0 to 9 painted in mostly primary colours of red, yellow, and blue.

Johns has also used orange as orange is the opposite colour of blue in the colour wheel.

When I deeply analysed into this particular artwork, I also considered that he has used the colours that are in between yellow and red, as you can see the image of the colour wheel below. To make the numbers stand out, Johns has used the complementary colour; orange to contrast with blue. For instance the number 3, you can see that Johns has used blue acrylic as the inner fragment and also to give the number a tone and a close to opposite colour red-orange on the outer background of the number.

Duncan Grant and Jasper Johns Comparison

Numbers In Colours

Rug Design

Both of these two artists Jasper Johns and Duncan Grant have divided sections to separate each individual from the rest of its surroundings. This could be illustrated as Bags of numbers and bags of shapes. This also gives the viewer more time to engage with the whole piece of work. Even though the two has used completely different mediums, they both have used red and yellow on their work, as the two colours are highly visible. 
Johns using numbers and Grant using shapes on their work could indicate that both artists were influenced by mathematical existence.
Johns using blue acrylic paint differs from Grants Rug design as blue dominates the rest of the colours in Johns’ “Numbers in colours”
Both of the two artists have boarders which they have also used in their work, For Instance in Rug Design Grant has used the slanted dashes for his border, which he has also used in his interior work. Johns has picked up a colour from his core piece of work and used it as the colour for his border frame.

Title: Number 80

Materials/mediums: cast paper, objects 

This contemporary art work is assembled, piece by piece, from the remains of contemporary life, which he transforms and presents back to us. Often in early works by Drew were painted over in one colour or covered by rust, which gave a uniform coating to the disparate parts of the whole, and emphasised the decay of the discarded objects. More recently, in works such as Number 77, the artist chose to leave the objects unchanged, adding to the tension between the chaos of the vast number of interacting objects and the grid-like pattern in which they are carefully arranged. Drew continued his investigation of collected objects, but instead of presenting the objects themselves, he made paper casts—thin shells or ghost forms of the original objects.
To create the installation, Drew collected over four hundred common object; toys, furniture, appliances, and household wares—from thrift stores, junkyards, and off the street. With a large group of interns and staff, he cast each object in paper, removing the original object once the paper cast was created. They are hollow, nearly weightless forms that echo the original objects from which they were made more than they replicate them.

Biography of Leonardo Drew

Leonardo Drew was born in Tallahassee, Florida in 1961, and moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut, when he was six years old. He began making art at a very young age, and pursued formal art training at Parsons School of Design, New York (1981–1982), and The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (BFA, 1985). Drew is best known for his abstract, monumental sculptural assemblages. His works are never titled because the artist does not want to impose an interpretation on the viewer; instead they are assigned numbers. Drew has had many one-person exhibitions in national and international museums, including the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, Ireland (2001), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC (2000), and The Bronx Museum of the Arts in Bronx, New York (2000).