Holly Meade Illustration Year 2: Primer Task Responses

1. The most important piece of personal work you have completed - no matter how small or unrelated to illustration as we teach it.

This is 'My Monobrow Heart' - a painting I did for my BOBA DOG exhibition. It's kind of about how I got teased as a kid for having a monobrow and now how I don't have one ... I kind of would love to have one.

Anyway now I can't stop drawing it! It's become a bit of a tag, it's all over my lecture notes and my sketchbooks.

(INSERT PICTURE HERE)

2. The most important object in your life. (Not an art tool.)

These are my lucky fringe scissors, I stole them from a kids activity session at my old volunteering - so they were once an art tool but now they're just for my hair. I never cut my fringe badly with these.

3. The most influential place to your life

I initially made the image on the left, thinking my most influential place was nature or somewhere but really, and this is deep, the most influential place is probably inside of myself. Or just slightly outside. I have synaesthesia, sound triggers a colourful sparkly reaction in a kind of bubble just above my head.

4. How you feel when you are wearing your most influential set of clothes.

I feel like a banana! I really like yellow, my most influential set of clothes is yellow tights, yellow skirt, and yellow jumper. Plus a yellow rain coat + shoes if I dare leave the house in this ensemble.

5. The song that is most emblematic of yourself or your beliefs.

I had to prove that I could make it alone now
But that's not me
I wanted to show how independent I'd grown now
But that's not me
I could try to be big in the eyes of the world
What matters to me is what I could be to just one girl

I'm a big wuss.

6. The most important film or piece of moving image to you.

Just watch.

7. The most important thing/book/poem that you have read.

John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing' was a very important read for me! Understanding the ideas Berger explains opened up a whole load of other reading (Sontag and pals)

8. The person (that you have met) who has been most influential to you.

I used to work in a charity shop and it was my first experience of customer service. One day this man came in because he was trying to return a Wagner Album. We only allow returns on CDs that don't play. He said it didn't play. We managed to get it to play. So now he couldn't get his three quid back and was VERY very very mad. He yelled and yelled, all the while this was playing in the background:

He influenced me not to be a colossal twat to customer service workers.

9. The most important piece of art

Hanging Man by Ai Weiwei is my choice. The economy of line + material + the efficiency of the message is all very very good.

10. The most influential perosn that you don't know or will never meet, how have they shaped your life.

This is Aung San Suu Kyi and the shadow of her father, General Aung San. General Aung San was responsible the murder and arrest of members of my grandfather's family, he had no family by the time he left Burma except for his father who was kept under strict house arrest for the remainder of his life. So there's that.