Ivan Hoo

Well, who is Ivan Hoo? He is a visual artist and art instructor from Singapore. As a self taught artist, he has been constantly drawing since a very young age. He focuses on hyper-realistic drawings and still life drawings of everyday things, and prefers to work with dry mediums such as pastel but would like to do more paintings in the future. 

Recently, he has been working on wood with pastel. Yes, wood. A medium from which paper is derived from, yet has a completely different texture. Below are some of his works:

One thing that absolutely baffles me about his work is that once the drawing is complete, the grain of the wood disappears beneath the image. I always thought that would have an effect on the drawing, making it more difficult to produce but Hoo makes it look as easy as pie.After a closer observation of his drawings, he appears to create a base layer of colour first, from which he builds more solid colour blocks before adding in the finer colour and detail. His artwork is rule astonishing and at a first glance, I actually thought they were photographs. 

Although I work in a completely different medium, I could still reflect his way of working by working up the base layers and adding the detail, which I definitely need to start doing as I just dive straight in, head for the details and then get frustrated when it doesn't work as half of it is complete and the other isn't.

What have I learnt from this artist? Don't believe everything you see at first glance.

The Man Who Punched a £7.8m Painting

Whilst watching the recent news, it was brought to my attention that a man who was visiting a gallery, thought it would be a great idea to punch a Monet painting that was worth an estimated £8million. After further research online, I discovered that the man was actually jailed for his wrong-doing, and I also found out how they restored the damaged painting.

The Daily Mail (Mail Online) states that Andrew Shannon, aged 49, entered the gallery back in 2012 in a calm manner, and claims that he 'collapsed' onto the painting due to a heart condition, although witness say that he clearly used his fist. He has been jailed for six years out of a maximum of ten and has been banned from entering all galleries.
What truly shocked me was that art was protected in such a way that if damaged, you could be sent to jail for it.

After two years, the painting has finally been able to be repaired by finely sewing the tears back together with the same material that the painting was on, and then after collecting all the tiny, microscopic fragments that fell from the painting when hit, they carefully placed those back onto the painting after hours of research into the painting. This site explains how.

This gives artists a sense of security in a way, to know that their artwork will always be protected when on display, and to know that whoever damages it could get sent to jail for such a crime. How has it affected me? Well, I know that I won't be going round punching paintings anytime soon! (Not that I would anyway…)