Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Shepard Fairey & Obama


In tune with the current Obama fever :D.....

Shepard Fairey is one very lucky artist!!
From skate board artist to "official" Obama portrait artist. He worked on the image on his own ( Not commissioned work ) after hearing Obama's speech and feel that this guy is worth supporting. His popularity increased a million fold after Obama 's success. That one image is now as memorable and captivating as the Che Guevara poster image.
This reminds me that we have to be aware of our surroundings and hopefully what we create is not just beautiful but hopefully a worthy social commentary. ( and take a good look at this article posted by Bella )

5 comments:

andyyang said...

Powerlah, bro. The portrait was featured on the cover of TIME magazine as well. One of those inspiring iconic images. Strong!

Don Low said...

Thanks for sharing.. a very precious lesson indeed.

Bella said...

so far this is one of his most original works so far.

(sorry to burst the dream bubble.. but there is an existing online article featuring his plagarism of various original works, it looks wrong on so many levels... http://www.art-for-a-change.com/Obey/index.htm)

mindflyer 小飞人 said...

Bella- thx for the article :).

Its a real eye opener for me. I have removed the word "talented"- but now he's a real lucky to get this far !! Damn Lucky!!
My view on this is :

To copy so closely as some of the examples showed is definitely wrong.

I believe in being inspired by and creative "copying". Not like this.

How is this relevant here from this article?
It tells me that every artist better learn how to draw and create their own stuff!! Its good to have reference but not to "remix" stuff like this - unless u declare it so and give fair credit when due.

Looking back - it seems maybe he doesn't draw anything at all!!

In the article u posted-
"In fact, I've never seen any evidence indicating Fairey can draw at all. Even the art of Andy Warhol, reliant as it was upon photography and mass commercial imagery, displayed passages of gestural drawing and flamboyant brushstrokes."

Its not right to compare Fairey to Andy Warhol's. Andy can definitely DRAW and i like his work done when he started out as an illustrator.

ok- a good reminder for me to draw even more and " reference" smartly !! :D

Anonymous said...

interesting enough, super touch has posted a response to all this obey plagarism:
http://www.supertouchart.com/2009/02/02/editorial-the-medium-is-the-message-shepard-fairey-and-the-art-of-appropriation/