Andreea Dobrin Graphics portfolio
National Universtiy of Arts Bucharest Graphic Arts Department/2nd year/2013
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Andreea Dobrin Graphics portfolio
National Universtiy of Arts Bucharest Graphic Arts Department/2nd year/2013
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Summary
Curriculum Vitae....................................................... Book Intervention...................................................... School Days............................................................ Antipa................................................................. Mofturi................................................................ Sketchbooks............................................................ Photography............................................................
page 8 page 11 page 29 page 57 page 67 page 79 page 95
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Andreea Dobrin Curriculum vitae
Born on 03/08/1981 in Pitesti, Arges
Studies
2011-2013 2000-2004 1996-2000
Group Exhibitions
Mar 2013
Dec 2012 Nov 2012 Oct 2012
Jun 2012 Apr 2012
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Graphic Arts at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, second year. BA in Business Management at the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest. High School Diploma at “I.C. Bratianu” National College in Pitesti. Modernity and Tradition in the City of the 21st Century etchings group exhibition, Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Torino. Mofturi poster group exhibition at Rapsodia Theater, Bucharest. Desene la Palat group exhibition at Casa Artelor Gallery, Mogosoaia Palace. Expozitie de afis group exhibition at Mansarda Gallery, Art and Design Faculty, Timisoara. Arte la Antipa group exhibition at the National University of Arts Bucharest. Ánuala artelor grafice group exhibition at Mansarda Gallery, Art and Design Faculty, Timisoara.
Modernity and Tradition in the City of the 21st Century , experimental etching techniques at Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Torino held by professors Franco Fabrero, Claudia Tamburelli, Zuzu Caratanase and Andrei Ciubotaru. B - a Creative Approach to Bucharest, graphic design workshop held by Marc Andrews and Christian Deggen from Andrews:Deggen Design Studio, Amsterdam. The results were published in an online magazine and included works by students based on graphical intervention in the surrounding cityscape.
05-12 Mar 2013
9 years of practiced graphic design in local advertising agencies mostly for the web environment but also logos, identity packages and offline works for commercial purposes.
2004 - 2013
Workshops
21-25 May 2012
Graphic design experience
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Book intervention
This book intervention project is a personal initiative. It started from the simple premise that as children we were always forbidden, among other things, to draw on books, that we would ruin them. I wanted to overcome that interdiction, bought a book from a local antique bookshop and started to draw on it. It is a book of poems by the Romanian author Ion Barbu, not one of my favourites as I grew up, but whose creations I now see in a totally different light. I’ve never read poetry so focused as I did when I was drawing next to his rhymes. Just like myself he had double interests: he was a mathematics professor and a poet and both art and science intermingled in his case.
The drawings in the book were done in black ink liner. At first they were mere experiments around Ion Barbu’s poems.I have to admit I wasn’t reading the texts very carefully.
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What started at first only as a playful act continued more and more serious as I unveiled the possibilities of book intervention. It simply becomes a different object then the original.
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The organic universe of Ion Barbu was a perfect match for my intention to study the animals at our Natural History Museum “Grigore Antipa�, a place where I had previously been with my classmates for a different project earlier that year.
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Exploring both literary and scientific worlds yielded these results, a third universe almost filled with creatures that are partly true, partly inspired by poetry and in the end sometimes just left for the imagination.
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Working in the museum gave me the opportunity to have people interact with this kind of project. Children are the best at administrating constructive criticism as well as compliments.
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Workers at the museum got used to seeing me there every day during winter vacation, as that was the most concentrated period when this work got done. Some of them were also curious about seeing someone drawing.
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The drawings in the book have had quite a trip. Some of them are merely decorative, others are symbolic and others, that I prefer, have managed to convey just a hint of a feeling, a question that opens more questions.
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Being at the museum made me want to create out of this book something like the journal of an explorer, collecting information about the wildlings in its trips and having only a book of poems to record them.
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Some of the drawings spawned other creatures in my imagination, an animal out of a tree, an insect out of lines of text, things I later used in other larger works. That is the best benefit of concentrated work, the spring of new ideas.
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I find myself more and more fascinated with animals and their role in our human lives, the symbolism behind each and every species, the folklore they inspired, the religions they served if we think of some civilizations like the Egyptins and so many more.
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I intend to make this project a part of a series, pick out different Romanian authors and see what those colliding worlds would bring to light.
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School days
After graduating from Business School and working for eight years as a self taught graphic designer here I am, finally doing what I always wanted to do: studying art, drawing. It was the best decision I’ve ever taken and still proves to be surprisingly good in ways I hadn’t even foreseen when I first took it. I learned a new way of thinking in the creative process and that is probably the greatest benefit. I met professors and students, people that have “the itch”, that never sit still in the routine of life, people that work hard and when you think they are finished they work even harder. Above all they are talented and beautiful and you cannot ignore this vibe and it’s this vibe that makes you better. And here, in this world, I come every day and draw.
When you make quick sketches, I’ve been taught, it should be like one long breath of air. It should flow out of one concentrated gesture. The mind is at work just as much or even more than the hand.
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In the first week of school our professor told us to forget everything we knew about drawing until that point. I didn’t know much so it was easy to throw away the little I knew...and I started to draw freely.
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Charcoal and ink drawing with a corn stick are some of my favourite tools. They seem to do half the work themselves. The truth is they simply “force� you to become free because they lack precision.
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I never thought that drawing reflections in the mirror could prove so different than drawing after reality. The mirror reinterprets reality and when we draw that we do a reinterpret this
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Colour is a personal war for me, probably for many. But once started there is no battle more exciting than that of finding the perfect relation between two tones of colour and making them sing.
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We don’t have many models at school. This is one of the three available. Meet Angela. She lives in Buftea, near Bucharest and for these two paintings she had two overcome a very tough winter to arrive at school.
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Angela doesn’t talk much as opposed to the other two models, she seems to be in a world of her own. I don’t even think she sees us when she poses. I wonder how she became a model for the school. I’ll ask her that next time she poses.
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Meet Flory. She is warm hearted and drawings after her come out very expressive. Not just mine, but throughout the whole school. She doesn’t usually take her tea naked. Just for the sake of art.
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Mogosoaia is a small village at about 15 km outside of Bucharest. Even though I’ve been in the capital for 13 years, I had never visited this place before this project.
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The project at the Mogosoaia Palace lasted for about three weeks and finished with a group exhibition done during this time by my colleagues and I. It’s a Romanian architectural landmark built in one of the most beautiful parks I’ve ever seen. It inspired us all for the exhibition.
The trees and the stillness of the place is so impressive and so much in contrast with what lies so close, the crowded capital. It’s almost unreal because of that.
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These etchings are using the Aqua Forte, Aqua Tinta and Soft Wax traditional techniques. The one on the right it’s done during a workshop at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Torino.
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I intend to one day follow the path of illustration, mostly for children books. Of one thing I’m certain: drawing will somehow be involved in my future.
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Antipa
The Antipa project was organized by two coordinating professors, Carmen Apetrei and Stela Lie and it consisted of us drawing at the Natural History Museum “Grigore Antipa” for about a month during spring of 2012. The museum became very familiar during that time, almost like a home, I knew all its dioramas and the info that was played over and over. What never got old was people’s reaction to seeing certain animals in the museum, especially children’s reactions and questions. Some kids came with their attentive mothers, some with their encyclopaedic fathers, some with their nannies and some with a dad that was on the phone during the whole visit. If you stayed long enough you could make a very comprehensive study on family mechanics and that fits a Natural History Museum very well. I learned from children that Leonardo Di Caprio was a great painter and that you can say “spaghetti” instead of “cheese” when you take a photo.
The lizard drawing on the left was done in watercolour and strives for the animal as a sign. My intent was for it to have calligraphic power, to have one clear way in which the eye follows the drawing.
During the one month we stayed at Antipa I avoided the insects room as much as I could because, like most people, I fear bugs and cockroaches. Drawing them was a challenge and I thought it would cure my phobia, but it didn’t.
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The bug drawn here is a Cyclommatus Metallifer. It does seem like it’s made out of metal or that it could break metal with its pliers like horns. Despite the fear they induce in me, there is also fascination in the way nature built these creatures. It is true what the philosophers said about drawing, that it is a different type of assimilating knowledge, different then science or religion.
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I made these drawings using my first grade fountain pen, one of those objects made in China that were so popular when I was a child. I even had one with a golden tip and one that I received for my birthday from my dad.
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Here I discovered and applied the secret of drawing insect wings, the secret between heavy and light objects. I didn’t know up until that point that if you drew all the details in a wing it will make it look heavy.
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Caterpillars and the Elephant Bug are the stars in these drawings. Even though I feared insects, in the end some of the best drawings I did in the museum were there.
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Watercolours and a squirrel hair brush helped create these small paintings. The pink fish on the left got stolen during the exhibition, just like a lot of my colleagues works. Luckily they were prints of the originals.
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Mofturi
Posters for a children theatre play. This was one of my favourite project from school thus far. The play was a kind of a collage from various literary sketches written by Ion Luca Caragiale and was directed by Chris Simion who is known for her experimental and modern approaches. We had access to their rehearsals and that was new to me. I never knew the kind of work theatre people have to go through before we actually see the play on stage. It’s a lot of shouting, a lot of repeating, objects flying around and nerves stretched to the maximum. In the end the results seem effortless. The fact that I got to meet Alexandrina Halic, the voice that told us stories on the radio when I was a child, was the cherry on top of everything. The graphic challenge itself was intense and I immersed in it with everything I got.
I made a string of paper people which got used in various ways for this project: as a standalone object for a photo shoot, as a detail for a poster and as an illustration for the play’s program flyer.
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The sketches on the left were done during the play’s rehearsal and the one on the right is a hands on example of my Edward Gorey influence, an illustrator I admire very much.
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Who knew that pop-art and Caragiale would ever come to mix! The work on these posters was one of the most fruitful due to the fact that my professor, Carmen Apetrei, gladly shared her printing knowledge.
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It was the first time I used a pantone sampler, the first time I understood what pantone colours actually meant and the correspondence that exists between physical colours and the way we use them on the computer.
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Caragiale’s colourful characters were very inspirational for the characters seen here. It helped that we knew these characters ever since we were children ourselves.
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The play’s program flyer was another challenge of the project. The graphic design part is another aspect of our jobs that interests me and seeing a product of mine from concept to print was quite an experience.
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Sketchbooks
Drawing in sketchbooks is one of my favourite ways of expression. They are intimate, they are mine, they are mini projects in themselves because sometimes they are finished just as they are. The drawings in there are not necessarily the scaffold for something else. Sometimes I feel like the word “sketchbook” doesn’t do them justice. They are drawingbooks, period. I have one drawingbook, the one pictured on the left that is half started before I got into art school and continued during the first year of studies. It’s interesting to draw parallels between the two periods. Some things I knew better instinctively and lost a little bit after entering school. Others were major improvements. I am glad I have a testimonial for my evolution during those times.
The sketchbook pictured on the left is a red Moleskine. Yes I succumbed to the much beloved brand and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of it.
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The domestic surroundings are some of my favourite things to draw after. It wasn’t always like this in the sense that I wasn’t always aware that you can make an interesting and beautiful drawing after almost anything.
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Sometimes the drawings in the notebooks have a therapeutic effect on me. I write things that have been hanging in my system for a long time and it feels good to see them out in the open.
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Leonardo’s notebooks proved great inspiration for this particular drawing.
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I’m also interested in cinematography. This particular drawing is made after a movie still shot.
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The domestic common things at work. My bathroom, my detergents, my clothes hangers, my cat. My universe.
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Who knew clothes clips could talk! They spoke to me on a boring day and became important, uncommon.
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Represented here is a series of family portraits: my dad, my grandma who is in heaven now and my boyfriend’s nana, Mikisori. Family members prove to be great models for us art students.
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These preparatory sketches were done for one of my favourite theme. It was an illustration theme. We had a model, Claudia, who posed there almost like a princess or a Dutch royalty and we had to build a new story around her.
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I feel very comfortable drawing on small surfaces. The next challenge is to draw with the same force on a larger surface. This applies both in my drawings and in life.
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Photography
Photography was virtually unknown to me until I entered art school. I’m referring of course to the artistic part of it. I am still far from understanding its sensitive rules and its poetic power but it definitely counts as one of the most pleasant surprises. After learning a few things about photographic composition in the first year, playing with our digital cameras, during our second year at school we immersed into to the accidental by taking photos with improvised pinhole boxes. Some of the results can be seen here and on the following pages.
The local surroundings don’t look so eastern Europe through a pinhole box photography.
The unexpected type of imagery is the biggest surprise in these photos.
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The characters seem almost painted. And they are...but with light.
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Long exposure was required for these interior photos. My apartment seems completely transformed.
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The mystery surrounding the characters was an unexpected effect.
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I improvised a small photo studio in the bathroom at my place.
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Developing the photos myself makes the whole process so helpful.
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2013
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