Oliver Jeffers
Oliver Jeffers specialises in a range of different techniques, ranging from painting, collage, illustration, sculpture as well as performance. As an artist and story teller, the main themes that influence his work are curiosity and humour while additionally investigating the way a persons mind views and understands the world. Jeffers work interests me as his illustrations are extremely playful. They are also really simple and use basic forms and shapes to create his images. For example his cartoon of a person is made up of a circle, rectangles and lines, making the simplified cartoon really appealing to his audience of children as they do not need to take too long to figures out what the picture book is telling them and giving off the message without having to spend too much time describing it. Overall I think his work is very impressive in a subtle way as you do not realise how smart his work is.
Steve Simpson
Steve Simpson’s work covers many different aspects of design. Looking at packaging design, illustrated barcodes and characters. His style is inspired by the arts and craft movement, folk art and 50’s advertising. I am particularly interested in how versatile his art is. For example, when looking at the Galway stamp he created, I’m interested in looking at his thought process and seeing how he positions everything together and investigates his colour scheme. When looking at the stamp he created and then looking at it in his hand and recognising how small it actually is, it lets me appreciate it even more as his thought process and colour scheme reflect how much work went into it as it’s extremely vibrant and stands out. In contrast to the scale of this project, the KURO murals are a larger scale project that he done that also shows his thought process, taking colour and culture into consideration as the mural was for an Asian cuisine restaurant. Overall I think his work is really interesting and am impressed by how versatile he’s able to work.
