Sara Fanelli Eye Motif

"To me the world is surreal and I find its absurdities and surprises make it worth coping with all the rest. There is also an element of playfulness in the surreal side of things that is equally fundamental, for me, in order to live."- Heller Books- Interview with Sara Fanelli by Steven Heller

Sara Fanelli’s main audience is children. She tries to engage her readers by making her interactive and adding doodle and anecdotes to make it look more like children’s drawings. She uses bright colors, with fairly monotone/ subtle background colors to grab children’s attention. The dust jackets of some of her books, ‘My Maps Book’, unfold to reveal thick shiny poster, which allows children to create their own maps. 

Fig 1- Sara Fanelli- 'My Map Book'

She also creates characters to engage her readers, but these characters are made from or up of random, shapes or identifiable objects. But in order for the characters to be identified as people like creatures, Fannelli simple puts an eye or two eyes on the character, and automatically the object come alive. Fannelli uses eyes as a motif, which you can spot in most of her work. She takes eyes from photograph her as a child, magazines or simply scribbles them on over the top of her collage. To make these characters interactive Fannelli uses interesting materials such as fabric, cut out from magazines, old master paintings, music scripts, newsprint, sale recipes, travel tickets and doesn’t limit herself to her spoken language, she uses lots of different language.

Fig 2- Sara Fanelli

Fig 3- Sara Fanelli Mythological monsters of Ancient Greece

This avant guard eye reference of Fanelli’s may have been inspirited by surrealist artist Hannah Höch. Hannah Höch was an important member of the Berlin Dada movement. She created her images like Fanelli does from popular magazines photography and text, illustrated journals and fashion publications, she created a humorous and moving commentary on society during a time of tremendous social change, establishing collage as a key medium for satire whilst creating poetic artwork. Höch like Fanelli using eyes as her main focus point of her images.

Fig 4 Hannah Höch 

In response to both Sara Fanelli and Hannah Höch myself and my peers decided to play "exquisite corpse. This game involves folding a piece of paper horizontally, one fold for each person playing the game. We then drew a head on the fop section and folding it over the edge of the next fold, and past it onto someone else to draw the body. We repeated this until we had drawn a head, body and arm, legs and finally feet. We completed this exercise several time and the results of our experiment are below. 

I wanted to kind of push the idea of created some that didn't really fit properly together even further. So I collaged 3 different monsters together using mix media material and scribbles in the style of Sara Fanelli, I then chopped the image into 3 sections the head, torso and legs/feet. I then asked my house mates to mix the 3 monsters together to form 3 completely different creatures.

Original collages

This was a fun experiment to complete it allowed me to stop worrying about what the outcome of my artwork and focus more on experimenting and simply seeing what would happen, a skill that i may use in the future, as an idea/ character generator. 

References

• Fig 1 Penandoink.files.wordpress.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 22 Oct. 2016.
• Fig 2" EYE-LIKEY". Eye-likey.blogspot.co.uk. N.p., 2016. Web. 22 Oct. 2016.
• Fig 3"Sara Fanelli, Rebosante Creatividad". lamonomagazine | art&urban culture magazine. N.p., 2013. Web. 22 Oct. 2016.
• Fig 4"Hannah Höch :: Whitechapel Gallery". People of Print. N.p., 2014. Web. 22 Oct. 2016.

Bibliography 

Books

• Fanelli, Sara, Marina Warner, and Steven Heller. Sometimes I Think, Sometimes I Am. London: Tate, 2007. Print.
• Fanelli, Sara. My Map Book. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995. Print.
• Fanelli, Sara. Mythological Monsters Of Ancient Greece. Cambridge, Mass.: Candlewick Press, 2002. Print.

Website

• "Children's Books - Articles - The Dream-Like Images Of Sara Fanelli | Bfk No. 195". Booksforkeeps.co.uk. N.p., 2016. Web. 27 Oct. 2016.
• "Cinderella And Bags!". Creativeflourishes.blogspot.co.uk. N.p., 2016. Web. 27 Oct. 2016.
• "Cinderella". Alibris UK. N.p., 2016. Web. 27 Oct. 2016.
• "Oliver Jeffers". En.wikipedia.org. N.p., 2016. Web. 27 Oct. 2016.
• "Oliver Jeffers". HarperCollins UK. N.p., 2016. Web. 27 Oct. 2016.
• "Oliver Jeffers". Oliverjeffers.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 27 Oct. 2016.
• "Sara Fanelli - A Life In Pictures". the Guardian. N.p., 2016. Web. 27 Oct. 2016.
• "Sara Fanelli - Literature". Literature.britishcouncil.org. N.p., 2016. Web. 27 Oct. 2016.
• "Sara Fanelli – Art Not Artifice". Tate.org.uk. N.p., 2016. Web. 27 Oct. 2016.
• "Sara Fanelli. Creature Creator For Children’S Illustration". Fishinkblog.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 27 Oct. 2016.
• "Stephen Friedman Gallery - Artists - David Shrigley". Stephenfriedman.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 27 Oct. 2016.
• "The Thought-Provoking Illustrations Of Sara Fanelli | Design | Agenda | Phaidon". Phaidon. N.p., 2016. Web. 27 Oct. 2016.
• Steven Heller : Hellerbooks.Com". Hellerbooks.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 27 Oct. 2016.